Will a Tax Repatration Holiday Spur Investment?

If you ask a person prefers to ignore data, the answer might be yes. If you ask a person who looks at the data, the answer is likely no. There are apparently a lot of the former [0]. Anyway, to some analysis. From the abstract of a paper by Dharmapala, Foley and Forbes entitled Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act:

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided
a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. …

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“Effects of Abandoning Fixed Exchange Rates for Greater Flexibility”

At the recent NBER ISOM conference, Andy Rose presented a paper entitled Flexing Your Muscles: Effects of Abandoning Fixed Exchange Rates for Greater Flexibility, coauthored with Barry Eichengreen, following up on this 2010 paper, evaluating the effects of flexing (VoxEU post here).

For purposes of this short paper we examine a
comprehensive data set covering over 200 countries and territories since 1957. …

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The effectiveness of quantitative easing

This week I attended a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on quantitative easing. The purpose of the conference, as explained by Bank President James Bullard in his opening remarks, was to answer Stanford Professor John Taylor’s challenge to provide research of real-time usefulness to policy makers. The conference featured analyses by 5 different research teams of the effects of recent quantitative easing measures adopted in the United States and United Kingdom.

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Tax Changes, Revenue Impacts, Conditional Statements, and Other Things that Befuddle the Statistically Disinclined

Or, a weblog post for the benefit of those unable to read beyond a technical paper’s abstract, a clarification of what exactly Romer and Romer (2010) found regarding the impact of tax increases on tax revenues. This note is inspired by Econbrowser reader Ricardo (who also goes under the monikers of RicardoZ, Dick, and DickF) who inaccurately (but with inexplicable confidence) characterizes the Romer and Romer findings regarding tax changes in my last post’s comments:

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Forecasting Commodity Prices

With commodity prices exhibiting wide fluctations over the past few years, it’s no wonder that many are interested in determining what procedure best forecasts. A recent New York Fed blog post by Jan Groen and Paolo Pesenti tackles this issue. In a horse race between various economic, time series, and futures-based approaches…

there is no obvious winner. Information from large panels of global economic variables can help, but their forecasting properties are by no means overwhelming. It all depends on the choice of the specific index and the forecasting horizon. …

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The Strategic Petroleum Reserve drawdown

The International Energy Agency announced on Thursday that its 28 member countries had agreed to release 60 million barrels from their combined strategic stockpiles. The U.S. plans to contribute half of this total, all in the form of sweet crude. Thirty million barrels represents about 10% of the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve of 293 million barrels of sweet crude oil, and about 4% of the entire 727 million barrels stockpiled in the U.S. SPR.

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