Many national accounts of economic output and prosperity, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or net domestic product (NDP), offer an incomplete picture by ignoring, for example, the value of leisure, home production, and the value of health. Previous discussed shortcomings of such accounts...

This paper calculates monthly time series for the overall safety net's statutory marginal labor income tax rate as a function of skill and marital status. Marginal tax rates increased significantly for all groups between 2007 and 2009, and dramatically so for unmarried household heads. The...

Measured in percentage points, the Affordable Care Act will, by 2015, add about fourteen times more to average marginal labor income tax rates nationwide than the Massachusetts health reform added to average rates in Massachusetts following its 2006 statewide health reform. The rate impacts are...

The Affordable Care Act's taxes, subsidies, and regulations significantly alter terms of trade in both goods and factor markets. We use a multi-sector (intra-national) trade model to predict and quantify consequences of the Affordable Care Act for the incidence of health insurance coverage and...

The Affordable Care Act includes four significant, permanent, implicit unemployment assistance programs, plus various implicit subsidies for underemployment, and expanded Medicaid eligibility for adults. Every sector of the economy, and about half of nonelderly adults, is directly affected by at...

Inflation-adjusted spending on means-tested subsidies has increased sharply since 2007, and most of the growth was due to changes in eligibility rules, and increases in subsidies per eligible person, rather than increases in the number of people who would have been eligible under pre-recession...

The Affordable Care Act introduces or expands taxes on incomes and full-time employment, beginning in 2014. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the new full-time employment taxes from the perspective of a household budget constraint, measure their magnitude, and assess their likely...

Political competitiveness - which many interpret as the degree of democracy - can be modeled as a monopolistic competition. All regimes are constrained by the threat of "entry," and thereby seek some combination of popular support and political entry barriers. This simple model predicts that...

Many political economic theories use and emphasize the process of voting in their explanation of the growth of Social Security, government spending, and other public policies. But is there an empirical connection between democracy and Social Security program size or design? Using some new...