Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 17, 2023: paper summaries
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
A lot of discussion on Piketty-Saez-Zucman and Auten-Splinter this week, see the section in the middle of the newsletter for highlights…
Paper summaries
^a lot of high-powered brains are burned investigating whether the top MTR should be 50% or 51%, when it seems totally plausible IMO that reducing just the mechanical cost of filing personal taxes from 10h/year to 5h/year would improve welfare just as much. A lot of issues are like this
^file under: extremely speculative but interesting. On the other hand, on tech twitter this week, some discussion suggesting the opposite:
^the big picture here: normatively, should firms maximize profits (a la Friedman) or should they have some different objective function?
^a lot of substantive discussion in the replies and a thread from George Selgin here
^what’s the best analysis on what’s happened here?
Inequality trends: Auten-Splinter vs. Piketty-Saez-Zucman
^Piketty: “Inequality denial in action”
Auten-Splinter respond in an MR post here
^another Zucman thread here; Dube-Kopczuk-Baker back and forth here. @VincentGeloso has a long post about a different aspect of the debate (where he has contributed) here: