AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 12, December 2000
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Computers and the Internet do not measure up to the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The modern world was made possible by a set of "great inventions" discovered during 1860-1900, including electricity, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, phonograph, motion pictures, and a host of subsidiary inventions, including air transport. In turn, the great inventions made possible the great spurt of growth in U. S. productivity,...
Article
The legislation consequently has had relatively little real impact on overall compensation.
Reacting to public and political scrutiny of high CEO compensation, Congress enacted legislation in 1993 to limit the corporate tax deductibility of executive pay. But a recent study by Nancy Rose and Catherine Wolfram indicates that this legislation had no significant effect on overall executive compensation levels.
In Regulating Executive Pay: Using the Tax Code to...
Article
Georgia's HOPE Scholarship, the inspiration for the federal Hope Scholarship, raised the college attendance rate of 18- to 19-year-olds by 7 to 8 percentage points but widened the gap in college attendance between blacks and whites and between those from low- and high-income families.
The federal government and the states have recently ushered in a new generation of student aid policies. These new programs differ from traditional, need-based student aid in one crucial...
Article
Once one allows for trade costs in goods markets, a host of puzzling market behaviors seem less mysterious.
Goods shipped from one country to another incur an array of costs. These include but are not limited to transport charges, currency conversion costs, tariffs, and an assortment of "nontariff" expenses, such as those associated with meeting country-specific product standards. The conventional wisdom has been that these costs of transactions in goods markets,...