Andrew Coleman

Liquidity crises, wealth, and the government balance sheet

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The events of the last two months have brought financial liquidity issues into sharp focus. As firms shut down for an indefinite period in response to the Coronavirus, the question on many people lips is “will this firm be able to survive without cash income?”

If they have large amount of cash in the bank, the answer is likely to be yes. Yet most firms don’t have a large amount of cash in the bank. Rather, they have large amounts of productive assets – sometimes physical assets like machinery and equipment, and sometimes intangible assets like good business routines, long standing customers, or patented technologies. These assets will produce them with cash incomes in the future – but only if they can survive until then. 

So how can we think about this issue?

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Andrew Coleman

Measuring “OK Boomer”

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In a sense OK Boomer has a history as long as the lives of Baby Boomers themselves – at least if we relate such things to the overlapping generations models in economics.

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Andrew Coleman

Retirement income and the choices of youth

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When you get to a certain age, anyone under 35 seems young.

People born after 1984 have different preferences and a different life experience than people born earlier. Their phones are better, their clothes use less cloth, their cars are more fuel efficient, and they probably left home at a later age. They may eat less meat, be more concerned about global warming, and have a longer life expectancy.

Firms design products for these cohorts that are very different to the products they designed for young people a generation or two ago.

Strangely, however, the government obliges these cohorts to use a similar retirement income policy as their parents. Sure, they occasionally argue over small details such as whether the age of entitlement (on young cohorts) will be raised from 65 to 67, but they never ask: is the current system fit for purpose for a new generation?

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Andrew Coleman

Taxing capital incomes – are we doing it the right way?

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About fifteen years ago, the new Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Caralee McLeish, was part of a World Bank team that put together a dataset measuring the regulations and taxes that small businesses face in different countries. In conjunction with Price Waterhouse, this group (including an extremely famous Harvard economist) worked out the taxes paid by a standardised 20-person business in its first two years of operation, as well as the taxes its employees pay. 

The authors then used this data to ascertain if there was a consistent relationship between the taxes and regulations that businesses in each country face and the amount of investment taking place in each country. There was: the countries with lower tax rates and less onerous regulations tended to have more investment and more foreign investment. The data were considered so useful that the exercise is now repeated annually. One of the original papers by this group of authors, “The effect of corporate taxes on investment and entrepreneurship” (published in 2010) has been cited more than 750 times. 

New Zealand has low levels of capital for a country of its income level and quite high corporate taxes. 

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Infometrics

The disabled aren’t worth less than the old – so why does policy act like they are?

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This article was originally published on the Infometrics website here.

One of the true tests of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members, particularly the old, the young, the sick, and the disabled. There is a lot of good with New Zealand and New Zealand policy. However, on assisting those unable to provide for themselves, our provisions for people unable to work due to a health condition is an area where we are increasingly failing. 

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Gulnara Nolan

What is secular stagnation and why do we care?

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I’ve heard the arguments that secular stagnation refers to a situation with low long-term interest rates – reaching the zero lower bound on nominal rate often – low inflation and low output growth.  But what does this really mean?

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