New Releases by Jonathan Gruber

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalisation of weed, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

We are currently engaged in the most fundamental debate about the role of government in decades, and who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars in the new edition of his best-selling text, Public Finance and Public Policy, 6e. The new edition details ongoing policy debates, with special focus on the largest tax reform in 30 years. New topics include universal basic income, the legalization of pot, and congestion pricing. And, of course, there is an extensive, in-depth discussion of the debate over health care. At the heart of this new edition is the author’s belief that at no other time has it been so important to know the facts, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to be thinking clearly about problem, policy, and politics. The sixth edition delivers on all counts.

The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen—and how we can do it again. The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas -- and destroying middle class jobs elsewhere. To turn this tide, we must look to a brilliant and all-but-forgotten American success story and embark on a plan that will create the industries of the future -- and the jobs that go with them. Beginning in 1940, massive public investment generated breakthroughs in science and technology that first helped win WWII and then created the most successful economy the world has ever seen. Private enterprise then built on these breakthroughs to create new industries -- such as radar, jet engines, digital computers, mobile telecommunications, life-saving medicines, and the internet-- that became the catalyst for broader economic growth that generated millions of good jobs. We lifted almost all boats, not just the yachts. Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson tell the story of this first American growth engine and provide the blueprint for a second. It''s a visionary, pragmatic, sure-to-be controversial plan that will lead to job growth and a new American economy in places now left behind.

Jonathan Gruber’s market-leading Public Finance and Public Policy was the first textbook to truly reflect the way public policy is created, implemented, and researched. Like no other text available, it integrated real-world empirical work and coverage of transfer programs and social insurance into the traditional topics of public finance. By augmenting the traditional approach of public finance texts with a true integration of theory, application, and evidence, Public Finance and Public Policy engages students like no other public finance text. Thoroughly updated, this timely new edition gives students the basic tools they need to understand the driving issues of public policy today, including healthcare, education, global climate change, entitlements, and more.

Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and her own research, the author presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this.

"A graphic explanation of the PPACA act"--Provided by publisher.

Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives to leave the labor force. "Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the issue of age in the labor force. A notable group of contributors analyzes the relationship between incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons in the workforce, the effects that reforming social security would have on the employment rates of older workers, and how extending labor force participation will affect program costs. Dispelling the myth that employing older workers takes jobs away from the young, this timely volume challenges a raft of existing assumptions about the relationship between old and young people in the workforce.

Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".

We investigate the effect of health insurance coverage on the decision of individuals to apply for Disability Insurance (DI). Those who qualify for DI receive public insurance under Medicare, but only after a two-year waiting period. This raises concerns that many disabled are going uninsured while they wait for their Medicare coverage. Moreover, the combination of this waiting period and the uncertainty about application acceptance may deter those with health insurance on their jobs, but no alternative source of coverage, from leaving work to apply for DI. Data from the Health and Retirement Survey show that, in fact, uninsurance does not rise during the waiting period for DI benefits; reductions in own employer coverage are small, and are offset by increases in other sources of insurance. Correspondingly, we find that imperfect insurance coverage does deter DI application. Those who have an alternative source of insurance coverage (coverage from a spouse''s employer or retiree coverage), are 26 to 74% more likely to apply for DI than those without such an alternative. Thus, limiting this waiting period would not increase the insurance coverage of the disabled in the U.S., but it would significantly increase applications to the DI program.

The populations in all industrialized countries are aging rapidly and life life expectancies are increasing. Yet older workers are leaving the labor force at younger and younger ages. In some countries, the labor force participation rates of 60 to 64 year old men have fallen by 75% over the past 30 years. This decline magnifies population trends, further increasing the number of retirees relative to the number of people working. Together these trends have put enormous pressure on the financial solvency of social security systems around the world. Ironically, the provisions of the systems themselves typically contribute to the labor force withdrawal. This paper is a summary of the findings of the evidence in 11 industrialized countries. We distill the key conclusions drawn from the collective findings of the individual papers. It is clear there is a strong correspondence between the age at which benefits are available and departure from the labor force. Social security programs often provide generous retirement benefits at young ages. Also, the provisions of these programs often imply large financial penalties on earnings beyond the social security early retirement age.Furthermore, in many countries disability and unemployment programs effectively provide early retirement benefits before the official social security early retirement age. We conclude that social security program provisions have contributed to the decline in labor force participation of older persons, substantially reducing the potential productive capacity of the labor force. It seems evident that if the trend to early retirement is to be reversed, as will almost surely be dictated by demographic trends, changing the provisions of social security programs that induce early retirement will play a key role.

Disability Insurance (DI) is a public program that provides income support to persons unable to continue work due to disability. The difficulty of defining disability, however, has raised the possibility that this program may be subsidizing the early retirement of workers who are not truly disabled. A critical input for assessing the optimal size of the DI program is therefore the elasticity of labor force participation with respect to benefits generosity. Unfortunately, this parameter has been difficult to estimate in the context of the U.S. DI program, since all workers face an identical benefits schedule. I surmount this problem by studying the experience of Canada, which operates two distinct DI programs, for Quebec and the rest of Canada. The latter program raised its benefits by 36% in January, 1987, while benefits were constant in Quebec, providing exogenous variation in benefits generosity across similar workers. I study this relative benefits increase using both simple `difference-in-difference'' estimators and more parameterized estimators that exploit the differential impact of this policy change across workers. I find that there was a sizeable labor supply response to the policy change; my central estimates imply an elasticity of labor force non-participation with respect to DI benefits of 0.25 to 0.32. Despite this large labor supply response, simulations suggest that there were welfare gains from this policy change under plausible assumptions about preference parameters.

Disability Insurance (DI), which provides income support to disabled workers, has been criticized for inducing a large fall in the labor force participation rate of older workers. We study the effects of one policy response designed to address this moral hazard problem: raising the rate at which DI claims are denied. Initial DI applications are decided at the state level, and, in response to a funding crisis for the DI program in the late 1970s, the states raised their rejection rates for first time applicants by 30% on average. The extent of this rise, however, varied substantially across states. We use this variation to estimate a significant reduction in labor force non-participation among older workers in response to denial rate rises. A 10% increase in denial rates led to a 2.7% fall in non- participation among 45-64 year old males; between 1/2 and 2/3 of this effect is a true reduction in labor force leaving, with the remainder accounted for by the return to work of denied applicants. We find some support for the notion that increases in denial rates effectively target their incentive effects to more able individuals; the fall in labor force non-participation was much stronger among more able workers, according to an anthropometric measure of disability.