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December 13, 2021 RIN 1210-AC03 Docket EBSA-2021-0013 CFR 29 CFR 2550 Document Citation 86 FR 57272 Document Number 2021-22263 By electronic submission: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/14/2021-22263/prudence-and-loyalty-in-selecting-plan-investments-and-exercising-shareholder-rights The Employee Benefits Security Administration of the [...]

Executive Summary Much has changed in media and communications technologies over the past fifty years. Today we face the dual problems of an increasing gap in access to these technologies [...]

Key Points * Due to the steady decline of print news in America, many Americans now live in news deserts, where there is no newspaper covering local issues. The absence [...]

Many commentators have pointed out that the Dodd-Frank Act ignored the fundamental causes of the financial crisis it was supposed to address. While imposing new, costly and growth inhibiting regulations on the entire financial system, the act failed to reform the US government's housing policies--policies that fostered the creation of 27 million subprime and Alt-A loans and the inflation of a massive housing bubble between 1997 and 2007. When the bubble began to deflate, these weak and high-risk loans started to default in unprecedented numbers, driving down housing values and weakening financial institutions in the United States and around the world. Implicit in most of the proposals for reforming the housing finance system is the idea that institutional investors will not buy mortgage backed securities (MBS) backed by US mortgages unless they are issued by a government sponsored enterprise (GSE), a US government agency, or are otherwise guaranteed by the US government. We believe, however, that there is a robust alternative to government support of the housing finance system--a system which in the past has led to large scale taxpayer bailouts and losses. Our alternative approach is to ensure that only prime quality mortgages, which comprise the vast majority of US mortgages, are allowed into the securitization system. The very low delinquency and default rates on prime mortgages will be attractive investments for institutional investors and enable the housing finance system to function effectively with no government support. This will eliminate the potential for additional taxpayer losses in the future, and allow the eventual elimination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In order to implement our approach, in this white paper we outline four basic principles on which US housing policy should be based in the future. If these principles had been in place for the last twenty years, we would not have had a financial crisis in 2008. But that is water over the dam. The current interest in replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provides another opportunity to adopt reforms that will prevent a recurrence of another financial crisis in the future., The four central principles of our plan are the following: I. The housing finance market--like other US industries and housing finance systems in most other developed countries--can and should principally [...]

Key Points * Greater output of final products does not improve supply-chain resilience. Manufacturing more with the same supply chains could even create more vulnerabilities. New policies must address full supply chains, not just the final stage. * Companies selling in the US should be responsible for knowing their suppliers, through the full extent of the chain. For products deemed critical, Chinese participation at any point in the supply chain should be restricted. * The single weakest link in many supply chains is constitutive materials, since these enable the next stages of production and are often sourced overseas. The US must quickly determine where projected materials demand exceeds reliable supply., There's been a great deal of talk about supply chains, yet the US government has done little. (1) There are in fact good reasons for inaction: Shifting supply chains is [...]

Chairman Smith, Subcommittee Chairman LaHood, Ranking Member Davis, and distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at the [...]

This paper presents a critique of a recent analysis by my friends and colleagues Kyle Pomerleau and Shuting Pomerleau in the pages of Tax Notes Federal examining policy alternatives for [...]

Chairman Wyden, Ranking Member Crapo, and distinguished members of Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Bruce D. Meyer, and I am the McCormick Foundation Professor [...]

The American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law in March of this year, created the most ambitious antipoverty policy since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The law authorized a one-year expansion [...]

The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) system has a broad scope and provides important resources to economically vulnerable children who live apart from one of their parents. Yet, it is subject to critique for intervening too much, too little, or in the wrong ways. In this paper, we then consider some long-term issues of concern, identifying areas of emerging agreement (at least between the two authors), and exploring some of the fundamental questions that remain to be addressed. We argue that CSE reduces child poverty, helps to promote parental responsibility especially for parents living apart from their children, and for many families is a convenience. Contrary to early proponents of the program, we argue that CSE should not be used for cost recovery; collected child support should always directly benefit children, not offset government costs. Finally, we outline areas of agreement and disagreement related to mandated cooperation with CSE. In this way, we aim to clarify both areas where bipartisan policy reforms may be more feasible, and areas that remain particularly challenging., Introduction The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) system is important in providing resources to children who live apart from one of their parents. This is especially true in poor households. In [...]

This comment paper addresses policy issues inherent in the proposed rule from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 'Management and Protection of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.' (1) At [...]

Following Manzan (2021), this paper examines how professional forecasters revise their uncertainty (variance) forecasts. We show that popular first moment 'efficiency' tests are not applicable to study variance forecasts and instead employ monotonicity tests developed by Patton and Timmermann (2012). We find strong support for the Bayesian learning prediction of decreasing patterns in the variance of fixed-event density forecasts and their revisions as the forecast horizon declines. We explore the role of financial conditions indices in variance forecasts and document their predictive content for the revision process of US professional forecasters, although the evidence is weaker for euro area forecasters. Keywords: Variance forecasts, survey expectations, Bayesian learning JEL Codes: C53, E17, E37., I. Introduction The study of expectations and the process underlying their formation remains a topic of considerable interest and importance. The recently published Handbook of Economic Expectations (2022) speaks to [...]

Contents INTRODUCTION 1 PLACE-BASED POLICIES THROUGH A RURAL LENS 2 Anthony F. Pipa TEXAS 2036 AND THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE'S FUTURE WORKFORCE INITIATIVES 6 A. J. Rodriguez PLACE-BASED POLICY AND ECONOMIC [...]

'A robust and resilient industrial base provides the enduring foundation for military advantage. While America continues to generate the world's most capable weapons systems, it must have the capacity to [...]

A prominent theme in debates about US national privacy legislation is whether federal law should preempt state law. A federal statute could create one standard for markets that are obviously national in scope. Another approach is to allow states to be 'laboratories of democracy' that adopt different laws so they can discover the best ones. We propose a federal statute requiring states to recognize contractual choice-of-law provisions, so companies and consumers can choose what state privacy law to adopt. Privacy would continue to be regulated at the state level. However, the federal government would provide for jurisdictional competition among states, such that companies operating nationally could comply with the privacy laws of any one state. Our proposed approach would foster a double competition aimed at discerning and delivering on consumers' true privacy interests: market competition to deliver privacy policies that consumers prefer and competition among states to develop the best privacy laws. Unlike a single federal privacy law, this approach would provide 50 competing privacy regimes for national firms. The choice-of-law approach can trigger competition and innovation in privacy practices while preserving a role for meaningful state privacy regulation., The question of preemption of state law by the federal government has bedeviled debates about privacy regulation in the United States. A prominent theme is to propose a national privacy [...]

The long road to enactment of the regular annual appropriations bills for 2024 has finally come to a close. Congress approved the second of two large federal funding packages on [...]

Contents INTRODUCTION 1 BEYOND THE TURING TEST: HARNESSING AI TO CREATE WIDELY 2 SHARED PROSPERITY Erik Brynjolfsson WE CAN'T PREDICT THE FUTURE OF WORK 4 Adam Thierer AUTOMATION, AI, AND [...]

The December 5, 2023, House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on antisemitism in higher education embarrassed American political science (of which I am a part). Two of the [...]

The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, which the US House of Representatives passed on January 31, 2024, and the Senate is now considering, would make important changes to the child tax credit (CTC) if enacted. The legislation would increase CTC payments for families with lower earnings, apply a one-year "lookback" provision to the refundable credit's earnings test, and begin increasing the maximum benefit with inflation. We first summarize how this legislation would affect benefits for families based on their marital status, number of children, and earnings. Then we discuss how it would affect work and marriage incentives. We conclude by arguing that more research is needed to inform how behavioral responses to these changed incentives would ultimately shape the legislation's effects on employment, marriage, and family well-being., The child tax credit (CTC) was enacted in 1997 to provide tax relief for families with dependent children. (1) Originally a nonrefundable credit that offset federal income tax liability, the [...]

Local lawmakers are currently piloting their desired next nationwide expansion of the welfare state. Dozens of guaranteed income pilots are running across the country at the local and state level, sometimes funded by COVID-19 relief funds, to encourage federal policymakers to implement cash grants without work requirements, restrictions, or conditions. These guaranteed income pilots are a precursor to these policymakers' ultimate goal: establishing a universal basic income, an extraordinarily expensive proposal that can lead to less work, particularly among low-income recipients. When considering these initiatives, policymakers should ensure that the primary long-term outcomes are more work attachment and hours worked, less safety-net dependence, and better overall outcomes for children, including improving children's likelihood of being raised in a married household., Dozens of new welfare experiments, called guaranteed income pilots, have launched in cities throughout the United States over the past few years. Their goal is to prove that important outcomes [...]

Federal legislation to legalize, regulate, and tax cannabis could have significant impacts on the federal budget. While the specific details of any potential cannabis legalization legislation are unknown at present, such reforms are likely to affect both tax receipts and federal outlays through a wide range of mechanisms including excise tax collections, changes in the size and composition of the labor force, and the major federal health care programs. We identify the main federal budgetary implications of legalizing cannabis and estimate their likely magnitude where possible. JEL codes: H2, H5, H6, I1, K2, K4 Keywords: Cannabis; Federal budget; Health Care; Revenue; Spending; Excise tax, INTRODUCTION While the precise contours of future federal legislation and executive action to legalize, regulate, and tax cannabis remain unknown, such policies could have significant impacts on the federal budget. [...]

In 2022, the United States witnessed a notable rise in household food insecurity, reversing a decade-long decline. Some observers have argued that the expiration of government relief efforts stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic caused the one-year spike. However, the household food insecurity rate was higher in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the pandemic started. We explore several potential reasons for the household food insecurity increase from 2019 to 2022. We find that neither changes in the social safety net nor underlying economic factors, such as unemployment, could explain this trend. Instead, we attribute the increase to a rise in food price inflation during this period, compounded by changes in the survey methodology for food insecurity assessment. The increase in food insecurity would likely have been larger without expansions to the social safety net during this time. We conclude with several recommendations to keep food price inflation low., After peaking during the Great Recession, food insecurity rates in the United States had been falling dramatically since 2010. For all households in the United States, food insecurity rates declined [...]

We compile a comprehensive dataset of adverse cyber events experienced by U.S. firms. We then categorize cyber incidents by their detrimental impacts on firms' assets and operations and show that firms suffer significant value losses across multiple cyber categories. These losses also spill over to economically linked firms, thereby amplifying the negative effect of malicious cyber activity on the economy. We additionally assemble a lexicon to identify from public sources firms that possess trade secrets, work on emerging technology or critical infrastructure projects, or have government and defense contracts, and show that such firms face a higher risk of a cyber incident. JEL classification: G10, G12, G14, G17 Keywords: Cyberattacks, Malicious Cyber Activity, Cyber Threat Actors, Attack Vectors, Intellectual Property Theft, Trade Secrets, Critical Infrastructures, Emerging Technologies, Defense Contracts, Government Contracts, Spillover Effects, Economically Linked Firms, Corporate Transparency, 1. Introduction As the U.S. economy grew more reliant on information technology, malicious cyber activity has emerged as a new threat to corporations, government, and private citizens. Illegal activities, such [...]

This comment paper addresses the revision of guidelines for regulatory benefit/cost analysis by federal agencies, as proposed by the Office of Management and Budget in its draft Circular A-4 of [...]

The launch of ChatGPT has captured the world's imagination about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI): In just its first two months, over 30 million people used the tool, and [...]

December 2023 Leading voices at America's most prominent universities have recently pointed out that institutions of higher education are failing to offer students the civic education they need to play [...]

The modern environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement and related stakeholder capitalism strains are nothing new. They have historical precedent in pre-Enlightenment times when the church, crown, guild, and village similarly extracted rents from capital and labor to the detriment of both--and society more broadly. Impeding the employment of labor and capital to promote the well-being of others reduces the incentive to work, save, and invest, causing economic growth to stagnate. Allowing a self-appointed elite to impose ESG constraints on investment generates inferior returns on investment, compromised economic outcomes, and little in the way of desired social and environmental benefit. Human flourishing and global prosperity would be enhanced if those who choose to use their money to promote ESG goals instead invested to maximize returns and used some portion of their profits to promote environmental and social goals directly. Impact investing, in which capital owners make informed choices about likely trade-offs between financial return and specific nonfinancial priorities, can also be highly effective., The modern-day phenomenon that has become known as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing did not spontaneously generate, nor was it hewn into stone tablets and handed to Moses on [...]

The Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture Series A scholar of political philosophy and constitutional law, Walter Berns wrote extensively on issues of American government and its founding principles. He authored [...]

While it is widely known that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the policy document that sets authorizations and legislative boundaries for the Department of Defense (DOD), in recent [...]

The Administrative Procedures Act (APA), first passed in 1946, requires that all federal agencies obtain public input before formulating, amending, or repealing a regulation. Specifically, they must 'give interested persons [...]

Community colleges have long been tasked with educating a workforce that meets local, regional, and state needs. This role, how it has evolved, and how it is carried out today [...]

I. Introduction A persistent issue for central banks in emerging market economies (EMEs) has been their difficulties in pursuing counter-cyclical monetary policies such as those adopted in advanced economies (AEs). [...], This paper assesses Latin American monetary policy during the pandemic era against the benchmark of a "balanced" monetary policy strategy, that is, a strategy in which policies respond both to deviations of economic activity from equilibrium as well as deviations of inflation from target. We first review the evolution of Latin American monetary policy during this period. Central banks in the region cut rates sharply in response to the recession of 2020, despite steep currency depreciations, but subsequently tightened policy aggressively as inflation rebounded in 2021. We then compare these developments to the behavior of Latin American monetary policy in previous years. Estimating a Taylor rule for the period 2007 to 2019, we find that Latin American central banks had been responding in a balanced manner to movements in both inflation and output. However, with the pandemic, the weight of inflation in their reaction function rose substantially and the weight of output declined. Consistent with that finding, we find that policy interest rates generally fell less in 2020 than those predicted by the Taylor rule model (estimated over pre-pandemic years), and they rose more than predicted by the model in late 2021 and early 2022. Our findings could be interpreted to mean that Latin American central banks abandoned a balanced strategy in favor of one focused solely on fighting inflation. But we believe it more likely that the model, estimated over a more normal period, simply may not provide a good guideline for how Latin American central banks would (or should) react in response to a downturn of unprecedented depth followed by an equally dramatic inflationary surge. Several good reasons for monetary policy in the region to have tightened unusually sharply over the past year fall outside the scope of the standard Taylor rule, including the expansion of fiscal deficits and debt, the drag on supply from pandemic scarring, and the extraordinary rise in global interest rates.

As the COVID pandemic has made clear, the resources available to vulnerable households can change suddenly. Over the past few years, we have seen sharp changes in employment as well [...], In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) that is available for a subsample of those surveyed. The CPSP monthly poverty measure, widely cited in the media, uses data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the CPS and other sources to impute poverty in the Monthly CPS sample based on demographic and employment variables. This paper evaluates the two measures and their estimates of child poverty around the 2021 temporary changes to the Child Tax Credit (CTC). We argue that conceptually the measure based on responses rather than the one based on imputations is preferable, though both measures suffer from important drawbacks. We also conclude that widely publicized claims that child poverty fell by 25 percent when the Advance CTC payments started and subsequently rose by 41 percent when they ended are based on weak evidence and are overstated. The best evidence, though still imperfect, suggests poverty was relatively stable in 2021 and the first half of 2022. Part of the explanation for the lack of change appears to be a compensating decline in employment among low-skilled workers with children. Other evidence tying changes in well-being to the tax credit is confounded by other policy changes.

1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest downturn in the world economy since the Depression, with global GDP declining 3.1 percent in 2020 compared to a rise of 2.9 [...], This paper describes one of the first attempts to gauge the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global trajectory of real GDP over the course of 2020 and 2021. It is also among the first efforts to distinguish between the role of domestic variables and global trade in transmitting the economic effects of COVID-19. We estimate panel data regressions of the quarterly growth in real GDP on pandemic variables for 90 countries over the period 2020 Q1 through 2021 Q4. We find that readings on the number of COVID-19 deaths had a very small effect in our aggregate sample. On the other hand, changes in the stringency of the lockdown measures taken by governments to restrict the spread of the virus were an important influence on GDP. The economic effects of the pandemic differed between rich and poor countries: COVID-19 deaths exerted a somewhat greater drag on GDP in advanced economies, whereas lockdown restrictions were more injurious to economic activity in emerging and developing economies. In addition to these domestic pandemic effects, global trade represented a significant channel through which the economic effects of the pandemic spilled across national borders. This finding underscores how globalization makes each country vulnerable not only to medical contagion from the COVID-19 pandemic, but to economic contagion as well. Keywords: COVID-19, coronavirus, economic growth, global GDP, 2SLS, two-stage least squares, international trade, health policy JEL No. E0,F1,F4,I1 Declarations of interest: none This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.

1. Introduction President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty in 1963, which led to a major expansion of the social safety net, including the introduction of Medicaid, Medicare and [...], Without Congressional action, the recently released National Academy of Sciences report, "An Updated Measure of Poverty: (Re)Drawing the Line," could have substantial effects on government program eligibility and spending--if its recommendation to "redraw the line" is implemented by the Census Bureau, and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is made the official one by the Office of Management and Budget. This change to the official poverty measure could be made as soon as September 2023, and major government transfer programs whose eligibility standards are tied to the official poverty guidelines could be affected in 2024. In this paper, I first project that making the SPM the official poverty measure would increase the poverty guideline for a family of four by $6,400 (20 percent) in 2024 and by $13,150 (34 percent) in 2033. I also show that if state-specific SPM thresholds were used, then poverty guidelines would be higher in high-cost states like California (21 percent higher than the national average) and lower in low-cost states like West Virginia (19 percent lower than the national average). I then estimate how the change in the poverty guidelines would affect government spending on the two largest entitlement programs whose eligibility standards are tied to the official poverty guidelines. I estimate that over the next decade (2024-2033) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending would be $47 billion higher, and Medicaid spending would be $78 billion higher. Thus, basing the U.S. poverty guidelines on the SPM would increase government spending by at least $124 billion over the next decade.

The estimates on benefits and costs asserted by the Department of Energy (DoE) in the proposed rule on 'Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Conventional Cooking Products' demonstrate that it cannot satisfy any plausible benefit/cost test. The maximum annual consumer savings in the DoE lifecycle analysis is for gas cooking tops, asserted by DoE to be $1.51 per year per unit. That number is too small to differ from zero as a matter of statistical significance; the figures for the other cooking technologies are smaller, and in most cases are effectively zero. Accordingly, the savings, whether delineated in dollars or units of energy, are too small to satisfy the legal requirements promulgated under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). Nor does the DoE analysis examine the forgone service quality characteristics to be lost under the proposed rule. If DoE is correct that the savings, again whether delineated in dollars or units of energy, are sufficiently significant to satisfy the requirements of the EPCA, then unless DoE asserts that consumers are irrational--which it does not do--then it must be the case that the forgone service quality characteristics, if monetized, are greater than the asserted savings. A continued pursuit of the specifics of this rule, accordingly, is inconsistent with the central principle underlying support for a market economy, to wit, a definition of economic value as revealed by consumer preferences reflected in market prices. If DoE views consumers as irrational, it should say that explicitly, justify it, and justify as well the implicit premise that DoE officials and staff are more rational. The DoE assertion of climate benefits is preposterous, as a straightforward application of the DoE estimates of the reductions in GHG emissions to the EPA climate model, under assumptions that exaggerate the effects of such reductions, yields a prediction of a temperature decline in 2100 of 0.005[degrees]C, a figure effectively equal to zero, and undetectable in any event given the standard deviation of the surface temperature record. DoE attempts to circumvent this obvious problem by using instead the interim IWG estimates of the social cost of carbon, but those estimates are fatally flawed and heavily politicized, in that they (1) distort the actual economic growth predictions produced by the integrated assessment models, (2) base predictions of future climate phenomena on climate models that cannot predict the past or the present, (3) incorporate 'co-benefits' in the form of a reduction in the emissions of other criteria and hazardous air pollutants already regulated under different provisions of the Clean Air Act, (4) incorporate the asserted benefits of GHG reductions on a global basis, and (5) employ discount rates that are inconsistent and inappropriate. In short, the proposed rule cannot satisfy any basic standard of analytic rigor, a plausible benefit/cost test in particular. It should not be finalized in this form., RIN 1904-AD15 Docket EERE-2014-BT-STD-0005 Document 2023-00610 Document Citation 88 FR 6818 This comment paper addresses the benefit/cost analysis presented in the rule proposed by the Department of Energy (DoE) on [...]

For most of American history, the formal process that certified the winner of the presidential election--a joint session of Congress, presided over by the vice president (serving as president of the Senate), that opened and counted each state's electoral votes--passed with little public notice. The constitutionally required voting by the Electoral College and the subsequent tabulation were mere formalities between the general election and inauguration. Consequently, since the disputed presidential election of 1876, the details of the process and the respective powers and authorities of Congress and the vice president during the counting process have attracted little attention. That changed with the 2020 presidential election. Claiming fraud and illegality, President Donald Trump urged Vice President Mike Pence, when Pence presided over the vote count on January 6, to either throw out electoral votes for Joe Biden from half a dozen states or return them to state legislatures for further investigation. As a result, Trump supporters came to believe that if Pence did what Trump called the 'right thing,' (1) the incumbent president would begin a second term on January 20, 2021. This event has resurrected the question of whether, under the Constitution, Congress or the vice president has final say in counting the Electoral College votes. We argue, contrary to the former president, his lawyers, and some legal scholars, that this authority resides with Congress and not the vice president--and that the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which affirms that view, is constitutional. Our analysis proceeds in five stages. First, we show that the framers viewed the vice presidency as an insignificant office, virtually an afterthought. It was conceived only in the Constitutional Convention's last days to provide a successor to the president if the office became vacant and to incentivize presidential electors, who were to cast two votes, to look beyond their local favorites. To give the vice president something to do, he was then made president of the Senate, possessing the single substantive power to break ties. In short, it is highly unlikely the Constitution's framers would have given the vice president a potentially crucial say in selecting a president. Next, we analyze the relevant language in the Constitution: 'The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted,' (2) language repeated in the 12th Amendment. The shift from the active voice--the president of the Senate shall 'open all the Certificates'--to the passive--'and the Votes shall then be counted'--implies that someone other than the vice president would count the votes. If the framers intended to vest the counting authority in the vice president, they would have simply written, 'The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates and count the Votes.' Third, the natural reading of the necessary and proper clause grants Congress the authority to legislate and regulate the counting of electoral votes and provide a mechanism to resolve disputes. This was amply demonstrated in legislation passed in 1792 that reached deeply into the electoral process and again in 1800, when majorities in the House and Senate respectively passed measures that had Congress or an appointed committee resolving disputes. In these debates, not a single member opposed to the proposed measures put forward the alternative idea that it was the vice president's role to settle contested votes. The silence here is telling. Fourth, and consistent with our analysis of the language above, congressional records for the first five presidential elections show Congress doing the actual counting through tellers appointed by the Senate and the House and drawn from their members. As president of the Senate, the vice president opened the sealed packets and handed the certificates verifying the electors' names and recorded votes to the clerk, who then transmitted the papers to the tellers for inspection and totaling. From these early vote counts, it is clear that (1) the members of the House and Senate were not mere observers and, in turn, (2) the vice president's role was essentially ministerial. Finally, we maintain that the principles and structure of the American constitutional order are inimical to allowing the discretion and will of an individual (especially one who often has a personal stake in the outcome) to decide presidential elections. The founders' understanding of the norms of republican government and the rule of law, the requirement for checks and balances, and Madison's principle that 'no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause' (3) all point toward Congress, not the vice president, possessing that power. As Vice President Pence aptly articulated to his staff, There was no way that our framers, who [abhorred] concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome because they were on the ticket for the election, in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election. (4), APRIL 2023 On December 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law a $1.7 trillion omnibus bill to fund the federal government for fiscal year 2023. Included in the bill's [...]

Although American politics today are defined by sharp, bitter disagreement, a bipartisan US grand strategy for great-power competition has emerged. This grand strategy has taken shape over the course of the Trump and Biden administrations. Like all grand strategies, it is built on a range of critical assumptions about how the world works and how America can and should use its power to address a range of challenges. But how solid are those assumptions? This report makes explicit 17 critical assumptions underpinning US grand strategy today and subjects them to an intellectual stress test. In other words, it asks whether they can bear the weight of world affairs. While the assumptions we survey are of varying strength, this assessment leads to a sobering conclusion: Prevailing in great-power rivalry is likely to be more difficult, expensive, dangerous, and all-consuming than US policymakers have so far been willing to admit--or than the American public presently understands., In 2015, this report's authors prepared a paper on critical assumptions in American grand strategy. (1) We catalogued several dozen assumptions undergirding American grand strategy in the post-Cold War era [...]

We develop new facts relating news coverage, interest groups, and events in the legislative histories of minimum wage increases. First, we create and validate a database of news articles that includes coverage of minimum wages and organized labor. Second, we show that policy changes predict increases in news coverage that connects organized labor and minimum wages, in particular when those articles reference high-profile interest groups and research output. Third, these policy events lead coverage of organized labor to shift towards articles about minimum wages. We observe that the minimum wage's popularity with the public makes this shift qualify as 'good PR,' an assessment that is supported by sentiment analysis of articles about organized labor. This public relations channel can thus help rationalize why interest groups engage in policy advocacy. JEL Classification: D71, D78, P16 Keywords: political economy, social choice, minimum wage, unionization, Section I: Introduction Over the past decade, labor unions have emerged as advocates for historically high minimum wages. (1) Since its inception in 2012, the 'Fight for $15' movement has [...]

We compile a comprehensive dataset of adverse cyber events experienced by U.S. firms. We then categorize cyber incidents by their detrimental impacts on firms' assets and operations, e.g., data theft, ransomware attacks, security breaches, denial of service attacks, and show that firms suffer significant value losses across multiple cyber categories. These losses also spill over to economically linked firms, thereby amplifying the negative effect of malicious cyber activity on the economy. We also compile a lexicon to identify from public sources firms that possess trade secrets, work on emerging technology or critical infrastructure projects, or have government and defense contracts, and show that such firms face a higher risk of a cyber incident. JEL classification: G10, G12, G14, G17 Keywords: Cyberattacks, Malicious Cyber Activity, Cyber Threat Actors, Attack Vectors, Intellectual Property Theft, Trade Secrets, Critical Infrastructures, Emerging Technologies, Defense Contracts, Government Contracts, Spillover Effects, Economically Linked Firms, Corporate Transparency, 1. Introduction As the U.S. economy grew more reliant on information technology, malicious cyber activity has emerged as a new threat to corporations, government, and private citizens. Illegal activities, such [...]

Keywords: antitrust; consumer welfare; competitive advantage; regulation JEL codes: K21, L12, L22, L4, Introduction A current controversy in antitrust is use of the consumer welfare standard (CWS). CWS in effect states that a merger or anticompetitive business practice is illegal if it makes [...]

At the roughly 1,000 public community colleges in the US, millions of students enroll in courses and programs that prepare them for either academic pursuits (such as transferring to a [...]

I Introduction In the literature on fiscal federalism, the sources and implications of strategic interactions both within and between layers of government have long been of interest (Gordon, 1983; Dahlby, [...], Our purpose is three-fold. First, we summarize some of the core insights from both classic and more recent papers in the literature on the role of intergovernmental grants in systems of fiscal federalism. Second, we provide an updated look at some of the key institutions through which intergovernmental transfers are implemented in the United States. Third, we consider the rich environment of the COVID-19 pandemic in which new additional intergovernmental transfers were deployed, and present empirical evidence on how they affected state-level corporate tax policy. We conclude by discussing productive directions for future research on the economics of fiscal federalism and the role of intergovernmental grants as policy instruments in federal systems.

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of default risk for newly originated home mortgages over the past quarter century. We bring together several data sources to produce this history, including loan-level data for the entire Enterprise (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) book. We use these data to track a large number of loan characteristics and a summary measure of risk, the stressed default rate. Among the many results in the paper, we show that mortgage risk had already risen in the 1990s, planting seeds of the financial crisis well before the actual event. Our results also cast doubt on explanations of the crisis that focus on borrowers with low credit scores. The aggregate series we present in this paper are available for download at https:/www.fhfa.gov/papers/wp1902.aspx. (1) JEL Classification: E32, G21, G28, H22, R31 Keywords: mortgage risk * housing boom * default * foreclosure * house price * leverage, 1. Introduction Since the global financial crisis, there has been an outpouring of research to understand the developments in the U.S. home mortgage market that precipitated the crisis. (1) Nonetheless, [...]

Despite large increases in the representation of women and people from other minority groups on corporate boards, public and private regulators are pushing for more. California already passed mandates requiring firms headquartered in the state to meet quotas for women and members of other underrep-resented groups on their corporate boards. The Nasdaq stock exchange proposed a similar mandate. To support this forced injection of diversity, the regulators point to a wealth of citations claiming diversity improves a firm's value. Upon examination, though, the research base does not hold up. Many citations come from consulting firm position papers that lack credibility. These reports imply that, because higher-value firms tend to have more-diverse boards, diversity causes the increase in value, without even attempting to adjust for other differences across firms. The academic literature noted in the Nasdaq proposal is not much better. Reliable causal inferences require methods that ensure one is comparing apples to apples, whereas most of the cited literature does little more than add a few control variables to get to an apples-to-bananas comparison, at best. It also appears that the Nasdaq proposal selectively surveyed the literature on board diversity. When meta-analyses are consulted, the literature as a whole finds little relationship between board diversity and firm value. This systematic review of the literature aligns with numerous other literature reviews, even those performed by individuals predisposed to ffavor diversity mandates, finding that the evidence is weak for a business case for diversity. The Nasdaq proposal ignores many studies that are much more reliable methodologically. For example, studies examined the enactment of diversity requirements in Norway, using it as a natural experiment that would provide insight into what happens when firms are forced to diversify their boards. Findings from the Norwegian experience indicate, at best, that diversity mandates do not improve firm value, and some studies find the quotas harmed firm performance. Additionally, many firms chose to go private to avoid the regulation. There is no credible evidence that diversity requirements systematically improve firm performance., Women are better represented on US corporate boards than ever before. According to data from the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), by 2019, women held more than one-fourth [...]

Well before John Adams assumed the presidency on March 4, 1797, James Madison was convinced that Adams, like Alexander Hamilton, was overly fond of monarchic government. Though Hamilton was careful [...]

Donald Trump's ascendancy has inflicted many changes on the right, including substantially altering its posture on economic issues. (1) Where this blend of economic nationalism and conservative populism has been [...]

Socialism is the ultimate big lie. While it falsely promises prosperity, equality, and security, it delivers the exact opposite: poverty, misery, inequality, and tyranny. Equality is achieved under socialism only [...]

Key Points * The Biden administration's Department of Education is taking steps to undermine institutions' ability to work with outside providers for many functions necessary to deliver high-quality course-work to [...]

Place-based policies aim to stimulate economic development in disadvantaged areas with the goal of improving the well-being of residents. A provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act aimed to spur private investment in low-income areas called Opportunity Zones (OZs). We evaluate the impact of OZs on investment using data on the near-universe of commercial retail, office, and industrial real estate investments in the United States and a regression discontinuity design that exploits randomness near the OZ eligibility threshold. From 2019-2022, we find economically small and statistically insignificant point estimates of the effect of OZ eligibility on census tract-level investment. Additional data from MasterCard show no robust evidence of increased business activity nor consumer spending. However, we find suggestive effects on investment in multi-family housing in certain years. We conclude that almost five years after the OZ policy was implemented, there is no evidence of a private investment response that has spread beyond multi-family housing, limiting the potential of the policy to stimulate broad economic development and improve the well-being of residents. JEL Codes: H53, E22, D61 Keywords: Opportunity zones, investment, tax policy, poverty, 1 Introduction Rising geographic disparity in economic well-being in recent decades has focused attention on place-based policies as a tool to help people living in distressed areas. While in the [...]