Random charts - robots

Source: How robots change the world: What automation really means for jobs and productivity

Random charts - healthcare costs

Source: Initiative 18/11: What Can We Do About the Cost of Health Care? (21-page PDF)

Random chart - inequality

Source: Twitter

Random chart - China VC

Source: Chinese Venture Capital Abroad

Random charts - Russian economy

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Russian Analytical Digest No 220: Political Economy

Random chart - CEO compensation

Source: Does tax deductibility affect CEO pay? The case of the health insurance industry

"The policy of limiting the deductibility of even performance-based pay for CEOs has much to make it worthy of recommendation. Evidence strongly indicates that performance-based pay is not an efficiency enhancing institution that should be given preferential treatment in the tax code, so ending this preferential treatment is the rare provision in the TCJA that seems to make some economic sense. Further, ending the performance-based pay deductibility will raise a modest amount of revenue to roughly $9 billion per year (Balsam 2012). 

However, this analysis finds little evidence that ending the deductibility of performance-based pay will significantly affect the trajectory of CEO pay. We find no evidence that the provision of the ACA limiting the deductibility of CEO pay for insurers had any effect in reducing CEO compensation. This would tend to support the view that CEO pay is determined much more by the power of CEOs in corporate decision-making than the returns they generate for shareholders since the change in tax treatment unambiguously raised the cost of CEO pay to the companies that employ them. This also suggests that efforts to rein in CEO pay by limiting deductibility more generally, as was done in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, will not be effective. In order to limit CEO pay it may be necessary to alter the rules of corporate governance in ways that increase the power of shareholders over the CEO. This assessment must be qualified by the fact that our sample included a relatively small number of firms over a span of just four years"

Random charts - drug pricing

Source: Reforming Biopharmaceutical Pricing at Home and Abroad (28-page CEA PDF)

Random charts - healthcare spend

Source: Altarum Health Sector Trend Report

Random charts - biosimilars

Source: Biosimilar Cost Savings in the United States: Initial Experience and Future Potential (20-pg RAND PDF)

Random charts - income mobility

 

Source: The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940

"... We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution..."

Random chart - retail

Source: Amazon is actually the weakest of the big U.S. retailers, Moody’s says

Random charts - housing rates

 

Source: People Buy Payments & Why Rates Can’t Rise

Random chart - income growth

Source: Growth in State Personal Income Slows in 2016

Random chart - value

Click to enlarge:

Source: The Real Value of $100 in Each State

Random chart -- income inequality

 

Source: Letting the GINI out of the bottle: Income inequality in America

Random chart - healthcare costs

Source: National Health Expenditure Projections, 2016–25: Price Increases, Aging Push Sector To 20 Percent Of Economy (12-pg PDF)

Abstract: "Under current law, national health expenditures are projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.6 percent for 2016–25 and represent 19.9 percent of gross domestic product by 2025. For 2016, national health expenditure growth is anticipated to have slowed 1.1 percentage points to 4.8 percent, as a result of slower Medicaid and prescription drug spending growth. For the rest of the projection period, faster projected growth in medical prices is partly offset by slower projected growth in the use and intensity of medical goods and services, relative to that observed in 2014–16 associated with the Affordable Care Act coverage expansions. The insured share of the population is projected to increase from 90.9 percent in 2015 to 91.5 percent by 2025."

Random chart - EVs

Source: For Tesla, Electric Car Sales Explode In All The Wrong Places 

"More than 2 million electric vehicles may be on the world’s roads by the end of 2016, writes the Guardian, citing data from the electric vehicle world database EV Volumes. That should be good news for electric carmaker Tesla. It is not. A closer look at the data shows that most of the growth comes from Tesla competitors, and from regions where Tesla is weak. It is a stereotype “that the U.S. market is further ahead in deploying the zero-emission technology thanks to cars such as the Tesla Model S,”  writes Automotive News. As far as Tesla is concerned, electric vehicle sales are exploding in all the wrong places...." Read the rest here.

Random chart - U.D. debt holders

Source: Foreign Holdings of Federal Debt (10-pg CRS PDF)

Random charts - wage inequality

 

 

Source: Wage inequality continued its 35-year rise in 2015

"Key findings include:

• While real hourly wages (i.e., wages adjusted for inflation) grew across the board in 2015, this is largely due to a sharp dip in inflation; growth in nominal wages (i.e., wages unadjusted for inflation) has not accelerated. This dip in inflation is unlikely to be a durable source of future real wage gains.
  • Nominal wage growth of 2.2 percent remains below a level where workers would reap the benefits of economic growth.
  • There is no evidence of substantial acceleration of wages that would signal that the Federal Reserve Board should worry about incipient inflation and raise interest rates in an effort to slow the economy.

• Real hourly wage growth in 2015 was fastest at the top of the wage distribution, illustrating that wage inequality continued its 35-year rise last year.
  • The gap between the middle and bottom has remained stable since 2000.
  • The gap between the top and everyone else has grown.

• Looking at men and women separately, from 2014 to 2015, the strongest wage growth was at the top of the men’s wage distribution and at the bottom of the women’s wage distribution.
  • For men, wages at the 95th and 90th percentiles grew by 9.9 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively, compared with only 2.6 percent at the median.
  • While significant gender wage gaps remain across the wage distribution, there has been significant narrowing of the gap at the bottom and middle of the wage distribution since 2000.

• In 2015, faster low-wage wage growth occurred in states that increased their minimum wage.
  • The 10th percentile women’s wage grew 5.2 percent in states with legislated minimum-wage increases, compared with only 3.1 percent growth in states without any minimum-wage increase.

• Racial and ethnic wage gaps are on the rise at the top of the wage distribution.
  • Between 2014 and 2015, white wage growth was at least as fast as black wage growth at all deciles, and was far stronger at the top than at the middle or bottom.
  • Wage growth at the bottom of the Hispanic wage distribution since 2000 greatly exceeded that of low-wage black workers, who actually experienced losses over that period.
  • Regardless of race or ethnicity, within-group inequality has risen since 2000, with stronger growth at the top than at the bottom.

• Over 2000–2015, wage growth was faster among the more educated, but not fast enough to explain growing wage inequality.
  • For both men and women, those with less than a college degree had lower wages in 2015 than in 2007.
  • While there has been a slow narrowing of gender wage gaps for those with less than a college degree since 2000, gender wage gaps continued to grow among those with an advanced degree..."

Random chart - "defense" spend

Source: Top 15 Defense Budgets 2015

"According to the Military Balance 2016, recently published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), global defence spending in 2015 amounted to $1.563 trillion – with the US, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia accounting for more than half of total expenditure. For its part, ‘EUrope’ has largely reversed its trend of cutting budgets and accounts for roughly 14.5% of the world’s spending..." - Global defence spending 2015: the big picture