Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: July 21, 2013

The Policy Elasticity

The Policy Elasticity, Nathaniel Hendren, Harvard University, June 2013
“This paper provides a generic framework for evaluating the welfare impact of government policy changes towards taxes, transfers, and publicly provided goods. The results show that the behavioral response required for welfare measurement is the causal impact of each agent’s response to the policy on the government’s budget. A decomposition of this response into income and substitution effects is not required. Because these desired elasticities vary with the policy in question, I term them policy elasticities. I also provide an additivity condition that yields a natural definition of the marginal costs of public funds as welfare impact of a policy per dollar of its cost to the government budget. Finally, I use the model, along with causal estimates from existing literature, to study the welfare impact of additional redistribution by increasing the generosity of the earned income tax credit financed by an increase in the top marginal income tax rate. I show existing causal estimates suggest additional redistribution is desirable if and only if providing an additional $0.44 to an EITC-eligible single mother (earning less than $40,000) is preferred to providing an additional $1 to a person subject to the top marginal tax rate (earning more than $400,000).”
  • See also NYT –Location Plays Major Role in Climbing the Income Ranks: “According to a new study that has provided the most detailed portrait yet of income mobility, the odds of rising to another income level are notably low in certain cities, like Atlanta and Charlotte, and much higher in New York and Boston.”

State-Specific Healthy Life Expectancy at Age 65 Years

State-Specific Healthy Life Expectancy at Age 65 Years — United States, 2007–2009, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). July 19, 2013 / 62(28);561-566 “In this report, difference in Health Life Expectancies (HLE) were reported at the state level for adults aged 65 years based on self-reported health in the 2007–2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, National Vital… Continue Reading

Big Data, Little Privacy: Tracking the Usual Suspects

Via LLRX.com – Big Data, Little Privacy: Tracking the Usual Suspects In his article, Ken Strutin examines how the 21st century use of watch lists might or might not resemble the labeling of the McCarthy period, and how the experience of that era might inform an evaluation of present-day designation of the dangerous. After first describing… Continue Reading

Life Span of U.S. Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link

Liebler, Raizel and Liebert, June (2013) Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010), Yale Journal of Law and Technology: Vol. 15: Iss. 2, Article 2. “Citations are the cornerstone upon which judicial opinions and law review articles stand. Within… Continue Reading

UK Guardian – Secret court lets NSA extend its trawl of Verizon customers’ phone records

“The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance. In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian’s disclosure in June of the NSA‘s indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office… Continue Reading

Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion

Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion, Elizabeth E. Joh, U.C. Davis School of Law – Arizona Law Review, Vol. 55, No. 4, (2013), Forthcoming” The police tend to think that those who evade surveillance are criminals. Yet the evasion may only be a protest against the surveillance itself. Faced with the growing surveillance… Continue Reading

2013 State of Cybercrime Survey from PwC and CSO

“PwC US and CSO magazine today released the 2013 State of Cybercrime Survey, which reveals that while cybercrime threats are on the rise, current attempts to counter them remain largely unsuccessful. According to the report, organizations have made little progress in developing ways to defend themselves against both internal and external cyber opponents. Over 500… Continue Reading