When a professor working at a university or college develops has an innovation that may lead to a new product or a new company, who should own the intellectual property? The professor? The university? Some mixture of the two?
The Jones Act pops into public consciousness every few years, perhaps most recently in fall 2017 when President Trump suspended the law for 10 days to help hurricane assistance in Puerto Rico. Colin Grabow, Inu Manak, and Daniel Ikenson offer background on the law and make the case for its repeal in in "The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear" (Cato Institute Policy Analysis #845, June 28, 2018). They begin:
The collapse of the Turkish Lira should have surprised no one. Yet, in this bubble-justifying market, it did.
The shape of an economics research article is changing: much longer, and with more co-authors.
I'm the sort of joyless and soul-killing conversationalist who likes to use facts as the background for arguments. In that spirit, here's an overview of some facts about global trade balances, taken from the IMF External Sector Report: Tackling Global Imbalances and Rising Trade Tensions (July 2018).
About 160 countries around the world, including all the other high-income countries of the world, use a value-added tax. The US has no value added tax, but 45 states and several thousand cities, use a sales tax as an alternative method of taxing consumption. John L. Mikesell and Sharon N. Kioko provide a useful overview of the issues in "The Retail Sales Tax in a New Economy," written for the 7th Annual Municipal Finance Conference, which was held on July 16-17, 2018, at the Brookings Institution.
The label of "single-payer" health care tends to hide the reality that many choices would still need to be made. For example, a "single payer" plan could involve the government providing a voucher for a standardized health insurance plan, or it could offer choices between insurance plans provided by private firms. It could involve supplementary private health insurance: for example, the single-payer Medicare plan is often supplemented with "Medi-gap" private policies. A "single payer" plan could be funded out of general tax revenues, or by charging insurance premiums that might vary by age or in some other way. A "single payer" plan might have have most health care providers as government employees, or as employees of private firms. A "single-payer" plan could be run at the national level, or at a regional or state-by-state level. It could involve the same price-and-payment structure across the country, or allow for substantial variations across areas.