By Popularity

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) A comprehensive policy response to the coronavirus will involve tolerating a very large contraction in economic activity until the spread of infections has dropped significantly.

B) Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk.

C) Optimally, the government would invest more than it is currently doing in expanding treatment capacity through steps such as building temporary hospitals, accelerating testing, making more masks and ventilators, and providing financial incentives for the production of a successful vaccine.

‘Modern monetary theory’ (MMT) – the idea that a country that is able to borrow in its own currency need not worry about government deficits and debt – has been all over the economics and finance media in recent weeks. This approach to macroeconomics, which has been used to underpin calls for new public spending programs, has been debated widely in newspaper columns, blog posts and tweets – often in quite vitriolic ways.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statement:

Local ordinances that limit rent increases for some rental housing units, such as in New York and San Francisco, have had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) If the federal minimum wage is raised gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020, the employment rate for low-wage US workers will be substantially lower than it would be under the status quo.

B) Increasing the federal minimum wage gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020 would substantially increase aggregate output in the US economy.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statements:

A) Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment.

B) On average, citizens of the U.S. have been better off with the North American Free Trade Agreement than they would have been if the trade rules for the U.S., Canada and Mexico prior to NAFTA had remained in place.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statements:

A) If the US replaced its discretionary monetary policy regime with a gold standard, defining a “dollar” as a specific number of ounces of gold, the price-stability and employment outcomes would be better for the average American.

B) There are many factors besides US inflation risk that influence the current dollar price of gold.

With sharply rising US inflation prompting debate about the potential role of powerful firms in driving up prices and whether antitrust interventions and/or price controls may be an effective policy response, we invited our US panel to express their views. We asked the experts whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements, and, if so, how strongly and with what degree of confidence:

The total value of outstanding student loans in the United States currently stands at over $1.6 trillion. During the coronavirus crisis, federal student loan payments have been suspended to the end of the calendar year. Following the presidential election, there have been wider discussions of whether the incoming administration may consider some level of forgiveness of the debt.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A: The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year.

B: Unless they were compensated by others, many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year.

This week’s US Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) A federal minimum wage of $15 per hour would lower employment for low-wage workers in many states.

B) A federal minimum wage that is pegged to state and/or local conditions such as the cost of living would be preferable to the current arrangements that give states a role in setting the policy. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A: Raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.

B: The distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) A cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would lead to higher GDP within five years than without the tax cut.

B) A cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) Even if the mortality of COVID-19 proves to be limited (similar to the number of flu deaths in a regular season), it is likely to cause a major recession.

B) The economic effects of COVID-19 coming from reduced spending will be larger than those coming from disruptions to supply chains and illness-related workforce reductions.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statement:

Connecticut should pass its Senate Bill 60, which states that during a “severe weather event emergency, no person within the chain of distribution of consumer goods and services shall sell or offer to sell consumer goods or services for a price that is unconscionably excessive.”

In January this year, Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled a proposal to tax the wealth of the richest 0.1% of Americans. The proposed legislation to tax households with a net worth of $50 million or more draws on analysis by one of our US panel of economic experts – Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley – showing that the richest 0.1% has seen its share of American wealth more than triple from 7% to 22% since the late 1970s. Saez and colleagues have also made calculations of the potential impact of Senator Warren’s proposed tax.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

Granting every American citizen over 21-years old a universal basic income of $13,000 a year — financed by eliminating all transfer programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing subsidies, household welfare payments, and farm and corporate subsidies) — would be a better policy than the status quo.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel Statements:

A)   If the US enacts a tax bill similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate— and assuming no other changes in tax or spending policy — US GDP will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo.

B)    If the US enacts a tax bill similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate— and assuming no other changes in tax or spending policy — the US debt-to-GDP ratio will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo.

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) Rising inequality is straining the health of liberal democracy.

B) Enacting more redistributive expenditures and policies would be likely to limit the rise of populism.

C) Governments should allocate more resources to policies that would be likely to limit the rise of populism, even if it means higher public debt or lower public spending in other areas.