When policy wonks call for the minimum wage to rise, they often discuss helping workers at the bottom of the income ladder, or address rising living costs and income inequality.

But a new working paper from the University of Zurich finds that the poorest workers, those earning minimum wage, pay the most for the increase.

The researchers look at supermarkets in the United States, which tend to employ many minimum-wage earners. Moreover, rather than studying the effect of a wage increase after it is implemented, the authors look at the moment when the legislation mandating an upcoming increase is passed — often months or years before the increase actually takes effect.

The authors use Census Bureau data on grocery prices collected in about 2,000 stores in 41 states between the years 2001 and 2012. They observe 166 increases in the minimum wage during this period (including both local and national legislation). Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics helps the authors estimate how changes to the minimum wage impact grocery stores’ bottom line.

Findings: 

• The average American household applies 11 percent of its expenditures to groceries. For the poorest fifth of households, that share is 14 to 15 percent.
• Grocery prices start to rise a month before minimum-wage legislation is passed and continue rising for three months after. During this period, grocery prices rise twice as fast as normal, even though the wage increase has not yet kicked in: “Due to the structure of minimum-wage laws, most increases are known long in advance and firms have ample time to act in anticipation.”
• This is known as a “price response” — the prices respond to the anticipated rise in wages.
• This price response at grocery stores alone offsets about 10 percent of the poorest employees’ average “nominal” gains (that is, gains on paper). In real terms — after factoring in inflation — the amount offset, or canceled, is even larger. After factoring in price responses elsewhere in the economy, more of the gain from the minimum-wage increase is erased.
• “Overall, the price response lowers the benefits of minimum wage increases, and makes them less redistributive in real than in nominal terms.”

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There’s abundant speculation that our smartphones make us less happy. Twitter: saps your attention. Facebook: fills you with FOMO. Email: your boss is barking directives again.

A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology finds science behind the speculation. The researchers, from the University of British Columbia and the University of Virginia, conduct two experiments that show smartphone distractions reduce how much we enjoy one thing repeatedly shown to make humans happy: face-to-face social interactions.

In the first, 304 participants each had dinner with a small group of friends or family. Half were told to keep their smartphone handy for a questionnaire, which would arrive by text, about the meal. Half were asked to turn their phones to silent and stash them away, instructed that they would receive questions later by paper. After the meal, all participants answered questions about how much they enjoyed their social interactions, how connected they felt, how distracted or bored. Lastly, participants reported how much they used their mobile phones; this response was compared with video footage of the meal (participants consented to being recorded, but didn’t know why they were being videotaped). This part of the study found that:

• Participants who used their phones — known as “the phone condition” — reported “significantly lower interest and enjoyment than those in the phoneless condition.”
• Participants in the phone condition reported feeling more distracted and slightly more bored.
• “We found that phone use had a small negative effect on well-being.”

In the second experiment, the researchers surveyed 123 American public-university students by text message five times a day at random for a week, asking them how they were feeling and what they had been doing for the last 15 minutes. Over 41 percent of responses occurred while participants were interacting with someone face-to-face. While using their smartphones, these people reported feeling:

• more distracted and more bored;
• less interested in their interactions with other people;
• that time was moving more slowly.

That the second survey records the negative effects of smartphones among university students was especially notable, the researchers point out: “This generation has grown up with mobile technology, and some [researchers] have raised the possibility that young people might therefore be relatively adept at multi-tasking in real world contexts. […] Yet, our findings suggest that even the moderate levels of phone use we observed are sufficient to create feelings of distraction that undermine the emotional rewards of social interaction.”

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It’s too familiar in America: Breaking news, another mass shooting, old pictures of the suspects, their names splashed across cable news.

Instant celebrities.

In an article this year for the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, and a colleague argue that journalists should not report the names or picture the faces of mass shooting suspects. Journalists should, however, continue to report every other detail so the public gains a better understanding about these tragedies.

Lankford has found many examples of perpetrators – both shooters and suicide bombers – who admit they want fame. In 1999, the Columbine High School shooters were influenced by the amount of attention that the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber received, he has written. “More recently, the Orlando nightclub shooter admitted that he was inspired by the [2013] Boston Marathon bombers. This was only possible due to the amount of media coverage the Boston bombers received,” he told Journalist’s Resource. In a forthcoming study, Lankford found the younger of the two brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing received “nearly $10 million in free publicity during the month of his attack, which was more than almost any other American celebrity during that time.”

There are precedents that give weight to Lankford’s case: Journalists rarely publish names of sexual assault victims.

Lankford spoke with Journalist’s Resource about his recent work. This interview has been lightly edited for length.

You’ve shown that mass shootings are getting worse in America. Does the media play a role?

In our research, Eric Madfis and I have identified three major consequences of the media coverage. One, it creates a kind of competition for mass shooters to maximize the number of victims they kill. The second is that it’s rewarding these offenders with fame and attention, which is often what they want – it serves to give them a legacy. Even if they die, they may be remembered, according to their distorted views, as someone who mattered, as a somebody rather than a nobody. […]

Apart from that, the media advertises the behavior. So regardless what kind of behavior it is, if you want to increase it, the best way is to advertise it. When it comes to mass shooters, that advertising produces what’s known as both contagion and copycat effects. Contagion essentially means that the ideas about committing this type of attack spread through society and permeate the minds of at-risk individuals. And copycat effects have been documented among many offenders who have specifically identified previous mass shooters as role models.

Do you see anything in common between American-bred mass shooters and foreign-raised suicide bombers? How do their motives differ?

We have some shooters who claim to have an ideological motive and some who claim to be attacking for personal reasons. But there is more overlap than is commonly assumed. Certainly we have shooters like the Ft. Hood Army base shooter in 2009 or the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooter who claimed to be motivated by Islamic extremism. But if we actually look at it, the Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech shooter, other shooters who didn’t actually affiliate with a clear cause also claimed to be ideologically motivated as well. The Columbine shooters expressed desires to engage in eugenics; the Virginia Tech shooter claimed to be motivated by serving Jesus Christ and Christianity. So, I wouldn’t put too much stake into what the attackers claim their motives are; underneath it all, they often have a lot of similar psychological issues, including, often, mental health problems. Often they have suicidal motives and also these desires for attention and fame. Just like the Columbine shooters talked about having movies made about them and becoming famous, the Orlando nightclub shooter called a news station in the midst of his attack and checked social media to see if he was going viral.

If we look at this globally, there certainly are suicide bombers who are different, some suicide bombers who are really acting only because of the influence of their organization. ISIS has kidnapped and coerced people into becoming suicide bombers. Boko Haram has done the same. No one coerces anyone into committing a mass shooting. So I guess that’s a long way of saying that various types of mass shooters, whether they have white skin or brown skin, are religious or not, often have a lot in common.

How could your proposal not to name them help?

There have been calls for the media to do a tremendous number of different things including, essentially, not cover or not give as much attention to the behavior of the shooters. And as a researcher, I find that problematic. It is important to report the details of the attacker’s behavior because those details can be important for understanding warning signs. It is important to understand them and it’s important that the media reports on them.

Our proposal is for media to keep reporting all the details about these crimes and these criminals that they would report anyways, but to make two small changes: Stop publishing the name of the perpetrator and stop publishing the photos or likenesses with the face of the perpetrator.

If we said, “the 2016 Orlando shooter,” rather than name him, we can still report all the details of that story without any problem. And in terms of the photo, I don’t think anyone really thinks that the photo itself is important as a newsworthy item. No one sees the photo of a mass shooter and thinks, “Aha, now that I have that information, I know how to stop mass shootings.” The photo is purely pandering to the public’s lurid curiosity and that’s specifically one of the things that the Society of Professional Journalists’ media ethics guidelines suggest should not be done.

With American media so tribal and atomized these days, do you think having guidelines is possible? How would you spread the word? In the age of blogs, does it even matter anymore what major media organizations do or agree upon?

This seems to be largely an apolitical issue. In terms of the multifaceted nature of the media, I would emphasize that we aren’t under any sort of false delusions that the names of these offenders would be kept completely confidential. We recognize that law enforcement will have to use these names during their investigations, and that media members will know these names as part of their investigations and attempts to delve into these stories. Witnesses will know these names, as will family and community members. But the key is to deny these offenders the type of fame and type of advertising that is so destructive. And that is the front-page news, prime-time cable news, prominent online news and things like that.

Are you seeing successes?

We are building support. We have a letter that’s been signed by 149 experts calling for the media to implement these changes. I think the members of the media I’ve spoken to one-on-one are all very receptive to this. It’s not that people have objections to the proposal, but more a matter of it feeling daunting to change society. But with any sort of social change, I think the idea that ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint’ is helpful to remember.

Do you see any precedents? There are other types of names and details that we in the press do withhold.

Yes, one of the cases I point to that seems to open a lot of eyes because it’s undeniable is the fact that sexual assault victims’ names are withheld as a matter of policy by major media outlets unless those victims consent to having their names released. This is not only in local cases, but also in cases that are widely covered, such as Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” story. […]

The media also monitors its own behavior and limits what it publishes in a variety of other ways, including profanities.

Have you met any specific resistance?

[…] It’s a tricky thing to ask the media to police themselves, given that no one’s intention is to inspire copycat killers. No one’s intention is to reward fame-seeking mass shooters. And so – when people’s intentions are good and then they’re confronted with the idea that what they’re doing could be leading to deaths – it’s hard to get past that stage of denial.

But I would point, for example, to things like cigarette advertisements. For a long time, newspapers and magazines and television ran cigarette advertisements. Now they don’t, but nobody focuses on media organizations from previous decades and says they were evil because of that. Now that we have more evidence on the subject, we simply focus on the best policy to protect the public.

Below is a selected bibliography of academic studies on contagion compiled by Nicole Dahmen, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon.

• Dahmen, Nicole; et al. “Covering Mass Shootings: Journalists’ Perceptions of Coverage and Factors Influencing Attitudes.” Journalism Practice, 2017. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2017.1326832.
• Kissner, Jason. “Are Active Shootings Temporally Contagious? An Empirical Assessment.” Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/s11896-015-9163-8.
• Lankford, Adam. “A Comparative Analysis of Suicide Terrorists and Rampage, Workplace, and School Shooters in the United States from 1990 to 2010.” Homicide Studies, 2013. DOI: 10.1177/1088767912462033.
• Lankford, Adam. “Précis of the Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2014. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X13001581.
• Lankford, Adam. “Are America’s Public Mass Shooters Unique? A Comparative Analysis of Offenders in the United States and Other Countries.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/01924036.2015.1105144.
• Lankford, Adam. “Detecting Mental Health Problems and Suicidal Motives Among Terrorists and Mass Shooters.” Criminal Behavior and Mental Health, 2016. DOI: 10.1002/cbm.2020.
• Lankford, Adam; Hakim, Nayab. “From Columbine to Palestine: A Comparative Analysis of Rampage Shooters in the United States and Volunteer Suicide Bombers in the Middle East.” Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2011. DOI: 1016/j.avb.2010.12.006.
• Lankford, Adam; Tomek, Sara. “Mass Killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: Social Contagion or Random Clusters?” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 2017. DOI: 1111/sltb.12366.
• Lankford, Adam. “Fame-Seeking Rampage Shooters: Initial Findings and Empirical Predictions.” Aggression and Violent Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2016.02.002.
• Lankford, Adam. “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries.” Violence and Victims, 2016. DOI: 10.1891/0886-6708.VV-D-15-00093.
• Lankford, Adam; Madfis, Eric. “Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, But Report Everything Else: A Pragmatic Proposal for Denying Mass Shooters the Attention They Seek and Deterring Future Offenders.” American Behavioral Scientist, 2017. DOI: 10.1177/0002764217730854.
• Schildkraut, Jaclyn; Muschert, Glenn W. “Media Salience and the Framing of Mass Murder in Schools: A Comparison of the Columbine and Sandy Hook Massacres.” Homicide Studies, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/1088767913511458.
• Towers, Sherry; et al. “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” PLoS ONE, 2015. DOI: 1371/journal.pone.0117259.

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Hate speech is not hard to find in 2017. A new study in Aggressive Behavior reveals that such verbal violence begets more hate and prejudice.

Three Polish academics conduct three experiments in Poland on attitudes toward hate speech targeting Muslims and LGBT groups (“two minorities particularly affected by hate speech in Poland”). Their findings on how desensitization works, they say, can be applied globally.

In the first, the researchers randomly select 1,007 Polish adults and expose them to six examples of verbal violence. They ask each to rate the examples on a seven-point scale from “not at all offensive” to “strongly offensive.” Then, to determine respondents’ level of prejudice, they ask them on a four-point scale if they would accept a member of these minorities as a neighbor, co-worker or part of their family. They also collect a measurement of how frequently the respondents encounter hate speech. Their findings:

• People exposed to hate speech appear less sensitive to it; it upsets them less.
• But after controlling for desensitization, “frequent exposure to hate speech was associated with decreased” prejudice. (They cannot explain this “non-intuitive” finding.)

In the second experiment, 39 white Polish undergraduates (the experimental group) were exposed to examples of hate speech in the comments section of an online forum. Another 36 (the control group) were exposed to benign comments. Then both were asked about their acceptance of minority groups on the four-point scale used in the first experiment. All then saw the offensive comments shown to the first group and were asked to rate the statements’ offensiveness.

• The experimental group perceived the examples “as being significantly less offensive” than the control group did.
• Exposure to hate speech “caused an increase in the level of prejudice.”

The third experiment tested white Polish attitudes toward Middle Eastern refugees by presenting 682 teenagers with examples of hate speech targeting refugees and Muslims. The teenagers were asked how offensive or inoffensive they found the language and asked how often they encounter such statements. They also completed surveys measuring their sensitivity to anti-immigrant prejudice.

• Exposure to these examples of hate speech “was a significant and positive predictor” of prejudice.
• Frequent exposure to hate speech is associated with a feeling that it is less offensive (“desensitization”).
• This lower sensitivity to hate speech was associated with higher prejudice.

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In the 1970s, experts estimated that New York City could expect a massive flood about every 500 years, “a 500-year flood.” But new research suggests such mega floods — something exceeding the surge caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which caused over $50 billion in damage — may start happening much more often. By the 2030s, mega floods may hit the Big Apple every five years, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Combining climate projections, expected sea-level rise and simulations of thousands of hurricanes, the authors model flooding at Battery Park on New York harbor between now and the year 2300. Rising seas are already expected to inundate large parts of the city this century. To that, the authors add the storm surges expected from the violent weather associated with climate change.

The first set of figures below are sea level increases under a scenario that the leading international body assessing climate change expects if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. By comparison, the flood during Hurricane Sandy crested at 3.4 meters in Battery Park.

• An increase of 0.55 to 1.4 meters between the years 2010 and 2100;
• 5 to 5.7 meters between 2000 and 2300.

The following sea level projections are more uncertain. After adding the melting ice sheet in Antarctica, which has not been included in previous studies, the researchers predict:

• An increase of 0.88 to 2.5 meters in the year 2100;
• 10.7 to 15.7 meters in 2300.

Below are models for 500-year floods. Between the years 850 and 1800, such storms surged 2.25 meters above sea level. Between 1970 to 2005 it surged 3.3 to 3.7 meters. In the future:

• 2080 to 2100: 4 to 5.1 meters;
• 2280 to 2300: 5 to 15.4 meters.

These projections are for New York, but the authors note that similar patterns could also impact New England and northwestern Europe.

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The internet has upended many trades. Next, perhaps, will be census takers. A new study finds that Google’s “Street View” photographs can be used to estimate a neighborhood’s racial fabric. They can also correctly predict if a town will vote Democrat or Republican over 80 percent of the time.

Traditionally, the Census Bureau collects exhaustive population surveys once a decade and a smaller sample — the American Community Survey (ACS) — once a year. But car-mounted cameras that automatically shoot photos to feed Google’s Maps application are as accurate at predicting demographics as the ACS sample, researchers led by Stanford computer scientist Timnit Gebru write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Google also makes this work much less labor-intensive.

Using a type of artificial intelligence known as “convolutional neural networks,” the authors teach computers to recognize different vehicle features — including make, model, year, average price and fuel efficiency — and classify them into 2,657 categories. In two weeks, their computers crunched through 50 million images shot in over 3,000 ZIP codes in 200 towns and cities across the United States. The same task would take a human 15 years.

From these categories, the researchers “infer a wide range of demographic statistics, socioeconomic attributes, and political preferences.” Vehicles are “among the most personalized expressions of American culture,” Gebru and her team write. About 95 percent of American households own one.

To judge the accuracy of their findings, they then compare their inferences to presidential election returns from 2008 and ACS data: “We found a strong correlation between our results and ACS values for every demographic statistic we examined.”

• Hondas and Toyotas most strongly indicate an Asian neighborhood.
• Chryslers, Buicks and Oldsmobiles “are positively associated with African-American neighborhoods.”
• Pickup trucks and Volkswagens are associated with white neighborhoods.
• Sedans are most associated with Democratic voter precincts; Republican-leaning precincts are most associated with extended-cab pickup trucks.
• If there are more sedans in a precinct, there is an 88 percent chance it voted Democrat; if there are more pickups, there is an 82 percent chance it voted Republican.
• “We found a strong correlation between our results and ACS values for every demographic statistic we examined.”
• The method has limitations: The researchers were not able to infer the percentage of children or farmers in a neighborhood.

Gebru and her colleagues write that this technology soon could have broader potential, as self-driving cars hit the roads, increasing the frequency of surveying trips: “The emergence of self-driving cars will bring about a large increase in the frequency with which different locations are sampled.”

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A growing share of Americans have felony records, according to data recently published in the journal Demography. Among African Americans, the ratio is much higher: Approximately 33 percent of African-American men have been convicted of a felony. The findings raise questions about the criminal justice system amid a “historic increase in criminal punishment,” the authors say.

A felony is a crime more serious than a misdemeanor, and can include a wide array of offenses depending on local legislation, from marijuana possession to murder. Though not all felons serve time in prison, a conviction can have far-reaching ramifications. “Many of the collateral consequences of punishment — most notably for the labor market, housing, and access to public supports — flow not from incarceration experiences but from the application of a widely known and publicly disseminated felony label.” In some states, people with felonies are also denied the right to vote.

The authors pair the limited available Justice Department data on convictions, incarcerations and recidivism with death, mobility and deportation rates to draw estimates for 1980 to 2010, though some of their data date back to 1948. They focus on African Americans and the population as a whole.

Findings:

• In 2010, 7.3 million U.S. adults were in prison or had been to prison.
• Between 1980 and 2010, the adult male population that had spent time in prison jumped from 1.79 to 5.55 percent. For African-American men, that figure rose from 5.76 to 15.14 percent.
• Between 1980 and 2010, the adult male population that had received a felony conviction rose from 5.25 percent to 12.81 percent. For African-American men, the number soared from 13.29 to 33.01 percent.
• By 2010, the five states with the highest number of African-American felons (men and women) were California, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Washington. In each, over 20 percent of African Americans were convicted felons.
• Maine was the state with the lowest rate of African-American felony convictions.

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Environmental campaigners agree that current greenhouse gas emissions are unsustainable. Yet they diverge on the role that nuclear power — a low-carbon energy source — should play in helping cut emissions. In many advanced economies, public pressure to close nuclear plants is rising, especially since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

But without nuclear power it may be impossible to meet the Paris climate deal “to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.”

A forthcoming paper in Energy Policy looks at the economic and environmental costs of replacing Sweden’s nuclear power plants — which generated 43 percent of the country’s electricity in 2014 — with solar and wind farms.

One of nuclear’s advantages is its predictability. The sun and wind, by contrast, are intermittent — think cloudy, breeze-less days. On some days these renewable sources could produce too much power. Since storage technology is still in its infancy, and transmission lines to other parts of Europe are unviable, the authors see a trade-off: Either spend a lot more money building renewables that will not always be used to capacity, or burn natural gas when the weather is not cooperating. Their findings:

• All nuclear alternatives require Sweden to construct facilities that can produce more power than the replaced nuclear plants. This would increase annual spending on electricity generation between two and five times.
• An alternative is to create electricity by burning more natural gas, increasing carbon emissions up to four times. In the authors’ models of future wetter years, when more hydropower is available, the need for gas falls, but it never disappears. (In 2014, Sweden produced almost as much electricity from hydropower as it did from its nuclear plants.)
• Overall, either emissions increase four-fold or costs increase five-fold compared to today.
• “It is clear that replacing nuclear with […] renewables is neither economically viable nor environmentally friendly.”

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If you’ve ever pumped gas in the United States, you’ve seen the sticker: “This product may contain up to 10 percent ethanol by volume,” declares one at a Massachusetts Shell station. Since 2005, Washington has mandated that an increasing amount of ethanol be mixed into gasoline every year, encouraging refiners and retailers with cash incentives.

The U.S. now produces over 1 million barrels of ethanol a day, largely from corn. Also known as ethyl alcohol and grain alcohol, ethanol is found in 97 percent of American gasoline. Elsewhere it’s made from sugar beets, sugar cane and other vegetable products. Proponents argue that it’s cleaner than burning regular gasoline, that it helps wean America off imports and that it finances domestic corn farmers rather than distant despots.

But ethanol and other biofuels are not without controversy or hype. Academic journals regularly examine trade-offs. As a 2015 study in Science noted, the shift to using corn to fuel our cars means someone is eating less: “roughly one-fifth of calories diverted to biofuels are not replaced.”

And all the agriculture isn’t good for the planet, either: tractors pollute, water is limited and corn plants do not absorb as much carbon dioxide as the forests they are replacing. The Science study concluded that ethanol releases “modestly lower total emissions” than gasoline — but only if people are eating less; not if growing and harvesting more corn is required to feed them.

For reporters, ethanol crisscrosses beats. It features in stories about renewable resources, greenhouse-gas emissions, water use and bioengineering. It’s an export story, too. This briefing will cover each of these themes, starting with the 2005 law that impelled an explosion in so-called “biofuels.”

The law

President George W. Bush signed the Renewable Fuel Standard into law in 2005, mandating that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be blended into our gasoline by 2022. The law was expanded under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and is enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Notably, the Renewable Fuel Standard requires that the biofuels emit less greenhouse gases than the petroleum-based fuels they replace. But it does not set standards for how emissions released during the production of biofuels are measured. We’ll return to this concern below.

Credits and economics

Under the Renewable Fuel Standard, if a refiner does not add biofuel, it must buy a credit from a refiner that does. A secondary market for these credits, which are known as Renewable Identification Numbers, has blossomed. “These credits originally sold for a few cents a gallon under the system supervised by the EPA. But as an unregulated trading market has emerged, the price has swung wildly for the credits,” The New York Times reported in 2016.

What does this mean for the rest of the economy?

Research led by Christopher Knittel of MIT has found ethanol has done little to depress the price we pay at the pump.

In fact, these credits may ultimately cost consumers more than a cap-and-trade policy (CAP) — a flexible, market-based approach to reducing emissions. A 2015 paper in The Review of Economics and Statistics showed that the ethanol mandate is at least 2.5 times more expensive than a CAP. But, the paper concludes, corn-based ethanol production has strong political support “effectively influencing carbon regulation in a manner consistent with private interest.” Where is that political support? Take a look at this map of ethanol refineries, which are often located in corn-growing regions.

The credits may also incentivize fraud. In 2015, three Indiana brothers pleaded guilty in a federal court to reselling millions of dollars’ worth of biofuel and falsely claiming it was eligible for credits, a local paper reported.

And then there is the question of impacts on the price of food, since ethanol is largely made from corn, which we, and the animals we eat, consume. A 2015 meta-analysis in Food Policy found that an additional billion gallons of corn ethanol increases corn prices approximately 2 to 3 percent.

Crops 

The U.S. produced around 15 billion gallons of ethanol in 2016, according to official statistics. Year-on-year, ethanol exports rose 26 percent to over 1 billion gallons – largely to Brazil, Canada and China.

Between 2005, the year the Renewable Fuel Standard was introduced, and 2017, the number of acres planted with corn in the U.S. rose from 81,779,000 to 90,429,000, according to the Department of Agriculture, which publishes maps showing how Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota dominate the corn market.

This massive shift affects not only food supplies, but scarce resources like water. In some cases, scientists are engineering crops to require less water and fertilizer.

Land-use change also impacts greenhouse-gas emissions. A 2013 paper finds the process of growing and converting corn into ethanol dirtier than using other plant-based alternatives, such as miscanthus (a.k.a. silvergrass), a tall grass found across the eastern U.S.

Net energy use and environmental impact

One of the reasons Washington mandated the use of biofuels was that, when we burn them, they supposedly release less greenhouse gases than traditional petroleum-based gasoline. But scholars have used wildly different models to calculate ethanol’s carbon footprint.

For starters, ethanol contains about 33 percent less energy than gasoline, according to the Energy Department. That means it will propel your car fewer miles. (A gallon of gasoline that’s 10 percent ethanol is about 3 percent less powerful than regular gasoline. If a regular gallon of gasoline can take you 30 miles, with 10 percent ethanol it can only take you about 29.) Flex-fuel vehicles can run on a blend that’s up to 85 percent ethanol.

Moreover, early studies did not account for the greenhouse-gases emitted by tractors sowing and harvesting the corn, trucks transporting it to the ethanol refinery, or the net effect of uprooting forests and grasslands to plant larger corn crops. A 2008 study in Science was among the first to point this out. Though the study was criticized for envisioning a worst-case scenario, it found biofuels actually increase emissions when compared to fossil fuels. This lesson was valuable for scientists and reporters alike: modeling can impact results.

Today most studies recognize a number of factors when calculating this “energy balance.” Researchers must account for fertilizer, the fuel used to harvest and transport the corn, the fuel used to mill the corn and heat it in the ethanol production process, the energy required to pump the irrigation water, etc. The Department of Agriculture says the energy balance has improved markedly since 1995 and somewhat more since 2008 — meaning that it takes less energy to make ethanol than the energy ethanol releases when it is powering a car.

Going even further, when studies also account for the byproducts left over in the ethanol refining process, which can be fed to animals, the balance improves.

And a number of chemists are probing ways to make the process more efficient. A 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details a process for turning carbon dioxide into ethanol. And researchers at MIT are making heavier, more energy-rich types of alcohol from yeast.

Other resources:

• The Energy Information Administration at the Energy Department is one of the world’s premier statistical resources on all things energy-related. Among other things, it has a page on renewables, data on ethanol production and consumption since 2000, and data on ethanol exports.
• The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory publishes interactive maps of where crops used in biofuels are grown, the location of ethanol refineries, pipelines, etc.
• The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has economic statistics related to cultivation and agriculture resource management.

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The United States often complains about Chinese industrial espionage, accusing the Asian superpower of stealing intellectual property and commercial secrets worth billions of dollars a year. No longer is this branch of spycraft the domain of men in fedoras dashing through factory gates. Today the FBI cites “cyber intrusions” as the chief threat.

Academics have long wondered if industrial espionage pays, or if it stymies organic research and development. According to a new working paper from one of Europe’s top centers of economic research, the answer may be both.

Together, the partition of Germany during the Cold War and subsequent reunification offer researchers a model laboratory. Walled off for four decades by a militant ideology, East Germany’s economy fell far behind the West’s; by some measurements the eastern regions still lag. After unification in 1990 East Germany then opened up its files – including over 151,000 classified documents about secrets gathered abroad between 1970 and 1988 and sorted by date, source and keyword. As it turned out, the secret police, “the Stasi,” had made the theft of commercial secrets from West Germany a priority.

The working paper by IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, finds that the thefts allowed East Germany to narrow the gap with the West – at a cost. The authors gauge total factor productivity (TFP), a measurement of economic efficiency and technological progress while controlling for research and development (R&D) spending.

West Germany, at unification, was 189 percent ahead of the East in TFP. Without the industrial espionage, the gap would have been 6.3 percent larger, the authors find. Other findings:

• The TFP gap in the electronics sector was 416 percent; it would have been 562 percent without industrial espionage.
• But the spying came with a cost. The reliance on espionage in the East resulted in significantly fewer patents (a proxy for R&D spending). “In fact, internal estimates by the Stasi itself suggested that its industrial espionage had saved the East Germany economy about 75 million East German Mark in R&D expenditures.” In the long-run, this hurt the East’s ability to develop.
• The espionage does not appear to have damaged the West’s economy.
• “Whether the East German economy’s dependence on industrial espionage bore some responsibility for its poor post-unification performance is an interesting question for future research.”

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Death and taxes: They’re not only unavoidable; for the very rich, they’re also inseparable. The estate tax — the “death tax” to critics — is a levy on your property when you expire. But the threshold is high and few are required to pay.

Under House Republicans’ November 2017 tax proposal, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the estate tax would be reduced and then scrapped altogether in six years. “This means family-owned farms and small businesses can pass from generation to generation without a grieving child having to worry about coming up with the cash necessary to pay that tax, or without a parent having to engage in costly and complicated estate-planning techniques to minimize the Death Tax,” says the proposal.

Currently, however, the tax only affects people who leave more than $5.49 million to their heirs. “If you’re single and you die with less than $5.49 million to your name, you — or rather, your heirs — don’t have to worry. Couples can shield $10.98 million from the estate tax, and the right planning can shield millions more,” Bloomberg explains. When the size of the estate exceeds these figures, the tax is calculated on the difference at a rate of up to 40 percent. (That may sound high, but after deductions the average is closer to 17 percent according to a Bloomberg analysis.)

Naturally, it’s complicated. Very few people are responsible for the tax and there are lots of deductions and provisions for a surviving spouse.

Estate taxes have been around since ancient Egypt. The United States first introduced one in 1916 in the run-up to World War I. But despite the clamorous public debate in America, the estate tax today accounts for little: In 2015, Uncle Sam collected around $19 billion from the estate tax. In 2014, estate taxes accounted for 0.6 percent of federal revenues, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Since World War II, they have never surpassed 1972’s high of 2.6 percent.

Fewer than 12,000 households filed an estate tax return in 2015. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates around 5,300 people owed estate taxes that year — about 1 in 550 decedents nationwide.

The House Republican proposal would lower that number to around 2,000 filers, according to an unpublished memo from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) obtained by the Washington Post. Under the Republican proposal, the exemption would double to roughly $11 million and the tax would disappear entirely in 2023.

Academics fall on both sides of the debate. Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw calls the estate tax unfair to hard workers. Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, however, have called for an increase in the top marginal estate tax rate to 50 or 60 percent, demonstrating in a widely cited 2013 paper that this would help reduce income inequality.

Other resources:

• The jargon can be puzzling. An “estate tax” — what we’ve been describing — can be either federal or assessed by the state. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia levy an estate tax, according to a count by the Tax Foundation, a think tank advocating for lower taxes. The “inheritance tax” is a different tax and depends on the relationship between the heir and decedent and is levied by six states.
• A related tax is the gift tax.
• We have briefings on tax loopholes and corporate tax reform.

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There’s little dispute that the United States has a high corporate tax rate. At 35 percent, it is, nominally, higher than rates in other advanced economies – a factor that companies consider when they select where to invest. Include state taxes, and the rate is, on average, 39.1 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But the reality is more complicated, and easily misrepresented.

Corporations, like individuals, can make deductions. These loopholes allow them to lower their “effective tax rate” substantially. After deductions, the average American corporation pays 18.6 percent in federal tax, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By comparison, Germany’s effective corporate tax rate is 15.5 percent; the United Kingdom’s 18.7.

Reducing the corporate rate to 20 percent while dropping some deductions is one of Republican leaders’ top policy priorities: It is the bedrock underpinning a 429-page tax plan House Republicans announced on November 2, 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Many Democrats agree that tax reform is imperative to compete in the global economy. But reformers who believe tax cuts will stimulate the economy by encouraging consumers to spend may be disappointed. “Claims that behavioral responses could cause revenues to rise if rates were cut do not hold up on either a theoretical or an empirical basis,” argues a September 2017 report from the Congressional Research Service.

To help journalists navigate the debate, this briefing will explain how the corporate tax rate works, proposals for reform, and frame some economics questions that will be useful to your reporting. It will also look at controversial pass-through taxation that critics of the Republican plan fear will be abused by the rich.

Business deductions

To recoup revenues lost when the corporate tax rate is lowered, Congressional Republicans have proposed to drop several deductions. Known as “loopholes” or “tax expenditures,” deductions are expenses that a company can deduct from its earnings, reducing its tax liability. One of the largest is the deduction of debt interest, which allows firms to deduct the interest they pay on loans before paying taxes.

For more on deductions, see
“Closing tax loopholes: Explainer and reporting resources.”

An example: After expenses – including payroll, costs of goods sold, utilities, etc. – a company earned a profit of $100 million last year. But its interest payments totaled $40 million. Under the current tax code, the firm deducts the interest from its taxable income and pays tax only on $60 million – its profits after interest payments. This encourages firms to borrow. The draft House Republican plan targets such large companies by capping the interest deduction at 30 percent of the firm’s taxable income. This cap would not affect companies with less than $25 million in gross revenues.

In total, corporate deductions amount to over $180 billion a year, the Government Accountability Office has estimated. In other words, they cost the federal government $180 billion in lost revenue.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) describes corporate expenses that can be deducted, including the controversial interest deduction, here. Other deductions added to the tax code over the years are designed to help, among others, dairy farmers, oil producers and space-technology researchers. Each has its own constituency, making reform tricky. Banks like the deduction of debt interest, for example, because it encourages firms to borrow money from them.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a non-profit, non-partisan Washington think tank, reckons dropping the rate below 23 percent is unfeasible; though that’s in line with other advanced economies, it is still higher than the rates in some advanced economies like Ireland and The Netherlands, meaning the incentive remains for American companies to register themselves in foreign companies for tax purposes – a strategy known as inversion.

Foreign earnings and corporate inversions

U.S. firms are holding as much as $2.6 trillion offshore, according to statistics released by the House Ways and Means Committee in 2016. Why? It’s cheaper. They don’t have to pay taxes on the profits they earn abroad, which they would if they returned the money to the U.S.

As business has become globalized, some U.S.-based companies have moved overseas, or set up foreign partners, to reduce the tax burden on their international income. Corporate inversion works when the foreign jurisdiction has a lower corporate tax rate. This is not happening only in offshore tax havens like Cyprus. Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate has attracted the likes of Google, Facebook and a number of U.S. drug companies, which have registered local entities.

The Obama administration struggled to stop corporate inversions, with little success. “If Washington wants to stop companies from taking advantage of tax-friendly environments overseas, or relocating altogether, it can start by making the United States a place where companies want to conduct business,” wrote Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, after Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016.

One solution is a “territorial system,” where U.S.-based corporations would only owe U.S. tax on profits earned in the U.S. This would lower the amount Uncle Sam collects, but also encourage profits to be shipped home and reinvested, potentially creating jobs and strengthening the U.S. economy, says a 2016 report by the Congressional Research Service.

Supporters of the November 2017 Republican tax plan hope the lower corporate rate would discourage inversions. The plan also exempts some profits earned abroad.

What’s pass-through taxation?

Most businesses in the U.S. are not corporations required to pay corporate tax. The majority, according to Treasury Department data, are known as “pass-through” entities, which pass their profits to their individual owners to be taxed as personal income. There are many different types of pass-throughs – such as sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations – depending on the size of the business and its ownership structure.

Currently, the pass-through tax rate is the same as the income tax rate. If you own a shoe store that earns $100,000 per year in profits, you pay taxes on the $100,000 as if it were your own income (if you’re single, that’s a rate of 28 percent according to the 2017 IRS tax schedule). If business is good and your shoe store earns you over $418,401, you are liable for a marginal rate of up to 39.6 percent.

A 2015 report by the Treasury Department found the richest Americans benefit disproportionately from pass-through entities: “69 percent of pass-through income earned by individuals accrues to the top 1 percent.” Matthew Weinzierl of Harvard Business School has linked the pass-through rate to growing income inequality in America: “If you cut the tax rate on pass-throughs from 39.6 to 25 [percent], and you cut top rates […] the vast majority of this tax cut goes to people in the top 1 percent.”

In their November 2017 draft tax bill, House Republicans proposed changing the pass-through rate to 25 percent. For the richest Americans, those currently paying 39.6 percent on their income, this could amount to a substantial break. Indeed, critics assail the Republican plan as creating a new loophole that will further enrich the richest.

The Republican plan addresses this concern by excluding some types of businesses. But these provisions have sown confusion and appear unpopular among business lobbyists. Rather than encourage the pass-through loophole, in fact, the Congressional Research Service recommends taxing more pass-through entities at corporate rates.

Another tax that benefits the wealthy is the lower rates applied to capital gains – the income derived from selling stocks or receiving dividends. These are often taxed at no more than 20 percent, no matter how much you earn. Since the poorest Americans tend not to hold stocks and dividends, the capital gains tax rate is widely seen as a boon to the rich. Similar is the carried interest provision, wherein the manager of a private investment fund pays a beneficial rate on income from the fund.

See our other tax explainers:

• Closing tax loopholes: Explainer and reporting resources
• How the federal budget process works
• Social Security reform: An explainer
• What is the national debt? A reporter’s guide
• Property Taxes 101: A primer for journalists

Other resources:

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a multilateral think tank, has a rich database of comparative tax data. The World Bank, a multilateral lender, also compares taxation in different countries. A March 2017 paper from the Congressional Budget Office discusses corporate tax rates internationally. And the National Bureau of Economic Research’s December 2011 paper on the effect of corporate taxes on investment around the world continues to be widely cited.

The House Ways and Means Committee drafts tax legislation. The November 2017 plan with section summaries written by the plan’s advocates is available here.

The Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, has published two explainers on pass-through taxation: one here and one, at Brookings’ Tax Policy Center, here. The Tax Policy Center also has data on corporate tax rates in the U.S.

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Donald Trump entered office promising to cut taxes, indeed to reform the American tax system. The last major reform happened over 30 years ago, in 1986, and both major parties largely agree today that the tax system is unnecessarily complex, even byzantine. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, a major rewrite to the tax code is possible.

In September, the White House and Republican Congressional leaders issued a joint framework for tax reform that focuses on lowering tax rates, paying for them by “closing special interest tax breaks and loopholes.” Such “tax expenditures,” as they’re called in government, were worth well over $1.5 trillion in 2016, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation – in other words, they cost the federal government over $1.5 trillion in lost revenue.

A detailed tax plan is not yet available, but many journalists are focusing on these breaks, each of which has a constituency. Some benefit middle class homeowners, others oil companies. Powerful lobby groups help such groups navigate Washington, stymieing change. As part of our occasional series on tax policy, this explainer looks at tax breaks, how they work, and the tension between the government’s need to raise revenue and what individuals and corporations have come to expect.

Mechanics of tax legislation: The government needs money

For a permanent tax cut to become law, it must pass the Senate with 60 votes (or at least 60 senators must vote on closing the arguments about the bill, “cloture”).

Republican leaders do not have that many votes. So they are using a legislative mechanism called “budget reconciliation” that requires only 51 votes. Under the terms of this rule, however, Congress cannot increase the deficit. Translation: Any change to tax revenues (what the government takes in) must be offset by savings.

How does the government save? One option is to cut spending. But the biggest line items in the federal budget all have significant constituents. It’s politically delicate – if not potentially dangerous — to cut welfare programs or defense spending or subsidies for pension plans.

“There just aren’t that many revenue raisers,” Harvard Business School’s Mihir Desai explained recently. “Tax expenditures, which are also sometimes labeled loopholes, have become highly concentrated in certain areas, namely, employer-provided health insurance, the state and local tax deduction, the mortgage interest deduction, all of which are sometimes called loopholes but are in fact very serious consequential policy choices. That makes reform really, really hard.”

What are deductions, credits and loopholes? A glossary

When you, or a company, pay taxes, you tell the government how much salary or profit you earned and then you pay a percentage of that sum in taxes. A deduction is an amount you can subtract from your taxable income, reducing your tax liability. Examples: the mortgage interest deduction, contributions to some retirement accounts, and charitable contributions.

These itemized deductions are regressive, benefiting the wealthy most because they pay a higher marginal rate (the amount one pays on another dollar of income). Under the current tax brackets, where the highest earners pay 39.6 percent on every dollar of income above $415,051 and the lowest pay 10 percent on their income, a high earner saves 39.6 cents for every dollar of deductions; a low earner saves 10 cents per dollar (or, because of credits, often nothing at all).

Unlike a deduction, a credit is subtracted from the taxes you owe. If your tax liability is $100 and you have a $50 credit, you pay $50 in taxes. Therefore, credits are worth the same to everyone who can use them. Some credits are nonrefundable. Perhaps your tax liability is so low you cannot take full advantage of the credit. If it’s a nonrefundable credit – like a credit on an electric vehicle – you don’t get the difference back; you cannot reduce your tax burden below zero. But other credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), are refundable – if this credit is worth more than you owe in taxes, you will receive the difference from the government. This one is intended to help low-income families.

The EITC is the most expensive tax credit, costing the federal government $68 billion in 2015 – the vast majority of that (85 percent) was paid out as a refund, according to statistics from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It is also the most popular credit, claimed by over 17 percent of tax-filing households that year.

Credits and deductions are types of tax expenditures, or tax revenue lost to the government.

A loophole is just another way to describe a deduction or other legal method for reducing your tax liability, though the word often carries negative connotations.

Deductions and credits are essentially subsidies – that is, they are like a transfer of money (in this case, money that otherwise would have gone to the government) to you or an organization such as a charity or a local government. And they incentivize certain behaviors, such as saving for retirement, buying an electric vehicle or giving to your church.

Some deductions and expenditures often discussed in the press

For individuals:

• Deduction for state and local taxes (SALT): Republicans in Congress have also proposed to end or at least cap the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), which helps subsidize state and local governments. Under this provision, a California taxpayer, say, deducts her property tax and state income tax from the income she declares to the federal government. This disproportionately affects residents of Democratic-leaning states, since these states tend to have higher taxes, Quartz points out. Eliminating SALT could raise between $1.3 trillion and $1.8 trillion over a decade, argue left- and right-leaning think tanks, respectively. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that capping this deduction at 2 percent of one’s gross salary would increase federal revenues by almost $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
• Employer-sponsored health insurance: The largest individual tax break covers health insurance premiums, by excluding employer and employee contributions as taxable income. This provision was worth $155 billion in 2016, according to the JCT. Other health-related exclusions totaled over $75 billion. These are not itemized deductions. They are benefits employees receive tax-free.
• The mortgage interest deduction is a popular subsidy benefiting homeowners who subtract from their taxable income the interest they pay on their mortgages. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimates this deduction is worth about $65 billion a year. The Republican framework says it is not on the chopping block, though it has long been in the sights of reformers and a cap is possible. Any change could have major implications for the housing market.
• Retirement plans: Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) and some other investment withholdings such as 401(k) plans have tax-preferred status. Trump has promised that reforms will not affect these programs, though some House Republicans have said they are still weighing changes. According to the Labor Department, over 62 million Americans have 401(k) plans, which allow them to set aside up to $18,500 (in 2018) for retirement before taxes are withheld. They must pay taxes when they withdraw money from the 401(k) during retirement; technically, this is not a deduction, but a deferral.
• Charitable contributions: The Republican framework promises not to touch this deduction, which amounted to $54 billion in lost revenues to the federal government in 2016, according to the Office of Management and Budget. As with other itemized deductions, high earners benefit more from charitable giving because they pay a higher marginal tax rate. A provision in the IRS code allows for donations to Israeli charities to be deducted in some cases, but not to charities in other countries.

For corporations:

• Tax breaks for oil producers: Pundits on the left frequently float the idea of cutting tax breaks for oil producers, which enable oil and gas companies to deduct drilling costs from their taxable income and cost the federal government about $4 billion a year, according to a 2016 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Deduction of debt interest: This allows companies to deduct the interest they pay on loans from their profits before paying corporate tax. But, explains the Financial Times, “that benefit is especially important to private equity groups whose modus operandi is to leverage up on debt to buy other companies.” Axing this deduction could add significant revenues to government coffers, but it would likely be offset by another mooted tax reform: cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.

Other deductions include union or professional association dues, gambling losses and some moving expenses. For a full list of deductions and credits, with definitions and terms, see this page from the IRS.

Itemized deductions and the standard deduction

The Republican tax framework proposes to double the standard deduction most taxpayers take. This is an amount – $6,350 in 2017 for an individual filing alone – that one can deduct from their salary instead of itemizing deductions for SALT, mortgage interest, charitable giving, etc. The higher amount will simplify taxes for many Americans, while also reducing the incentive to act in particular ways (to donate to your church or alma mater, to buy the house with the bigger mortgage, etc.). The standard deduction rarely impacts the super wealthy.

Driving growth

Proponents of the Republican framework argue that tax cuts help drive growth, that leaving money in consumers’ hands will encourage them, for example, to buy cars, in turn creating jobs for people to build cars, who will then pay taxes and fill government coffers. The question is, of course, how much the cuts will jumpstart the economy. A 2012 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis challenges assumptions that consumer spending can continue to drive growth.

Relatedly, expecting growth by entrusting corporations to invest is sometimes known as “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. A 2014 report by the Congressional Research Service concludes these policies have a relatively small effect on growth.

Taking into account these larger macroeconomic trends is called “dynamic scoring.” A popular model developed at the University of Pennsylvania and known as the Penn-Wharton Budget Model has found President Trump’s plan would add significantly to the deficit and slow growth.

Looking for the latest?

Check out the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, the two committees responsible for drafting legislation. The Treasury Department compiles annual statistics on what expenditures cost. Treasury also explains how tax legislation winds its way through government. The IRS has statistics galore. The JCT has a page of links to other resources.

Related explainers from Journalist’s Resource

• How the federal budget process works
• Social Security reform: An explainer
• What is the national debt? A reporter’s guide
• Property Taxes 101: A primer for journalists

Other research 

• We’ve also written about who benefits when sales taxes are cut.
• The Congressional Budget Office issues regular reports focusing specifically on federal spending and the debt, including a 2017 paper on the economy and budget in the decade ahead and a 2016 paper on options to reduce the annual deficit.
• The Congressional Research Service – Congress’s nonpartisan research arm – also publishes regular reports, including on topics such as the debt limit (2015), foreign holdings of federal debt (2016), deficits (2016), and how Treasury manages debt (2016).
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis performs cost-benefit analyses of various programs affecting the U.S. economy.
• The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, has a free briefing book on how the budget works as well as regular cost-benefit analyses on government initiatives. The National Conference on State Legislatures is also a good resource.
• Other think tanks and campaigners monitoring the budget, some of whom have agendas, include The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the National Priorities Project and The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Selected research

• Bergman, Peter; Denning, Jeffrey T.; Manoli, Day. “Broken Tax Breaks? Evidence from a Tax Credit Information Experiment with 1,000,000 Students.” IZA Discussion Paper No. 10997, 2017.
• Brewer, Ben; Conway, Karen Smith; Rork, Jonathan C. “Protecting the Vulnerable or Ripe for Reform? State Income Tax Breaks for the Elderly–Then and Now.” Public Finance Review, 2016. DOI: 10.1177/1091142116665903.

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“Spring forward, fall back.” Like clockwork, we follow this humble command twice a year. But what is it doing to our health and wellbeing?

The idea behind daylight saving time (DST) — when we move our clocks forward by one hour for the warmer months, giving us an extra hour on an autumn Sunday and losing us one in spring — is to make better use of daylight and conserve energy. A later sunset during the long summer days means less need for indoor lighting in the evening. The idea has been around for centuries. Some credit a 1784 essay by Benjamin Franklin.

Germany was the first country to adopt DST, in 1916, to save energy during World War I. Other countries quickly followed. In the 1970s, during the Arab oil embargo, the U.S. Congress approved an emergency yearlong DST. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act extended the observance of DST in the United States by four weeks. Americans (except in Arizona and Hawaii, which do not use DST) now set their clocks forward on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November.

Yet academic research shows largely negative impacts on health, which have stoked controversy in recent decades and led some to question if this century-old tradition still merits support. Indeed, some countries, like Argentina and Russia, have dropped DST altogether.

The spring is most dangerous: In the first few days after we lose an hour of sleep, researchers have shown increases in car accidents and heart attacks — the latter by as much as 24 percent. Those phenomena may decrease for a few days after the fall switch, when we are given that extra hour of sleep. Another study reports a mild health boost in the fall, though a 2016 study in Epidemiology found increased depressive episodes in the autumn, when the change means we are suddenly leaving work in the dark.

People with small children report higher levels of unhappiness during the spring transition, when they lose an hour of sleep. Without DST, though, parents worry about children leaving for school on dark winter mornings. Crime drops after the spring change.

As for energy consumption, in a 2008 study carried out shortly after the last federal change to the daylight saving schedule, the U.S. Department of Energy found annual energy usage fell about 0.03 percent. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to power 100,000 homes for a year. Other research found savings higher in regions far from the equator, where the length of the day varies considerably throughout the year. Yet usage near the equator, where the amount of daylight varies little, actually increased after the clocks were switched, they found.

Other resources:

A tip sheet from the Department of Energy details more history behind DST and suggests that Benjamin Franklin was joking when he proposed changing our clocks.

The Associated Press style is to use “daylight saving time,” not “savings,” without caps or hyphens. This is often known as summer time. Capitalize when speaking about usage within a particular time zone: Eastern Daylight Time, Pacific Daylight Time. In the winter, we use “standard time” — Eastern Standard Time — sometimes known as “winter time.”

The website timeanddate.com lists countries and the dates they change their clocks. Many — including China — do not change at all.

Selected studies:

“Using the Life Satisfaction Approach to Value Daylight Savings Time Transitions: Evidence from Britain and Germany”
Kuehnle, D.; Wunder, C. Journal of Happiness Studies, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s10902-015-9695-8.
Abstract: “Daylight savings time represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germany experience deteriorations in life satisfaction in the first week after the spring transition. We find no effect of the autumn transition. We attribute the negative effect of the spring transition to the reduction in the time endowment and the process of adjusting to the disruption in circadian rhythms. The effects are particularly strong for individuals with young children in the household. We conclude that the higher the shadow price of time, the more difficult is adjustment. Presumably, an increase in flexibility to reallocate time could reduce the welfare loss for individuals with binding time constraints.”

“Spring Forward at Your Own Risk: Daylight Saving Time and Fatal Vehicle Crashes”
Smith, Austin C. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2016. doi: 10.1257/app.20140100.
Abstract: “Daylight Saving Time (DST) impacts over 1.5 billion people, yet many of its impacts on practicing populations remain uncertain. Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually. Employing four tests to decompose the aggregate effect into an ambient light or sleep mechanism, I find that shifting ambient light only reallocates fatalities within a day, while sleep deprivation caused by the spring transition increases risk.”

“Daylight Savings Time and Myocardial Infarction”
Sandhu, A; Seth, M; Gurm, H.S. BMJ: Open Heart, 2014. DOI: 10.1136/openhrt-2013-000019.
Results: There was no difference in the total weekly number of PCIs performed for AMI for either the fall or spring time changes in the time period analysed. After adjustment for trend and seasonal effects, the Monday following spring time changes was associated with a 24% increase in daily AMI counts (p=0.011), and the Tuesday following fall changes was conversely associated with a 21% reduction (p=0.044). No other weekdays in the weeks following DST changes demonstrated significant associations.

“Adverse Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Adolescents’ Sleep and Vigilance”
Medina, Diana; et al. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2015. doi: 10.5664/jcsm.4938.
Conclusions: “The early March DST onset adversely affected sleep and vigilance in high school students resulting in increased daytime sleepiness. Larger scale evaluations of sleep impairments related to DST are needed to further quantify this problem in the population. If confirmed, measures to attenuate sleep loss post-DST should be implemented.”

“Under the Cover of Darkness: How Ambient Light Influences Criminal Activity”
Doleac, Jennifer L.; Sanders, Nicholas J. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015. doi: 10.1162/REST_a_00547.
Abstract: “We exploit daylight saving time (DST) as an exogenous shock to daylight, using both the discontinuous nature of the policy and the 2007 extension of DST, to consider the impact of light on criminal activity. Regression discontinuity estimates show a 7 percent decrease in robberies following the shift to DST. As expected, effects are largest during the hours directly affected by the shift in daylight. We discuss our findings within the context of criminal decision making and labor supply, and estimate that the 2007 DST extension resulted in $59 million in annual social cost savings from avoided robberies.”

“Prioritizing Sleep Health: Public Health Policy Recommendations”
Barnes, Christopher M.; Drake, Christopher L. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2015. doi: 10.1177/1745691615598509.
Abstract: “The schedules that Americans live by are not consistent with healthy sleep patterns. In addition, poor access to educational and treatment aids for sleep leaves people engaging in behavior that is harmful to sleep and forgoing treatment for sleep disorders. This has created a sleep crisis that is a public health issue with broad implications for cognitive outcomes, mental health, physical health, work performance, and safety. New public policies should be formulated to address these issues. We draw from the scientific literature to recommend the following: establishing national standards for middle and high school start times that are later in the day, stronger regulation of work hours and schedules, eliminating daylight saving time, educating the public regarding the impact of electronic media on sleep, and improving access to ambulatory in-home diagnostic testing for sleep disorders.”

“Does Daylight Saving Time Really Make Us Sick?”
Jin, Lawrence; Ziebarth, Nicolas R. IZA Discussion Paper No. 9088. 2015.
Abstract: “This paper comprehensively studies the health effects of Daylight Saving Time (DST) regulation. Relying on up to 3.4 million BRFSS [US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System] respondents from the US and the universe of 160 million hospital admissions from Germany over one decade, we do not find much evidence that population health significantly decreases when clocks are set forth by one hour in spring. However, when clocks are set back by one hour in fall, effectively extending sleep duration for the sleep deprived by one hour, population health slightly improves for about four days. The most likely explanation for the asymmetric effects are behavioral adjustments by marginal people in spring.”

“Incidence of Myocardial Infarction With Shifts to and From Daylight Savings Time”
Jiddou, Monica R.; et al. The American Journal of Cardiology, 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.amjcard.2012.11.010.
Abstract: “Modulators of normal bodily functions such as the duration and quality of sleep might transiently influence cardiovascular risk. The transition to daylight savings time (DST) has been associated with a short-term increased incidence ratio (IR) of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). The present retrospective study examined the IR of AMIs that presented to our hospitals the week after DST and after the autumn switch to standard time, October 2006 to April 2012, with specific reference to the AMI type. Our study population (n=935 patients; 59 percent men, 41 percent women) was obtained from the electronic medical records of the Royal Oak and Troy campuses of the Beaumont Hospitals in Michigan. Overall, the frequency of AMI was similar in the spring and autumn, 463 (49.5 percent) and 472 (50.5 percent), respectively. The IR for the first week after the spring shift was 1.17 (95 percent confidence interval 1.00 to 1.36). After the transition from DST in the autumn, the IR for the same period was lower, but not significantly different, 0.99 (95 percent confidence interval 0.85 to 1.16). Nevertheless, the greatest increase in AMI occurred on the first day (Sunday) after the spring shift to DST (1.71, 95 percent confidence interval 1.09 to 2.02; p <0.05). Also, a significantly greater incidence was found of non ST-segment myocardial infarction after the transition to DST in the study group compared with that in the control group (p=0.022). In conclusion, these data suggest that shifts to and from DST might transiently affect the incidence and type of acute cardiac events, albeit modestly.”

“Transition Into and Out of Daylight Saving Time and Spontaneous Delivery: A Population-Based Study”
László, Krisztina D.; Cnattingius, Sven; Janszky, Imre. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2016. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010925.
Results: “The number of deliveries during the week after the transition into or out of DST was similar to that in the comparison period (18,519 observed vs. 18,434 expected in case of the spring shift and 19,073 observed vs. 19,122 expected in case of the autumn shift); the corresponding incidence ratio and 95 percent CIs were 1.005 (0.990 to 1.019) and 0.997 (0.983 to 1.012), respectively. There were no differences in the length of gestation of the deliveries in the exposure and the control periods. Conclusions: Our results do not support the hypothesis that a minor circadian rhythm disruption is associated with an increased short-term risk of spontaneous delivery.”

“Daylight Saving Time Transitions on the Incidence Rate of Unipolar Depressive Episodes”
Hansen, Bertel Teilfeldt; et al. Epidemiology, 2016. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000580.
Conclusions: “This is the first study to show that the transition from summer time to standard time is associated with an increase in the incidence rate of unipolar depressive episodes. We speculate that the distress associated with the sudden advancement of sunset, which marks the coming of a long period of short days, accounts for this finding.”

“Does Daylight Saving Save Energy? A Meta-Analysis”
Havranek, Tomas; Herman, Dominik; Irsova, Zuzana. Munich Personal RePEc Archive, 2016.
Abstract: “The original rationale for adopting daylight saving time (DST) was energy savings. Modern research studies, however, question the magnitude and even direction of the effect of DST on energy consumption. Representing the first meta-analysis in this literature, we collect 162 estimates from 44 studies and find that the mean reported estimate indicates modest energy savings: 0.34% during the days when DST applies. The literature is not affected by publication bias, but the results vary systematically depending on the exact data and methodology applied. Using Bayesian model averaging we identify the most important factors driving the heterogeneity of the reported effects: data frequency, estimation technique (simulation vs. regression), and, importantly, the latitude of the country considered. Energy savings are larger for countries farther away from the equator, while subtropical regions consume more energy because of DST.”

“Impact of Daylight Saving Time on the Chilean Residential Consumption”
Verdejo, Humberto. Energy Policy, 2016. doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2015.10.051.
Abstract: “Since 1970 Chile has had a Daylight Saving Time (DST) policy in order to reduce residential electricity consumption in the country. The time change was set for the first time by executive decree in 1970, and since that date it was applied every year without great changes until 2010. Since then, and to date, decrees have been set in order to increase the duration of the DST, arguing that there are reasons associated with energy savings that justify the extension of the measure that has been adopted by the authority in recent years. In the present study the impact of the application of DST in terms of decreased household electricity consumption is analyzed using two complementary methods, one based on a heuristic approach and the other using an econometric model. The results indicate that there is indeed a marginally small reduction in residential electricity consumption, although these results are not homogeneous throughout the country.”

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Entering the labor market can be a tough adjustment for high school graduates. The state of the economy plays a big role. Graduate during a recession, and it’s harder to find a job; during a boom, and you may even have a choice of jobs.

A new paper looks at the “very sizable swings in youth criminality” in the United States and United Kingdom since the 1970s. It finds that a graduate’s chances of becoming a career criminal increase when graduating (or dropping out) during an economic downturn.

The paper, forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics, uses a variety of individual and longitudinal data for males in the U.S. and U.K. between the ages of 16 and 39. The authors define a recession as a period when unemployment is 5 percentage points higher than average. Some findings:

• There is a strong link between teenage criminality and subsequent criminal behavior. For example, “72 percent of males aged over 25 in the U.K. who were convicted of a crime in 2002 had a criminal record that went back to their teenage years.”
• “Young people who leave school in the midst of recessions are significantly more likely to lead a life of crime than those entering a buoyant labor market.”
• In the U.S., graduating from high school during a recession increases the chance a man will go to prison by 6.3 percent within the decade. This effect is slightly larger for high school dropouts.
• In the U.K., leaving school at any age during a recession “is associated with a 5.7 percent increase in the probability of ever being arrested.” But leaving school at age 16 during a recession increases the chance of being arrested in the future by 8 percent.
• Turning to crime later in life is “extremely rare” and “prolific offenders account for a disproportionate share of total crime.”

See our other research on criminal justice and economics.

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