Joseph Tracy

2 months ago | city-journal.org | Matthew Kahn |Joseph Tracy

/ Eye on the News / Economy, finance, and budgets, Politics and law The Southern California wildfires, still burning, already rank among the most destructive in the state’s fire-laden history. They have destroyed entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including those in the beautiful and affluent Pacific Palisades community nestled along the Pacific Ocean between Malibu and Santa Monica. The scale of the destruction and the human suffering the fires have inflicted are massive.

2 months ago | aei.org | Joseph Tracy |Matthew Kahn

AbstractDuring the Biden Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed new rules to protect workers from heat exposure. The intent of this regulation was to improve worker quality of life and reduce health impacts. In this paper, we explore the trends in heat-related worker injuries and the likely unintended consequences of this proposed regulation.

Nov 19, 2024 | aei.org | Tobias Peter |Edward Pinto |Joseph Tracy

AbstractWe provide an in-depth case study of land use reforms in Seattle to highlight how redevelopment of aging single-family housing to townhomes can lead to a significant increase in market-rate housing that promotes affordability. The key is to allow market forces to use by-right zoning to drive small-scale development, when also supported by clear and simplified regulatory frameworks.

Oct 18, 2024 | aei.org | Joseph Tracy |Robert Rich

AbstractAre all forecasters the same? Expectations models incorporating information rigidities typically imply forecasters are interchangeable which predicts an absence of systematic patterns in individual forecast behavior. Motivated by this prediction, we examine the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters and find, in contrast, that participants display systematic patterns in predictive performance both within and across target variables.

May 23, 2024 | aei.org | Joseph Tracy |Matthew Kahn

AbstractOver the last thirty years, there have been significant changes in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. A monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. High skilled mobile workers can avoid these lower wages by moving to other more competitive local labor markets. We explore several empirical implications of a Roy Model of heterogeneous worker sorting across local labor markets.