Permitting Reform

The Congressional Budget Office released a series of posts explaining questions they have about major federal budget policies that past research does not adequately answer. For any economist looking for paper ideas or for a way to influence policy, CBO’s posts are a great place to look:

At AEAs this year Heidi Williams emphasized how huge bills like permitting reform are being discussed by Congress without much research to inform key aspects of the bills, so CBO & some Congresspeople would genuinely like to see your work on these questions if it is well done

This also your regular reminded that I maintain a page of economics paper ideas. Until now all the ideas there have been my own, but I will be adding links to pages where others share their own paper ideas, starting with CBO’s.

Many regular Americans and policymakers say they want the US to manufacture more things domestically. But when they ask economists how to accomplish this, I find that our most common response is to question their premise- to say the US already manufactures plenty, or that there is nothing special about manufacturing. It’s easy for people to round off this answer to ‘your question is dumb and you are dumb’, then go ask someone else who will give them a real answer, even if that real answer is wrong.

Economists tell our students in intro classes that we focus on positive economics, not normative- that we won’t tell you what your goals should be, just how best to accomplish them. But then we seem to forget all that when it comes to manufacturing. Normally we would take even unreasonable questions seriously; but I think wondering how to increase manufacturing output is reasonable given the national defense externalities.

So if you had to increase the value of total US manufacturing output- if you were going to be paid based on a fraction of real US manufacturing output 10 years from now- how would you do it?

I haven’t made a deep study of this, but here are my thoughts. Better ideas at the top, ‘costly but would increase manufacturing output’ ideas at the bottom:

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