Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions

Benjamin B. Lockwood; Matthew  Weinzierl

Article | Journal of Monetary Economics | February 2016

Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions

by Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl

Abstract

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a positive inference exercise as in, for example, the recent surge of so-called "inverse-optimum" research. We find that capitalizing on the potential of this approach is not as straightforward as we might hope. We perform the inverse-optimum inference on U.S. tax policy from 1979 through 2010 and identify two broad explanations for its evolution. These explanations, however, either undermine the reliability of the inference exercise's conclusions or challenge conventional assumptions upon which economists routinely rely when performing welfare evaluations. We emphasize the need for better evidence on society's positive and normative judgments in order to resolve the questions these findings raise.

Keywords: Judgments; Taxation;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Lockwood, Benjamin B., and Matthew Weinzierl. "Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions." Journal of Monetary Economics 77 (February 2016): 30–47. (Also Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 14-119, June 2014.)

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020 (Revised June 2020)

SpaceX, Economies of Scale, and a Revolution in Space Access

Matthew C. Weinzierl, Kylie Lucas and Mehak Sarang

From the time he transformed the world of online banking, Elon Musk established himself as a bold innovator. After selling X.com to PayPal in 2002, he founded a series of revolutionary start-ups, starting with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). Hoping to "make human life multiplanetary", Musk aimed to establish the first Mars civilization, but was unable to procure rockets that would be cheap or reliable enough to make the journey. Over the course of the next decade, SpaceX developed a line of revolutionary rockets that transformed the commercial space launch industry. Using reusable rockets to exploit the benefits of economies of scale, SpaceX cut costs to orbit by a factor of 18 and captured a large percentage of the global launch market, once thought to be inaccessible to newcomers in the industry. But after a remarkable decade, Musk's original goal to reach Mars seemed both within reach and impossibly optimistic. SpaceX developed technologies that would be critical in supporting a crewed mission to Mars, but the cost to get there was estimated to be well above $200 billion dollars in 2014, nowhere near revenues from the launch services market. Would there be enough demand for launch services to make Elon Musk's vision a possibility, or would SpaceX have to find other ways to get there?

Keywords: space tech; space access; vision; Economies of Scale; Technological Innovation; Emerging Markets; Commercialization; Finance; Aerospace Industry;

Citation:

Weinzierl, Matthew C., Kylie Lucas, and Mehak Sarang. "SpaceX, Economies of Scale, and a Revolution in Space Access." Harvard Business School Case 720-027, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.) View Details

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The normative principle of benefit-based taxation has exerted substantial influence on many areas of public finance, but it has been largely set aside in the modern theoretical approach to optimal income taxation, where welfarist objectives dominate. A prerequisite for that gap to close is the clarification of what benefit-based income taxation would mean, specifically in a first-best setting. This paper seeks to provide clear, accessible descriptions and novel graphical representations of four major approaches to first-best benefit-based taxation, explain how these approaches relate to each other, and apply them within the Classical Benefit-Based framework for optimal income taxation of Smith (1776).

Taxing corporations is popular, but why? Corporations do not bear the burden of taxes, people do, and the incidence of the corporate income tax burden is likely to be far different from what many of its supporters assume.
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Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions

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