Matt Nolan

Tax cuts, the minimum wage, and incidence

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The Standard has been stating that tax cuts should be “fairer”. Now in principle I have no problem with things being “fairer” – however, defining what is fair very is subjective, and what the Standard sees as fair and what I see as fair might be different.

Still, both the Standard and No Right Turn go on to quantify what they feel is an injustice – the fact that a greater proportion of the tax cut will go to the wealthy. However, for what they are saying to be true, the wage everyone is paid following a tax cut must not change (or must change by the same lump sum) regardless of their current income – yet this is not the case.

Many moons ago we discussed tax incidence – I think it is time to run with this again, taking for granted some of the assumptions about the labour market that the Standard has provided us with over time.

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goonix

Metering and the market for water

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The DomPost contained an article on the potential for metering Wellington’s water supply. The question is asked: should Wellingtonians pay for their water? This issue is a hot topic, having been discussed at Kiwiblog, Infometrics and TVHE earlier this year.

Historically, water has been provided for by the various Wellington councils out of rates. Water is not currently metered, which implies that regardless of how much water each household takes, their rates do not vary. This arrangement has led many to believe water is in some way ‘free’, as they are not forced to pay for their specific usage and the cost is embodied in rates which cover many council services across many households. With water use of 400 litres per person per day in Wellington, relative to the national average of 160 litres, it appears water users here are not internalising the cost of their water usage.

Current arrangements do not allow for the pricing of scarcity. Read more

goonix

SKY TV and the market for live sport

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The previous Labour government bestowed a legacy upon NZ that included the first ever review of broadcasting regulations.

Essentially the question being asked in this review is: does the current market situation warrant government intervention?

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Matt Nolan

Multiple equilibrium and the drastic fall in oil prices

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The world price of oil has now declined to under $50US a barrel, a third of it’s peak value (live prices here).

This takes me back to a post we did at the end of May – when fuel costs were pushing up at a rate of knots. The topic was covered in the name: Collusion, multiple equilibrium, and petrol prices.

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Matt Nolan

Google takes on time-inconsistency

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In its eternal quest to “not be evil” Google has decided to take on one of the banes of man – himself, and his time-inconsistency.

It is doing this by introducing a new service to gmail.  You can set up this service to significantly increase the transaction cost associated with sending an email when you are drunk!

In the “drunk” state you may think it is a good idea to email your ex girlfriend/boyfriend and say strange things – however, prior to being drunk you may decide that any benefit associated with emailing someone in your drunk state is more than canceled out by the embarrassing phone call the next day.

This feature allows you to increase the cost to writing the email in your drunk state – allowing you to “pre-commit” to not sending embarrassing emails.

With classy features like this you can tell that a genius like Hal Varian is working for them 😉

Matt Nolan

Tax credit for R&D: What’s the point?

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So in National’s tax package they have dumped the R&D tax credit. Businesses seem disappointed – but this isn’t enough information in of itself to tell me whether getting rid of the credit is socially optimal or not.

In order to analyse this we have to think about why an R&D tax credit could be socially optimal and then see whether that scheme actually worked in the appropriate way to increase social welfare.

Let’s give this a go 😉

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