Taxes matter for innovation: higher personal and corporate income taxes negatively affect the quantity, quality, and location of inventive activity at the macro and micro levels; at the macro level, there are cross-state spillovers or business-stealing

Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century. Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas, Stefanie Stantcheva. NBER Working Paper No. 24982, September 2018. http://www.nber.org/papers/w24982

This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location and patents of firms active in R&D since 1921; and a historical state-level corporate tax database since 1900, which we link to an existing database on state-level personal income taxes. Our analysis focuses on the impact of taxes on individual inventors and firms (the micro level) and on states over time (the macro level). We propose several identification strategies, all of which yield consistent results: i) OLS with fixed effects, including inventor and state-times-year fixed effects, which make use of differences between tax brackets within a state-year cell and which absorb heterogeneity and contemporaneous changes in economic conditions; ii) an instrumental variable approach, which predicts changes in an individual or firm's total tax rate with changes in the federal tax rate only; iii) a border county strategy, which exploits tax variation across neighboring counties in different states. We find that taxes matter for innovation: higher personal and corporate income taxes negatively affect the quantity, quality, and location of inventive activity at the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, cross-state spillovers or business-stealing from one state to another are important, but do not account for all of the effect. Agglomeration effects from local innovation clusters tend to weaken responsiveness to taxation. Corporate inventors respond more strongly to taxes than their non-corporate counterparts.

Participants’ dishonesty seems to be independent to payoff uncertainty; they lie when lies generate certain payoffs, but do not lie more when lies can reduce payoff uncertainty; participants do not use lies as a strategy to secure their payoffs

Uncertain lies How payoff uncertainty affects dishonesty. Jeremy Celse et al. Journal of Economic Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2018.09.003

Highlights
•    Participants’ dishonesty seems to be independent to payoff uncertainty.
•    Participants lie when lies generate certain payoffs.
•    Participants do not lie more when lies can reduce largely payoff uncertainty.
•    Participants do not lie more when lies can reduce marginally payoff uncertainty.
•    Participants do not use lies as a strategy to secure their payoffs.

Abstract: In this paper we experimentally explore how lying changes when its consequences are not certain. We argue that, when consequences are not certain, lying is morally less costly because the action of lying does not mechanically result in the obtainment of the benefit and this produces a lower feeling of responsibility in case the benefit is obtained. Moreover, we argue that the smaller the impact of lying on the probability to obtain the benefit the lower is the feeling of responsibility. We test our predictions using a modified die-under-the-cup task where misreporting, rather than delivering a higher payoff, increases the likelihood to get a prize. Overall we have four treatments where the reported outcome affects the probability to get a prize to a different extent. Contrary to our prediction, we do not observe any treatment difference suggesting that lying is independent to the extent to which it increases the probability to get a benefit. This result suggests that the willingness to lie to secure a benefit and the willingness to lie to marginally increase the probability to obtain a benefit are very similar.

Further declines in divorce rates: Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, & cohabitation has grown less stable

Cohen, Philip N. 2018. “The Coming Divorce Decline.” SocArXiv. September 15. doi:10.31235/osf.io/h2sk6

Abstract: This paper analyzes the odds of divorce from 2008 to 2016 (soon 2017), using multivariate models of marital events data from the American Community Survey. I find that the falling observed divorce rates over the last decade are apparent in the fully adjusted model as well. Further, age specific divorce rates show that the trend in the last decade has been driven by younger women (despite higher divorce rates among older women than in the past). Finally, I analyze the characteristics of newly-married couples over the last decade, and identify trends that portend further declines in divorce rates. Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, and cohabitation has grown less stable. The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.

Of 1857 small mammal visits we recorded, only two occasions showed evidence of what could be considered as voluntary wheel running behavior; over hundred-fold fewer than previously reported

Does voluntary wheel running exist in Neotropical wild mammals? Peter van Lunteren et al. bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/409409

Abstract: Running wheels are frequently used to improve the welfare of captive animals, increase environmental enrichment, and, by doing so, reduce stereotypic behaviors. It is, however, still debated whether or not wheel running itself is a stereotypy. New evidence emerged when Meijer and Robbers (2014, Proc. Royal Soc. B) reported voluntary wheel running of wild animals in the Netherlands. Since stereotypic behaviors are exclusively attributed to captive animals, the occurrence of wheel running in the wild suggests that this behavior is non-stereotypic. Our study explores that same line of investigation, examining whether wild animals will voluntarily use running wheels in a natural area in Paraguay in comparison to the urban and semi-urban settings in the Netherlands. Of the 1857 small mammal visits we recorded, only two occasions showed evidence of what could be considered as wheel running behavior; over hundredfold fewer than previously reported. The potential reasons for the observed difference in wheel running activity, such as different species pool or seasonality, are discussed. The difference, however, is likely to be due to the much lower probability of Neotropical mammals in a remote natural site encountering man-made objects and experiencing urbanization-related behavioral patterns. Additionally, in the light of our findings, we review the definition of wheel running as a stereotypic behavior.