Penn Wharton PPI Issue Briefs | University of Pennsylvania

Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative

Penn Wharton PPI publishes Issue Briefs tackling concerns that are varied but share one common thread: they are central to the economic health of the nation and the American people. These are nonpartisan, knowledge-driven documents written by Wharton and Penn faculty in their specific areas of expertise.

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Shining a Light on the Federal Reserve’s Foreign Affairs

Peter Conti-Brown and David T. Zaring

Throughout its history, the U.S. Federal Reserve has engaged in international diplomacy, outside the bounds of (and sometimes in conflict with) the priorities of the White House and U.S. State Department. In directing monetary policy, the Fed’s primary concern is to benefit the U.S. economy. In the process, the Fed at times acts in concert with foreign central banks, as was the case in setting new bank regulations after the 2008 financial crisis. At other times, the Fed acts in ways that other countries view as detrimental to their economic interests. Either way, the Fed operates with little public accountability and can wind up complicating the work of U.S. diplomats. This issue brief focuses on the questions of whether and how greater oversight of the Fed’s international activities should be pursued. It recommends not an overhaul of the Fed’s structure or the elimination of its role in international affairs but instead calls for greater disclosure of its international activities. The Fed should provide testimony to Congress twice per year on its foreign policies, just as it does for monetary and regulatory policy. This kind of disclosure permits broader discussion of the Fed’s activities without eliminating the benefits of its institutional independence for monetary policy.
The Policy Barriers to Marijuana Banking

Peter Conti-Brown

Although cannabis-related businesses have thrived in the localities that have legalized marijuana as a consumer product, the industry has suffered from crippling uncertainty, in the form of limited access to the banking system. The cannabis industry thus has been forced to operate in a cash-intensive “gray market,” which is a problem. An entire industry conducting all of its business in cash cannot be fairly taxed or regulated and, historically, has been associated with lawlessness—everything from security concerns, transportation and currency problems, money laundering, and cash hoarding. This brief reviews and analyzes the issues that surround marijuana banking and offers several policy options for addressing the tension between federal enforcement and state sovereignty as it related to marijuana banking.
State Foreclosure Law: A Neglected Element of the Housing Finance Debate

Brian D. Feinstein

Proponents of robust mortgage finance regulation would do well to look to the states, and specifically to the regulatory effects of state-mandated judicial foreclosure. Judicial foreclosure, which is authorized in almost half of U.S. states, requires that lenders seeking to foreclose on a mortgage file an action in state court. This not only provides borrowers with a forum for holding lenders accountable for their behavior and obligations, but puts the onus on the lender to show that the requirements for foreclosure have been met. It also aids borrowers by delaying the foreclosure process and allowing them to remain in their homes for longer periods while in default. In this brief, Professor Brian Feinstein empirically examines the effects of judicial foreclosure on lender behavior and mortgage costs for consumers. The findings indicate that judicial foreclosure alters lender behavior in ways that are beneficial to borrowers, and that mirror regulatory goals. Lenders exhibit greater caution in loan-approval decisions and offer fewer subprime loans. These results are amplified for lower-income borrowers. Importantly, the costs imposed on lenders by judicial foreclosure do not appear to get passed on to borrowers in the form of higher rates.
Cryptocurrency Competition and the U.S. Monetary System

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

Advocates of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin believe that having currency competition will help achieve the economic objective of price stability. This Issue Brief summarizes research that explores whether competition among privately issued fiat currencies can actually produce price stability. The research finds that in most cases, a system of private monies does not deliver price stability. And even when it does, it always is subject to self-fulfilling inflationary episodes, and it supplies a suboptimal amount of money. Although there is no economic reason to curb the use of cryptocurrencies at the moment, it is important to review key regulatory issues that policymakers need to consider now, before the use of cryptocurrencies becomes even more widespread.
The Missing Pieces of the Economic Debate Over Immigration Reform

Exequiel Hernandez

To the extent that immigration reform is discussed in terms of economics, the debate tends to focus exclusively on labor issues-specifically, how immigrants affect jobs and wages for native citizens. But to understand the economic effects of immigration, and thus develop sounder policies, policymakers need to consider how immigration affects all three core components of economic growth: not just labor, but capital and innovation too.

In the Penn Wharton Public Policy Brief, "The Missing Pieces of the Economic Debate Over Immigration Reform/whr.tn/2vmKbK8>," Professor Exequiel Hernandez discusses new research showing that immigration produces gains for the U.S. economy with respect to capital and innovation. Immigrants help to attract investment from foreign firms and significantly increase bilateral trade flows between the U.S. and their home countries. Immigrants also account for roughly a quarter of all U.S. entrepreneurs. They not only generate novel businesses and inventions, but also introduce novel ideas that U.S. citizens develop further to create new products and companies of their own.

Just as importantly, labor, capital, and innovation are all interrelated. Policies that target one growth component (such as labor) can carry unintended negative consequences for the other two, and result in undesirable economic outcomes.
Regulating Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

David Hoffman

Research led by the University of Pennsylvania Professor David Hoffman presents legal literature’s first detailed analysis of the inner workings of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). Startups are using the novel funding mechanism with increasing frequency. In 2017, an estimate 370 ICOs raised around $6.2 billion, and by July 2018, an additional 430 ICOs had raised almost $17.2 billion. ICOs come with the promise of a “smart contract”, or an automated contract that governs real world relationships where before a legal document would have been employed. Human oversight is supposed to be unnecessary because the embedded code ensures proper governance. But do ICOs actually deliver what they promise? Hoffman’s team examines the white papers of the 50 top grossing ICOs from 2017 and compares the promises made to the underlying code. ICO investors face a unique set of concerns, three of which are addressed in detail: will promotors restrict the supply of their cyryptoasset, will they restrict the transfer of cryptoassets according to a vesting or lock-up plan, and do promotors retain the power to modify the smart-contract code governing the tokens sold? The findings are stark: ICO software code and ICO investor disclosures often did not match. While ICOs are a potentially powerful financial innovation, this failure of self-governance reveals opportunities for policymakers consider options to protect consumers and help the ICO market mature.
Antitrust in 2018: The Meaning of Consumer Welfare Now

Herbert Hovenkamp

Modern antitrust policy follows the consumer welfare principle (CWP), the proposition that antitrust policy should encourage markets to produce high output consistent with sustainable competition, and low prices. The market dominance of giant firms such as Amazon, however, is opening the door to a reevaluation of this antitrust standard, particularly from a new antitrust “movement” that has economic goals, such as protecting small businesses and controlling runaway profits, that can be at odds with promoting low prices. Penn Law and Wharton Professor Herbert Hovencamp evaluates the merits of three antitrust frameworks within the context of the law and economic history. While he acknowledges that business can cause harm to the lives of Americans in ways that extend beyond inflating prices—i.e., creating barriers to market entry, stifling innovation, controlling information, or limiting wages—he argues that the CWP remains best positioned to respond to antitrust problems, although it would benefit from technical improvements.
The Policy Trajectories of Autonomous Vehicles

John Paul MacDuffie

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology promises to dramatically reduce deaths and economic losses from crashes caused by human error, increase mobility for those with disabilities, and revolutionize the auto industry. Yet legislation to facilitate oversight of the development and deployment of AVs is stalling in Congress. Professor John Paul MacDuffie offers a primer on AV technology policy, and discusses strategies for addressing safety and other public concerns while still facilitating AV innovation in the private sector.
The Other Side of a Merger: Labor Market Power, Wage Suppression, and Finding Recourse in Antitrust Law

Ioana Marinescu

Labor market concentration can worsen after a merger takes place, and this heightened concentration can negatively affect wages. The focus of antitrust analysis, however, has been on the prices of consumer products, not the wages of laborers. New research indicates that, on average, labor markets are highly concentrated, and that higher concentration is associated with significantly lower posted wages for new jobs. This brief uses existing economic tools to develop a model for evaluating labor market concentration and its effects, to determine if a merger will run the risk of anticompetitively suppressing wages, employment, and output. Regulators can use this model to apply antitrust principles to labor markets, as a basis for antitrust enforcement.
Bright Lines: How Regulatory Asset Thresholds Change the Banking Industry

Allison Nicoletti, Michael Iselin, and Hailey Ballew

One of the key features of the Dodd-Frank Act is that it imposes specific and costly regulatory requirements on banks that cross the threshold of having more than $10 billion in total assets. Anecdotal accounts have suggested that this threshold has led to increased consolidation in the banking industry. This brief provides new statistical evidence of that phenomenon. Banks that approach the $10 billion threshold are significantly more likely to engage in an acquisition, pay more for that acquisition, and acquire bigger target banks than similar banking institutions did prior to Dodd-Frank. To the extent that policymakers are concerned with further consolidation in the banking industry, these findings should be of interest as they continue to evaluate current regulations and develop new ones, which might include the use of bright line asset thresholds.
Policy Options for Improving the Resilience of US Transportation Infrastructure

Gina Tonn Ms., Jeffrey Czajkowski, and Howard Kunreuther

Despite the vulnerability of America’s aging infrastructure to costly disruptions from man-made and natural disasters, infrastructure insurance under-utilized. On average, only 30% of catastrophic losses in the past 10 years have been covered by insurance. Most infrastructure project managers have relied instead on taxpayer-funded federal aid when disaster strikes. But it doesn’t need to be this way. In this brief, Gina Tonn, Jeffrey Czajkowski, and Howard Kunreuther use technical reports and input from infrastructure managers to outline steps that policymakers can take to help maximize the use of infrastructure insurance for providing financial protection, encouraging investment in loss mitigation measures, and limiting the current reliance on taxpayer dollars.
Regulating Robo Advisors: Old Policy Goals, New Challenges

Tom Baker and Benedict Dellaert

Financial “robo advice”—an automated service that ranks or matches consumers to financial products—has gained significant attention in the investment industry and on the Hill, but there has not yet been a consensus on how to regulate these new services. Robo advisors often are on par with and can exceed the standards of human advices, but they don’t fit into the category of fiduciary, and therefore won’t be held to the same regulatory standard that humans advisors are. Nonetheless, they are subject to systemic risks and the potential for abuses that can hurt consumers. Professors Tom Baker and Benedict Dellaert offer a regulatory trajectory to follow as the technology of robo advisors continues to develop and expand.
The Presidency, Congressional Republicans, and the Future of Financial Reform

Peter Conti-Brown

This brief examines the tension between the Republican ideological commitment to curbing executive power and the opportunity Republicans now have for Trump to dominate the direction of financial regulatory reform. The discussion will focus on three key policy outcomes that Republicans have sought during the last six years: reforming the Federal Reserve, overhauling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and changing the way in which the nation’s largest financial institutions are designated and regulated.
The Economic Realities of Replacing the Affordable Care Act

Hanming Fang

Using simulations based on a new economic model, this brief empirically examines the pivotal mechanisms of the Affordable Care Act, such as the individual mandate, employer mandate, and premium subsidies, to inform the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. The research suggests that the ACA, if left intact, in the long run significantly reduces the uninsured rate. The simulations also suggest that the employer mandate is not a crucial pillar for the success of the ACA. The analysis indicates it is the premium subsidy, rather than the employer mandate or the individual mandate, that is crucial for the success of the ACA, in terms of expanded coverage. The brief concludes with a look at the key elements of the main legislative proposals Congressional Republicans have offered to replace the ACA, including the American Health Care Act.
Before International Tax Reform, We Need to Understand Why Firms Invert

Michael Knoll

A wave of corporate inversions by U.S. firms over the past two decades has generated substantial debate in academic, business, and policy circles. The core of the debate hinges on a couple of key economic questions: Do U.S. tax laws disadvantage U.S.-domiciled companies relative to their foreign competitors? And, if so, do inversions improve the competitiveness of U.S. multinational firms both abroad and at home? This brief, summarizes both old and new research that views these questions through the lens of corporations’ global effective tax rates (ETRs), and finds that the stronger case seems to be that U.S.-domiciled corporations are often tax-disadvantaged and that they can improve their competitive position by inverting. Additional evidence also suggests that U.S. MNCs can increase their after-tax cash flow by inverting. Inversions indicate that something is fundamentally wrong with the tax system. The brief concludes by discussing two feasible paths forward for reform.
Why Taxing Carbon May Not Make the World More Green

Serguei Netessine and Sam Aflaki

Although taxing carbon is an idea that enjoys significant support among policymakers and business leaders, new research indicates that carbon taxation can actually cause energy investments to gravitate away from the cleanest energy technologies. This counterintuitive finding reflects two key characteristics of energy markets: the worldwide increase in renewable energy sources whose output is intermittent and variable; and greater market liberalization, which has made the spot driving of electricity more volatile. The intermittency of renewable energy sources requires backup generation, typically from generators using fossil fuels. The dynamics of market liberalization amplify this negative effect of intermittency. Policymakers need to take steps to reduce intermittency by supporting storage technologies or setting monetary incentives to increase renewable generation capacity investment.
An Updated Look at Student Loan Debt Repayment and Default

Laura W. Perna, James Kvaal, and Roman Ruiz

Over 41 million Americans now owe more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding federal student loan debt. Policymakers are considering a number of amendments related to federal student aid programs in the context of the Higher Education Act reauthorization. In addition to providing a snapshot of key data related to student loan debt that all policymakers should consider, this brief discusses recommendations for facilitating repayment and curbing defaults on student loans, including: protecting students from low-performing institutions; encouraging use of forbearance and deferment mechanisms; and strengthening income-driven repayment options.
Addressing Personal-Income-Tax Manipulation with Tools from Psychology

Alex Rees-jones

In order to better understand the tax manipulation decision-making process—both legal uses of tax deductions and illegal tax evasion—this brief looks at the impact of gain/loss framing. Analysis of tax data confirms that tax decisions are influenced by “loss aversion.” For instance, taxpayers are more likely to pursue tax reduction activities when they make a loss smaller, as compared to when they make a gain larger. The brief looks at tools that policymakers have at their disposal for both deterring tax evasion and making exiting tax incentives maximally effective. The brief discusses instances when such gain/loss framing interventions might be deployed, and provides estimates around the size of the revenue responses they may generate. The author estimates that if tax filers who face losses experienced the lower motivation to manipulate shown by those facing gains, annual tax revenue would increase by $1.4 billion. Even attempts at marginal interventions, though smaller in predicted effects, might be financially worthwhile.
The Issue at the Heart of America’s Great Unbanking

Lisa Servon

Consumer protection regulation targets services like payday lenders under the presumption that these services can be predatory and associated with high costs. Yet an increasing number of Americans are utilizing such alternative financial services and joining the ranks of the “unbanked” and “underbanked.” Altering this status quo and promoting greater middle-class stability will require that policymakers foster innovation in the development of high-quality, transparent, and consumer-oriented financial services within the mainstream banking system.
Lessons for Policymakers and Regulators on the (Predictable) Future of the Digital Economy

Kevin Werbach

The next stage in the evolution of the digital economy involves the creation of what can be called the “Internet of the World”—an expanding web of transactions, anticipated today by on-demand platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, that eventually will occur across trillions of networked devices and penetrate every sphere of human activity. This brief looks at the many legal questions raised by these novel services, in particular, at the regulatory classification of on-demand services, as well as the application of antitrust provisions, the imposition of taxes and fees, and the assignment of liability to these new platforms.
A Financial Assessment of Municipal Fiber in the U.S.

Christopher S. Yoo and Timothy Pfenninger

In the interest of bringing high-speed broadband access to communities underserved by current Internet service providers, many U.S. cities have initiated municipal broadband projects. Such efforts have received favorable attention from those eager to help close the digital divide. This brief presents a first look at a new, comprehensive empirical analysis of 20 U.S. municipal fiber builds for which financial data is available. The findings show that half of the projects in this study are cash-flow negative, and based on their performance from 2010-2014, 90 percent are unable to generate sufficient cash to recover their project costs within the 30-40 year life expectancy of a municipal fiber build. City leaders considering such projects, as well as state and federal officials interested in supporting them, need to understand the documented costs and risks before encouraging new municipal fiber programs to form.
The Economic Costs and Benefits of Implementing the Clean Power Plan

Jose Miguel Abito, Christopher R. Knittel, Konstantinos Metaxoglou, and Andre Trindade

This brief looks at the costs of implementing the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Specifically, it examines whether implementing the CPP on a state-by-state basis—that is, with each state meeting its own individual target for emissions reduction by 2030, rather than establishing regional targets—is economically efficient. The economic analysis uses data from electricity-generating firms participating in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) Interconnection to examine the relative economic efficiency of regional versus state-by-state implementation of the CPP. The research indicates that state-by-state implementation would yield the lowest electricity prices in 2030.
Excessive State Debt: A New Approach to a Growing Problem

Vincent Buccola

Economists and political observers agree state governments defaulting on their debt obligations is a growing concern. How best to aid struggling states, however, is a point of contention. This Issue Brief makes a case against ex post restructuring measures, specifically bankruptcy modeled on Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, and in favor of ex ante debt mitigation action. In particular, it introduces tax-credit borrowing (TCB) as a potential commitment device for states that would allow for the creation of super-priority, risk-free debt. TCB ensures that states internalize the risk of default and avoids the moral hazard problem of states assuming that the federal government will, in a fiscal crisis, use taxpayer money to offer a bailout. It also incentivizes better monitoring of the borrowing decisions made by state officials, as the fiscal ramifications of excessive debt would move from state creditors to taxpayers and voters. Small changes to federal tax policy and likely a subsidy (relative to traditional debt) would be necessary to encourage tax-credit borrowing, but this new approach can solve the sticky problem of debt prioritization that continues to mystify states and municipalities.
Walls or Welcome Mats? Immigration and the Labor Market

Howard F. Chang

While the public debate on immigration reform has been divisive, the tools of economics provide clear lessons for a way forward. The single most important lesson that economics holds for immigration policymakers is that immigration restrictions are costly, because they interfere with the free movement of labor. Most economists believe that the gains to global GDP from greater labor mobility are very large. Beyond the estimated gains to the world economy, the consensus among economists is that, as a whole, U.S. natives gain from immigration in the labor market. While immigration may have an adverse effect on some native wages and employment—particularly for the least skilled workers—the empirical evidence indicates these effects, if existent, are small.
Walls or Welcome Mats? Immigration and the Public Treasury

Howard F. Chang

Advocates of restrictive immigration policies often claim that immigrants impose a net burden on the public treasury. The most comprehensive and authoritative study of the fiscal effects of immigration in the U.S. finds, however, that there is a net positive effect. If policymakers are concerned that less skilled immigrants may pose some risk of a fiscal burden, then restricting immigrant access to means-tested public benefits would be a better response than denying them admission. A path to citizenship for these immigrants need not entail a fiscal burden as long as their access to these public benefits and citizenship is sufficiently delayed.