ECON 101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Deadweight Loss, Tax Incidence, Economic Surplus

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greenmarten520

13 Jun 2018

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4.3

Results of Govt. Price Controls:

● Some people win: winners from rent control are the ppl who are paying less for rent because

they live in rent-controlled apartments

○ landlords may also gain if they break the law by charging rents above the legal

maximum for controlled apartments (if those illegal rents are higher than the

competitive equilibrium rents would be)

● Some people lose: losers from rent control are the landlords of rent-controlled apartments who

abide by the law and renters who are unable to find apartments to rent at the controlled price

● There is a loss of economic efficiency: rent control reduces economic efficiency because fewer

apartments are rented than would be rented in competitive market

○ resulting deadweight loss measures decrease in economic efficiency

Positive and Normative Analysis of Price Ceilings and Price Floors:

● Positive analysis - what is

○ ex) evaluation of price ceilings and rent

● Normative analysis - what should be

4.4

Economic Effect of Taxes

● analyzing taxes is an important part of the field of economics known as public finance

The effect of taxes on economic efficiency:

● Whenever a govt. taxes a good or service —> less of that good or service will be produced and

consumed

● Increase in cost causes supply curve to shift up because sellers will now require a price that is

grater to supply the same quanity

● Tax on cigarettes ($1 increase) has reduced both consumer surplus and producer surplus

○ some of the reduction becomes tax revenue for the govt.

○ the rest of the reduction in consumer and producer surplus is equal to the deadweight

loss from the tax

● dead weight loss from a tax is referred to as the excess burden of the tax

○ a tax is efficient if it imposes a small excess burden relative to the tax revenue it raises

Tax Incidience: who actually pays a tax?

● Tax incidence: the actual division of the burden of a tax between buyers and sellers in a market

○ ex) federal govt. levies an excess tax of 18.4 sets/gasoline sold

■ gas wonders collect this tax and forward to the govt. but who actually bears the

burden of the tax?

Does it make a difference whether the government collects a tax from buyers or sellers?

● The incidence of a tax does not depend on whether the government collects a tax from the

buyers of a good or from the sellers.

● supply does not change but demand does (ex pay 10 cents less than what they wanted)

Is the burden of the social security tax really shared equally between workers and firms

● most of the time employers take tax out of paycheck

● FICA - funds social security and medicare programs - largest tax ppl w/ low income pay

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Some people lose: losers from rent control are the landlords of rent-controlled apartments who abide by the law and renters who are unable to find apartments to rent at the controlled price. There is a loss of economic efficiency: rent control reduces economic efficiency because fewer apartments are rented than would be rented in competitive market resulting deadweight loss measures decrease in economic efficiency. Positive and normative analysis of price ceilings and price floors: Ex) evaluation of price ceilings and rent. Analyzing taxes is an important part of the field of economics known as public finance. Whenever a govt. taxes a good or service > less of that good or service will be produced and consumed. Increase in cost causes supply curve to shift up because sellers will now require a price that is grater to supply the same quanity. Dead weight loss from a tax is referred to as the excess burden of the tax.

Related Questions

Who bears the primary costs of a rent control program?

landlords

renters that get rent-controlled apartments

taxpayers

the wealthy

Assume the demand for sushi is Qd = 180 - 3P, where Qd is quantity demanded and P = price in dollars. The supply of sushi is Qs = 80 + 5P, where Qs is quantity supplied (and P is, again, price in dollars). A price of $20 would result in:

	A.	Excess supply of 60
	B.	Excess supply of 120
	C.	Excess supply of 140
	D.	Excess demand of 140

US agricultural price supports are politically popular because

They have no adverse impacts

The US would have food shortages without them

The benefits accrue to a large number of voters and the costs are paid by a small number of voters

The costs are spread out among millions of people

	A.	$15.50
	B.	$12.50
	C.	$10
	D.	$15

Price floors and ceiling prices:

cause the supply and demand curves to shift until equilibrium is established.

both cause surpluses.

interfere with the rationing function of prices.

A change in the price of a good leads to a change in ________, which leads to a ___________

quantity supplied; shift of the supply curve

supply; shift of the supply curve

quantity supplied; movement along the supply curve

When the supply of a product increases, this implies that

the price of the product first declined

more will be purchased at the same price

producers will be willing to accept a lower price for each unit sold

demand for the good must have increased

producers will offer less for sale at each possible price

If there is a excess demand for product X:

fewer resources will be allocated to the production of this good.

the price of the product will rise.

the supply curve will shift to the left and the demand curve to the right, eliminating the shortage.

the price of the product will decline.

Which of the following will occur when there is a simultaneous decrease in demand and a decrease in supply?

B and D both necessarily occur

An increase in equilibrium quantity

A and C both necessarily occur

An increase in price

A and D both necessarily occur

A decrease in price

A decrease in equilibrium quantity

Velcro is becoming more and more popular for a variety of uses, including as fasteners for shoes. What should happen to the equilibrium price and quantity for shoelaces as a result?

Both price and quantity should decrease.

Price should increase and quantity decrease.

Both price and quantity should increase.

Price should decrease and quantity increase.

Nothing.

If the government imposes a ceiling price on apartment rents, we would expect to observe all of the following except one. Which is the exception?

	A.	conversion of some apartment complexes to condos
	B.	a shortage
	C.	an increase in the number of new apartment complexes being built
	D.	lower maintenance of existing apartments
	E.	long waiting lists for apartment seekers

supply; movement along the supply curve

both cause shortages.

chocolatebadger640

What do you believe is the ultimate impact of technology on job creation? Should there be curbs to the pace of modernization?

(Answer in a paragraph(around 200 words))

What Econ 101 Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence

Here's why advancing technology often leads to more jobs for humans, not fewer

A Tesla Model X 75D semi-autonomous electric vehicle is parked at the Governor's Mansion in Olympia, Wash., this year. Goldman Sachs predicts that 25 years from now, driver employment will be growing by 300,000 less per year because of autonomous vehicles.

By Greg Ip

Aug 9, 2017

The first chart you draw in Economics 101 is the downward-sloping demand curve. It shows that when the price of something drops, people consume more of it.

This elementary rule of economics is remarkably helpful in discussing the effects of technological change. As I wrote last week, when technology makes something cheaper, we consume more of it, often by finding new uses. This lesson repeats through history: When coal-fueled steam power became more efficient in the 1800s, demand for steam power and coal spread. When automated teller machines made it cheaper to operate bank branches in the 1980s, banks opened more branches.

My column cites spreadsheet programs like Lotus 1-2-3, whose arrival in the early 1980s made repetitive recalculation vastly simpler and faster. This reduced demand for bookkeepers but created more demand for people who could run numbers in new and interesting ways, such as accountants and management consultants.

In a recent article for the Harvard Business Review, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb, economists at the University of Toronto who study artificial intelligence, say that in the 1990s, economists didnât buy into the hype that the internet and the World Wide Web would upend everything:

âIt wasnât that we didnât recognize that something changed. It was that we recognized that the old economics lens remained useful for looking at the changes taking place. The economics of the âNew Economyâ could be described at a high level: Digital technology would cause a reduction in the cost of search and communication. This would lead to more search, more communication, and more activities that go together with search and communication. Thatâs essentially what happened.â

They apply that lesson to artificial intelligence and more specifically to machine learning, the use of powerful algorithms to make predictions from patterns in large quantities of data. Machine learning, they say, means many problems will be reframed as prediction problems. Autonomous driving no longer involves programming the car to respond in a certain way to a variety of controlled scenarios, but instead, to watch what humans actually do and then respond the same way.

How does this affect jobs? The authors says it depends on whether the technology competes with or complements what you do. Spreadsheets competed with what bookkeepers do (record keeping and calculation) and thus made them less valuable, but complemented what accountants and consultants do (analysis), and made them more valuable.

Mssrs. Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb say that AI reduces the value of those who predict things for a living, such as whether a mark on an X-ray is a tumor, but it raises the value of those who use predictions to make judgments:

âWhen prediction is cheap, diagnosis will be more frequent and convenient, and thus weâll detect many more early-stage, treatable conditions. This will mean more decisions will be made about

medical treatment, which means greater demand for the application of ethics, and for emotional support, which are provided by humans.â

So AI will create winners and losers within and among industries and occupations. But what will the net effect be? More jobs or less, and for whom? This isnât knowable, but history suggests that while a specific occupation or industry may suffer losses, the aggregate effects will be positive. The growth in accounting and analytical jobs since the early 1980s is much larger than the loss of bookkeeping jobs.

Nor did all those bookkeepers necessarily lose jobs; many probably became accountants or analysts. As Mr. Gans told me, bookkeepers may have been best placed to exploit the capabilities of spreadsheets: âIf you were doing calculations all day as a bookkeeper, chances are you thought a bit about why you are doing that. When you got a spreadsheet, rather than doing one calculation per day you could do 10 to 50, so you had a better sense of what the [calculations] might say.â

Some readers said AI is a much bigger threat than spreadsheets because it has so many more potential applicationsâand they displace uniquely human abilities. I agree with the first part, less so with the second. I suspect workers in previous eras, whether they drove a horse and plow, handled a stock trade or connected a phone call, thought there was something about their job that a machine could never replace.

Will the disruptions this time around be greater? Maybe, but not necessarily. Goldman Sachs predicts that 25 years from now, driver employment will be growing by 300,000 less per year because of autonomous vehicles. Thatâs 25,000 jobs per month to make up, compared with the 5,000 per month that the decline in bookkeeping since 1985 represents. But itâs hardly insurmountable in a labor market where five million jobs are created and destroyed each month.

Others said I was ignoring the potential for rogue algorithms and robots to turn on us or strip us of our freedom.

The experts, of which I am not one, tell me AI is nowhere near that capability. (Before the robots can kill us they must first stop killing themselves.) And donât assume spreadsheets have been all benign. Excel may not have slain anyone Terminator-style, but it did help wound J.P. Morgan through its role in the âLondon Whaleâ trading disaster.

Which brings me to the final point. We should not confuse what technology enables us to do with how much better off it makes us. Spreadsheets enabled analysts to construct much more intricate forecasts of stock prices and the economy, but didnât make those forecasts any more accurate. AI may enable companies to better manage the risks of their products and actions, but those products and actions may not be more profitable. Many a CEO has wondered whether the money they spend on spreadsheet-wielding consultants yields any real value. Some day they may wonder the same thing about their AI-wielding consultants.

ECON 101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Deadweight Loss, Tax Incidence, Economic Surplus

ECON 101 Full Course Notes

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