Considering a Consumption Tax

A combination of electronic commerce and the Flat Tax could eliminate the IRS as we know it

Dual Practice of Law and Accountancy: A Lawyer’s Paradox

If a man is qualified both as a lawyer and as a certified public accountant, is there any reason to prohibit him from practicing both professions at the same time? The Professional Ethics Committee of the ABA thinks so, but the author of this article, a lawyer-CPA himself, strongly disagrees. He argues that the Committee\u27s position is not in the public interest, not a proper interpretation of the Canons of Ethics, and perhaps even unconstitutional

Universal Health Care, American Pragmatism, and the Ethics of Health Policy: Questioning Political Efficacy

[Excerpt] “This article will explore the conceptual implications of applying ethical critique and analysis to health policy. This is not to imply any reductionist conception of health policy in which ethics is absent. As Deborah Stone and John W. Kingdon both note, policy is fraught with ethical implications, and value prioritization is a sine qua non for health policy. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that there are some conceptually significant distinctions in thinking of the ethics of health policy as opposed to thinking separately about ethics and about health policy. Moreover, these distinctions themselves are of value, both in thinking about some of the most intractable problems of health policy, and in generating health policy that expressly presents its ethical bases, as opposed to masking the value assumptions and beliefs that underpin such policy.

When Is U.S. Bank Lending to Emerging Markets Volatile?

Using bank-specific data on U.S. bank claims on individual foreign countries since the mid-1980s, this paper: 1) characterizes the size and portfolio diversification patterns of the U.S. banks engaging in foreign lending; and 2) econometrically explores the determinants of fluctuations in U.S. bank claims on a broad set of countries. U.S. bank claims on Latin American and Asian emerging markets, and on industrialized countries, are sensitive to U.S. macroeconomic conditions. When the United States grows rapidly, there is substitution between claims on industrialized countries and claims on the United States. The pattern of response of claims on emerging markets to U.S. conditions differs across banks of different sizes and across emerging market regions. Moreover, unlike U.S. bank claims on industrialized countries, we find that claims on emerging markets are not highly sensitive to local country GDP and interest rates.

Identity Salience and Involvement among Resident and Nonresident Fathers

The literature on father involvement suggests that the value men ascribe to the father role is important for understanding their involvement with their children, yet this theory has received only limited empirical attention. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,554), I examined the association between fathers? identity salience reported at their child?s birth and their involvement (accessibility, engagement, and responsibility) when their child was about 1, 3, and 5 years old, carefully considering the role played by fathers? residence status. I found that fathers? identity salience predicted future levels of engagement net of a large number of fathers? characteristics, and that fathers with high identity salience were more likely to reside with their child, which facilitated their involvement. These results suggest that programs designed to enhance the salience of the father role would be useful for teaching men to become more involved fathers.Fatherhood, Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW), Longitudinal Data, Parental Involvement, Social Psychology (Family)

Predicting Exchange Rate Crises: Mexico Revisited

This paper predicts ex-ante the probability of currency crises end size of expected devaluations month by month for Mexico between 1980 and 1986 using a heterodox linear discrete time model of exchange rate crises. The forces contributing to speculative attacks on the Mexican peso include internal money creation, external credit shocks, and relative price shocks. The framework proves highly successful for generating forecasts of the probability of speculative attacks on the peso and for predicting lower bounds for post- collapse exchange rates using a range of assumptions about critical levels of central bank reserve floors. Simulation results suggest that reducing domestic credit growth, increasing the uncertainty surrounding this growth, and reducing the size and perhaps increasing the frequency of currency realignments might have greatly reduced the amount of currency speculation against the peso in some of the crisis periods between 1980 and 1986.

Financial sector FDI and host countries: new and old lessons

Foreign direct investment (FDI) into the financial sectors of emerging economies soared during the 1990s, leaving many countries with banking sectors owned primarily by foreign institutions. While the implications of FDI into emerging markets are well documented, less clearly understood is how the host countries are affected by financial sector FDI specifically. An understanding of this relationship is crucial for countries formulating policy with respect to foreign banks. This article argues that many lessons learned from work on FDI into manufacturing and primary resource industries apply directly to host-country financial sectors. The author provides evidence on such themes as technology transfers, productivity spillovers, wage effects, macroeconomic growth, and fiscal policy to show that financial sector FDI into emerging markets generally has positive effects on the host countries. In banking and finance specifically, she argues that financial sector FDI can potentially strengthen institutional development through improvements to regulation and supervision.Investments, Foreign ; Emerging markets ; Banks and banking, Foreign ; International finance

Core-competitive Auctions

One of the major drawbacks of the celebrated VCG auction is its low (or zero) revenue even when the agents have high value for the goods and a {\em competitive} outcome could have generated a significant revenue. A competitive outcome is one for which it is impossible for the seller and a subset of buyers to `block' the auction by defecting and negotiating an outcome with higher payoffs for themselves. This corresponds to the well-known concept of {\em core} in cooperative game theory. In particular, VCG revenue is known to be not competitive when the goods being sold have complementarities. A bottleneck here is an impossibility result showing that there is no auction that simultaneously achieves competitive prices (a core outcome) and incentive-compatibility. In this paper we try to overcome the above impossibility result by asking the following natural question: is it possible to design an incentive-compatible auction whose revenue is comparable (even if less) to a competitive outcome? Towards this, we define a notion of {\em core-competitive} auctions. We say that an incentive-compatible auction is $\alpha$-core-competitive if its revenue is at least $1/\alpha$ fraction of the minimum revenue of a core-outcome. We study the Text-and-Image setting. In this setting, there is an ad slot which can be filled with either a single image ad or $k$ text ads. We design an $O(\ln \ln k)$ core-competitive randomized auction and an $O(\sqrt{\ln(k)})$ competitive deterministic auction for the Text-and-Image setting. We also show that both factors are tight