22,989 research outputs found
The Price of Egalitarianism
We compute the welfare cost of egalitarianism - a tax policy that equalizes wages for all. The benchmark "laissez-faire" economy has features a la Aiyagari (1994) with endogenous labor supply. A progressive income tax provides insurance against income risks but at the cost of efficiency: it undermines highly productive workers' incentives to work. We find that in an economy with the labor-supply elasticity of 1, the welfare cost of egalitarianism, measured in consumption-equivalence units, is only 1% as the welfare gain from insurance against income risks nearly offsets the efficiency loss from distorting labor effort. However, with an elastic labor supply, the welfare cost of egalitarianism is as large as 7.5% of steady state consumption.Egalitarianism; Welfare Cost; Equal-Wage Policy; Income Risks.
ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects
The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous
business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that
cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated
cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and
industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service
categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially
problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at
first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that
relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference
model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology
identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes
for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise
architecture engineering methodologies
Employment and deadweight loss effects of observed non-wage labor costs
To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate a long run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity in the determination of wages. We evaluate the employment and deadweight loss effects of observed employers’ contributions imposed by labor laws (health insurance, training, and taxes) as well as of observed workers’ deductions (social security and income tax). We find that non-wage labor costs reduce employment by 17% for whitecollars and by 53% for blue-collars, with associated deadweight losses of 10% and 35% of total contributions, respectively. Since most firms undercomply with mandated employers’ and workers contributions, we find that full compliance would imply employment losses of 4% for white-collars and 12% for blue-collars, with respective associated deadweight losses of 2% and 6%.
Employment and Deadweight Loss Effects of Observed Non-Wage Labor Costs
To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate a long run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity in the determination of wages. We evaluate the employment and deadweight loss effects of observed employers' contributions imposed by labor laws (health insurance, training, and taxes) as well as of observed workers' deductions (social security, and income tax). We find that non-wage labor costs reduce employment by 17% for white-collars and by 53% for blue-collars, with associated deadweight losses of 10% and 35% of total contributions, respectively. Since most firms undercomply with mandated employers' and workers contributions, we find that full compliance would imply employment losses of 4% for white-collars and 12% for blue-collars, with respective associated deadweight losses of 2% and 6%.Employment, Deadweight Loss, Job Creation, Labor Costs, Labor Law
Health Expenditure and Income in the United States
This paper investigates the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income in the US at a State level. Using a panel of 49 US States followed over the period 1980-2004, we study the non-stationarity and cointegration between health spending and income, ultimately measuring income elasticity of health care. The tests we adopt allow us to explicitly control for cross-section dependence and unobserved heterogeneity. Specifically, in our regression equations we assume that the error is the sum of a multifactor structure and a spatial autoregressive process, which capture global shocks and local spill overs in health expenditure. Our results suggest that health care is a necessity rather than a luxury, with an elasticity much smaller than that estimated in other US studies. Further, we observe a significant spatial spill over, though with a smaller intensity than that detected in other studies on spatial concentration of US health spending. Our broad perspective of cross section dependence as well as the methods used to capture it give new insights on the debate over the relationship between health spending and income.Health expenditure; income elasticity; cross section dependence; panels
Growth and Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the quantitative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of current IP policies. We focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth or to the expansion of trade, IP protection should be reduced.
- …