“Unintended Consequences should be read by anyone who takes for granted the superiority of progressive taxation and has not thought carefully about the trade-offs involved.” - The New Republic
“…reminds us that inequality sends a signal of what society lacks most, in America’s case, entrepreneurship and risk taking.” - Lawrence Lindsey, CEO, The Lindsey Group, former Director of the National Economic Council
“…a must-read for serious students of economic policy.” - Glenn Hubbard, Dean, Columbia Business School, and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
“…serious thinking for serious thinkers. …a thought-provoking blueprint for growing middle- and working-class incomes.” - Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts
“A full-throated defense of economic dynamism.” - The Wall Street Journal
“Unintended Consequences provides a provocative interpretation of the causes of the global financial crisis and the policies needed to return to rapid growth. Whether you agree or not, this analysis is well worth reading.” - Nouriel Roubini, New York University; Chairman, Roubini Global Economics
“Unintended Consequences represents the most cogent and persuasive analysis of the Financial Crisis to date.” - Andrei Shleifer, 1999 John Bates Clark Medal Winner
“…a comprehensive explanation of the modern economy.” - Julian Robertson, Founder, Tiger Management
“…a fresh argument for the productive value of inequality.” - David Autor, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“…reminds us that inequality sends a signal of what society lacks most, in America’s case, entrepreneurship and risk taking.” - Lawrence Lindsey, CEO, The Lindsey Group, former Director of the National Economic Council
“…serious thinking for serious thinkers. …a thought-provoking blueprint for growing middle- and working-class incomes.” - Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts
“Unintended Consequences offers deep and well-argued analyses on almost every issue.” - The New York Times

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The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio

Samuel Norris American Economic Review

Date Posted:: May 4, 2021
Is Database:: Database

Having a criminal parent jailed reduces children’s likelihood of incarceration by 4.9pp.

Utilizing 30 years of data from Ohio, this study provides quasi-experimental estimates showing that parental incarceration reduces children's likelihood of incarceration by 4.9pp [percentage points]. It also decreases the likelihood of a child being charged, convicted, or incarcerated before age 25 by 6.6, 5.5, and 4.9pp, respectively. These effects are notably concentrated among black children. The study highlights that sibling incarceration similarly reduces criminal activity, emphasizing the role of peer effects in youth criminal tendencies. Despite the high costs of incarceration, these findings suggest potential economic benefits and underscore the importance of considering family spillovers in sentencing policy. However, the study advocates for exploring alternative interventions to aid children with incarcerated family members, given the costliness of incarceration.

This finding is intuitive to me, “…Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the US. Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality….parental incarceration decreases the likelihood that a child is charged with a crime, convicted, or incarcerated before the age of 25 by 6.6, 5.5, and 4.9 percentage points respectively.2,3 These effects are concentrated among black children…While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity….”

Back to this paper what they try to do, “….We make three main contributions relative to these papers. First, although we study only one state, we emphasize the policy relevance of the US context: there are currently over 2 million prisoners in the US, making up one- fifth of all prisoners in the world, as opposed to approximately 5,400 in Sweden, 3,700 in Norway, 3,100 in Finland, and 121,000 in Colombia… Second, motivated by the prevalence of sibling incarceration 34% of US inmates have a brother who has been incarcerated, as opposed to 19% with an ever-incarcerated father….we provide some of the first estimates of the spillovers of sibling incarceration. Third, the breadth and depth of our data permit us to investigate differences in effects among different interesting subsamples (e.g. socioeconomic status, racial groups) and provide novel tests of the mechanisms at work…. The net result is that incarceration reduces the total criminal exposure for family members over the following 30 quarters by approximately 0.6 crimes, relative to a sample mean of 3.94.2
Core results, “….Tens of millions of Americans have been incarcerated, and a substantial literature has at tempted to understand both the direct and spillover effects of incarceration. In this paper, we provide the first causal estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the United States. In contrast to existing correlational evidence,we find that parental incarceration decreases children’s future criminal involvement and improves child long-term socioeconomic status. There are multiple mechanisms that may mediate this effect, including:(1) lower rates of criminal activity by the defendant and the non-incarcerated parent; (2) among male defendants, a greater dedication to existing family; (3) deterrence; and (4) removal of an unstable influence or shifting the child to a more stable care-giving environment.Even if there are notable anecdotes of when parental incarceration has harmed children, there appear to be other, potentially less salient cases in which the effects are positive. These positive cases counterbalance the negative ones to produce economic benefits. We find that sibling incarceration also results in reductions in criminal activity, consistent with the importance of peer effects in the formation of youth criminal tendencies. The timing of the sibling effects indicates sibling incarceration has a direct, short-term influence on criminality, rather than affecting long-term behavior. The relatively positive family spillovers from incarceration have a number of implications for policy. The costs and benefits from the spillovers of incarceration matter for determining optimal sentencing and incarceration policy… and our findings demonstrate a previously unknown benefit of incarceration. We conduct a partial cost benefit analysis and conclude that while the marginal child benefits from parental incarceration, the high costs of incarceration still outweigh the benefits. More broadly, the positive effects of family incarceration we find highlight the challenging environment faced by children with family members on the margin of incarceration, and demonstrate the scope for policy to affect their long-run economic outcomes. However, given the costliness of incarceration, future work should study other interventions that may aid this population..”
Samuel Norris, Matthew Pecenco, Jeffrey Weaver, “The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio,”American Economic Review, May 2021, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles

Note this finding mirrors a 2018 study we looked at (attached) that found that in terms of crime there are significant spillover (in terms of propensity to be arrested) effects from older to younger siblings (effect is gendered, impacting males)

An Extra Point for Attendance: The Impact of High School Varsity Athletics on Absenteeism

Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon American Enterprise Institute

Date Posted:: April 16, 2026
Is Database:: Database

The absentee rate of Indiana high school students, ~23% of whom played a varsity sport, was ~20% lower for those who participated in varsity athletics than for non-athletes. The effect was stronger when an athlete’s particular sport was in season.

We find that varsity sports participation is strongly associated with better student attendance, and we argue it is plausible that varsity sports participation causes better attendance. When we control for a number of factors that we know matter for both sports participation and attendance, we continue to find that varsity athletes are absent less often than their peers across the entire year. Across the school year, athletes’ absence rate was 1.37 points lower than non-athletes’. That’s a reduction of almost 20%. The broad pattern shown in Table 1 is that students from more advantaged groups were more likely to participate in varsity sports and less likely to be absent from school. It’s thus no surprise that, in the raw data, there is an association between playing varsity sports and having good attendance (Figure 3). But is that because students who attend school more reliably are more likely to play sports or because playing sports leads to better attendance? One way to tease out the answer is to compare varsity athletes' attendance during their sports seasons with their attendance the rest of the year. Not only do varsity athletes have lower annual absence rates—especially unexcused absences—than non-athletes, but [Figure 3 and Figure 4] show that their absence rates fall further when their sport is in season, [which suggests at least some causal effect].

Takeaways by Macro Roundup^® AI

Varsity athletes’ absence rates drop 1.37 pts below non-athletes’, a ~20% reduction that drives improved school engagement year-round.
In-season absence rates fall further for varsity athletes, suggesting sports participation directly leads to more reliable attendance patterns.
Athletes from advantaged backgrounds show stronger attendance gains, indicating varsity sports participation compounds existing socioeconomic advantages in school engagement.

Sports Betting Across Borders: Spatial Spillovers, Credit Distress, and Fiscal Externalities

Jacob Goss and Daniel Mangrum Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Date Posted:: March 27, 2026
Is Database:: Database

After the legalization of sports betting in 2018, delinquency rates on a wide range of consumer debts rose, increasing .31pp as of 2025. The delinquency rate for the ~3% of the population that were new gamblers increased by ~10pp driven by those under 40.

Exploiting the staggered roll-out of state-level legalization following the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, we use an extended two-way fixed effects (ETWFE) framework that separately estimates direct treatment effects and cross-border spillover effects. Our first-stage estimates establish that legalization dramatically increases betting activity: average quarterly spending per person rises by roughly $46 from a pre-treatment mean of $2.50, and the share of the population with any sportsbook spending in a quarter increases by 3.1 percentage points. The effects on average spending grow continually over time with no clear evidence of saturation, suggesting the market for mobile sports betting continues to mature years after legalization. At the same time, substantial betting activity occurs in counties where sports betting is not legal but which lie near a legal state, with spillover effects on total spending roughly 14% of the direct effect for counties within 15 miles of a legal state, declining monotonically with distance and approaching zero by 60 miles. These spillovers have real consequences for consumer financial health. Three years after legalization, median credit scores are one point lower and overall delinquency rates increase by 0.31 percentage points following legalization. [Under-40 auto loan delinquency increases by half a percentage point and credit card delinquency by one percentage point, driving the overall increase in delinquency.] Since only about 3.1% of the population takes up betting after legalization, these intent-to-treat estimates would imply that those who are induced to bet due to legalization experience delinquency increases of 10 percentage points.

New York City Government Services: Services for the Unsheltered

Thomas DiNapoli New York State Comptroller

Date Posted:: March 16, 2026
Is Database:: Database

In 2025 New York City spent $81,705 per “street” homeless person, up 262% from 2019 whose numbers increased 26% during that period. This does not include spending on “sheltered” homeless, who are ~97% of the homeless population.

New York City’s unsheltered population increased from 3,588 in FY 2019 to 4,504 in FY 2025 — a 26% increase from pre-pandemic levels. In that time, spending on services for this population has more than tripled, growing from $102 million in FY 2019 to nearly $368 million in FY 2025 (a 262% increase). Its share of spending has also increased, from just under 5% to nearly 9% of total Department of Homeless Services (DHS) spending.

Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023

Richard Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth National Bureau of Economic Research

Date Posted:: February 3, 2026
Is Database:: Database

Btw 1939 and 1963, the % of Americans below LBJ’s absolute poverty line (3× the cost of a minimal meal plan), fell from 48.5 to 19.5, driven by rising market income. Post-1964, most (for non-blacks, all) drops were the result of transfers, not earnings.

The major innovation of this paper is to extend a comprehensive and consistent measure of poverty back to 1939, exploiting a quarter century of data before the War on Poverty began. From 1939-1963, absolute poverty fell from 48.5% to 19.5%, a 29 percentage point reduction. This pre-war progress provides important context for previously documented success in reducing poverty afterwards, since it occurred before the major expansion of safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits. During that 1939–1963 period, it was the growth of market income rather than government transfers net of taxes that reduced poverty rates. In fact, poverty fell no faster in the 24 years after the War on Poverty was declared than in the 24 years before, even when applying the same initial poverty rate to both periods. Our results do not imply that poverty would have necessarily continued to fall at the same rate after 1963 in the absence of the War on Poverty. A pre versus post comparison is conflated by contemporaneous macroeconomic and social changes, such as slower economic growth in the post-1963 period. Conversely, any claim that the War on Poverty was necessary for poverty to decline should be accompanied by an attempt to understand why it had already been falling in the quarter century before it was declared.

The Biggest Fraud in Welfare

Phil Gramm and John Early Wall Street Journal

Date Posted:: December 18, 2025
Is Database:: Database

Counting non-cash benefits as income would reduce the 19.8mm US households defined as poor by 90%. If the $1.4T in annual Federal poverty spending, including non-cash benefits, were distributed in cash to those households, each would receive $70,000.

The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level. A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs.

Explaining the Widening Divides in US Midlife Mortality: Is There a Smoking Gun?

Christopher Foote, Ellen Meara, Jonathan Skinner, and Luke Stewart National Bureau of Economic Research

Date Posted:: December 17, 2025
Is Database:: Database
Is Important:: Important

The college/non-college life expectancy gap widened from 2.6–6.3 years btw 1992 and 2019, while county mortality inequality jumped 30% to the detriment of rural areas. Smoking by state predicts ~300 extra deaths per 100k for non-college grads, 0 for grads.

The education-mortality gradient has increased sharply in the last three decades, with the life expectancy gap btw people with and without a college degree widening from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019. During the same period, mortality inequality across counties rose 30%, accompanied by an increasing rural health penalty. Using county- and state-level data from the 1992–2019 period, we demonstrate that these three trends arose due to a fundamental shift in the geographic patterns of mortality among college and non-college populations. First, we find a sharp decline in both mortality rates and geographic inequality for college graduates. Second, the reverse was true for people without a college degree; spatial inequality became amplified. Third, we find that rates of smoking play a key role in explaining all three empirical puzzles, with secondary roles attributed to income, other health behaviors, and state policies. [An objection is that] the non-college smoking rate declined by somewhat more than the college rate from 1992 to 2019. [The resolution is that] college populations gave up smoking decades before non-college populations did. [The key] college/non-college comparison [is] among 55–64 year-olds, the age group for which the smoking mortality penalty is greatest.

Having a criminal parent jailed reduces children’s likelihood of incarceration by 4.9pp.

The absentee rate of Indiana high school students, ~23% of whom played a varsity sport, was ~20% lower for those who participated in varsity athletics than for non-athletes. The effect was stronger when an athlete’s particular sport was in season.

Does participation in high school sports significantly reduce student absenteeism?

Takeaways by Macro Roundup® AI

Related Articles:

After the legalization of sports betting in 2018, delinquency rates on a wide range of consumer debts rose, increasing .31pp as of 2025. The delinquency rate for the ~3% of the population that were new gamblers increased by ~10pp driven by those under 40.

Related Articles:

In 2025 New York City spent $81,705 per “street” homeless person, up 262% from 2019 whose numbers increased 26% during that period. This does not include spending on “sheltered” homeless, who are ~97% of the homeless population.

Related Articles:

Btw 1939 and 1963, the % of Americans below LBJ’s absolute poverty line (3× the cost of a minimal meal plan), fell from 48.5 to 19.5, driven by rising market income. Post-1964, most (for non-blacks, all) drops were the result of transfers, not earnings.

Related Articles:

Counting non-cash benefits as income would reduce the 19.8mm US households defined as poor by 90%. If the $1.4T in annual Federal poverty spending, including non-cash benefits, were distributed in cash to those households, each would receive $70,000.

Related Articles:

The college/non-college life expectancy gap widened from 2.6–6.3 years btw 1992 and 2019, while county mortality inequality jumped 30% to the detriment of rural areas. Smoking by state predicts ~300 extra deaths per 100k for non-college grads, 0 for grads.

Related Articles:

Takeaways by Macro Roundup^® AI