Questions of the IGM Economic Experts Panel, sorted by consensus

Vaccines (US) | Declining to be vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles imposes costs on other people, which is a negative externality. (Agree)
Dynamic Scoring (US) | Changing federal income tax rates, or the income bases to which those rates apply, can affect federal tax revenues partly by altering people’s behavior, and thus their actual or reported incomes. (Agree)
Nash Equilibrium (US) | Behavior in many complex and seemingly intractable strategic settings can be understood more clearly by working out what each party in the game will choose to do if they realize that the other parties will be solving the same problem. This insight has helped us understand behavior as diverse as military conflicts, price setting by competing firms and penalty kicking in soccer. (Agree)
The CBO (US) | Forecasting the effects of complex legislative actions is hard, so even competent, non-ideological and non-partisan projections could differ substantially from outcomes. (Agree)
Gold Standard (US) | There are many factors besides US inflation risk that influence the current dollar price of gold. (Agree)
Trade Within Europe (EU) | Freer movement of goods and services across borders within Europe has made the average western European citizen better off since the 1980s. (Agree)
Congestion Pricing (US) | In general, using more congestion charges in crowded transportation networks — such as higher tolls during peak travel times in cities, and peak fees for airplane takeoff and landing slots — and using the proceeds to lower other taxes would make citizens on average better off. (Agree)
Diversification (US) | In general, absent any inside information, an equity investor can expect to do better by choosing a well-diversified, low-cost index fund than by picking a few stocks. (Agree)
Primary Voting (US) | There is no perfect voting system. That is, no voting system can ensure that the winner will be the person who best represents voters’ wishes, including how intensely they favor or disfavor each candidate. (Agree)
Diversified Investing (EU) | In general, absent any inside information, an equity investor can expect to do better by holding a well-diversified, low-fee, passive index fund than by holding a few stocks. (Agree)
Healthcare (US) | There are no consequential distortions created by the tax preference that favors obtaining health insurance through employers. (Disagree)
Import Duties (US) | Adding new or higher import duties on products such as air conditioners, cars, and cookies — to encourage producers to make them in the US — would be a good idea. (Disagree)
Ethanol (US) | A direct disincentive to emit carbon-dioxide, for example through a carbon tax or an emissions permit market, is more efficient than requiring the use of corn-based ethanol fuels. (Agree)
Stock Prices (US) | Unless they have inside information, very few investors, if any, can consistently make accurate predictions about whether the price of an individual stock will rise or fall on a given day. (Agree)
Bureau of Labor Statistics (US) | By providing important measures of US economic performance — including employment, consumer prices, wages, job openings, time allocation in households, and productivity — the Bureau of Labor Statistics creates social benefits that exceed its annual cost of roughly $610 million. (Agree)
Tax Reforms (US) | The tax reform plan proposed by President Trump this week would likely pay for itself through higher economic growth. (Disagree)
Congestion Pricing (EU) | In general, using more congestion charges in crowded transportation networks — such as higher tolls during peak travel times in cities, and peak fees for airplane takeoff and landing slots — and using the proceeds to lower other taxes would make citizens on average better off. (Agree)
Gold Standard (US) | If the US replaced its discretionary monetary policy regime with a gold standard, defining a "dollar" as a specific number of ounces of gold, the price-stability and employment outcomes would be better for the average American. (Disagree)
Taxi Competition (US) | Letting car services such as Uber or Lyft compete with taxi firms on equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements, but without restrictions on prices or routes, raises consumer welfare. (Agree)
Drug Use Policies (US) | All else equal, making drugs illegal raises street prices for those drugs because suppliers require extra compensation for the risk of incarceration and other punishments. (Agree)
Privatization in Central and Eastern Europe (EU) | On the whole, the shift from state to private ownership of many industrial assets in central and eastern European countries after communism has increased productivity in those countries. (Agree)
U.S. State Budgets (US) | By discounting pension liabilities at high interest rates under government accounting standards, many U.S. state and local governments understate their pension liabilities and the costs of providing pensions to public-sector workers. (Agree)
Migration Within Europe (EU) | Freer movement of people to live and work across borders within Europe has made the average western European citizen better off since the 1980s. (Agree)
Presidents and Jobs (US) | Claims by incumbent presidents and challengers about how many private-sector jobs can be created in a four-year period by sector-level or other targeted policies should be viewed as rough guesses, because overall macroeconomic conditions drive aggregate employment in ways that dominate any net effects of polices that focus on specific industries or households. (Agree)
Taxes (US) | All else equal, permanently raising the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income by 1 percentage point for those in the top (i.e., currently 35%) tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years. (Agree)
China-US Trade (US) | Trade with China makes most Americans better off because, among other advantages, they can buy goods that are made or assembled more cheaply in China. (Agree)
Trade Barriers for Sugar (US) | The current trade barriers in the U.S. sugar industry raise the profits of sugar producers and make the typical U.S. consumer pay more for sugar and goods that use sugar as an input. (Agree)
Aging (EU) | In European countries where the share of those over 65 is rising, there are net social benefits to adjusting retirement ages for state-financed (including pay-as-you-go) pension systems upwards, so that revised retirement ages better reflect longer life expectancies. (Agree)
Bureau of Labor Statistics (US) | Cuts in BLS spending would likely involve net social costs because potential declines in the quality of data, and thus their usefulness to researchers and decision makers, would exceed any budget savings. (Agree)
Gasoline Prices (US) | Changes in U.S. gasoline prices over the past 10 years have predominantly been due to market factors rather than U.S. federal economic or energy policies. (Agree)
Primary Voting (US) | One clear defect of a winner-take-all election with 3 or more candidates, and with each voter choosing only one candidate, is that a candidate who is strongly disliked by a majority, but strongly liked by a minority, can beat a candidate who is liked by a majority and disliked by relatively few. (Agree)
Carbon Tax (US) | A tax on the carbon content of fuels would be a less expensive way to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions than would a collection of policies such as “corporate average fuel economy” requirements for automobiles. (Agree)
Carbon Taxes II (US) | The Brookings Institution recently described a US carbon tax of $20 per ton, increasing at 4% per year, which would raise an estimated $150 billion per year in federal revenues over the next decade. Given the negative externalities created by carbon dioxide emissions, a federal carbon tax at this rate would involve fewer harmful net distortions to the US economy than a tax increase that generated the same revenue by raising marginal tax rates on labor income across the board. (Agree)
Savings Behavior (US) | An effective way to increase savings rates of employees whose firms have defined contribution plans is to combine automatic enrollment in those plans and periodic automatic increases in their contributions (with the ability to opt out of either). (Agree)
Chairman Bernanke (US) | Informed postmortems of Ben Bernanke’s Fed chairmanship will judge favorably the Fed's creative and aggressive policy initiatives from autumn 2008 through early 2009. (Agree)
Brexit (EU) | Because of the Brexit vote's outcome, the UK's real per-capita income level is likely to be lower a decade from now than it would have been otherwise. (Agree)
Healthcare and Taxes (US) | Long run fiscal sustainability in the U.S. will require cuts in currently promised Medicare and Medicaid benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000. (Agree)
High-Skilled Immigrants (US) | The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year. (Agree)
Taxing Capital and Labor (US) | One drawback of taxing capital income at a lower rate than labor income is that it gives people incentives to relabel income that policymakers find hard to categorize as "capital" rather than labor". (Agree)
Debt Ceiling (US) | Because all federal spending and taxes must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes. (Agree)
China-US Trade (US) | Some Americans who work in the production of competing goods, such as clothing and furniture, are made worse off by trade with China. (Agree)
High-Debt Countries (US) | Countries that let their debt loads get high risk losing control of their own fiscal sustainability, through an adverse feedback loop in which doubts by lenders lead to higher government bond rates, which in turn make debt problems more severe. (Agree)
U.S. State Budgets (revisited) (US) | By discounting pension liabilities at high interest rates under government accounting standards, many U.S. state and local governments understate their pension liabilities and the costs of providing pensions to public-sector workers. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on October 1, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Economic Stimulus (revisited) (US) | Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on February 15, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Surge Pricing (US) | Using surge pricing to allocate transportation services — such as Uber does with its cars — raises consumer welfare through various potential channels, such as increasing the supply of those services, allocating them to people who desire them the most, and reducing search and queuing costs. (Agree)
Free Trade (US) | Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment. (Agree)
Science, Technology and Immigration (US) | Allowing US-based employers to hire many more immigrants with advanced degrees in science or engineering would raise per capita income in the US over time. (Agree)
Liquidity (US) | There is a social value to having institutions that issue liquid liabilities that are backed by illiquid assets. (Agree)
Fast-Track Authority (US) | By lowering bargaining costs, fast-track negotiating authority for the president makes it more likely that the U.S. can conclude major trade deals. (Agree)
Laffer Curve (US) | A cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut. (Disagree)
U.S. State Budgets (US) | During the next two decades some U.S. states, unless they substantially increase taxes, cut spending, and/or change public-sector pensions, will require a combination of severe austerity budgets, a federal bailout, and/or default. (Agree)
High-Skilled Immigrant Visas (US) | If the US significantly lowers the number of H-1B visas now, expected US tax revenues will rise materially over the next four years. (Disagree)
Rent Control (US) | Local ordinances that limit rent increases for some rental housing units, such as in New York and San Francisco, have had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them. (Disagree)
California’s Drought (US) | Californians would be better off on average if all final users in the state paid the same price for water — adjusted for quality, place and time — even if, as a result, some food prices rose sharply and some farms failed. (Agree)
Tax Reforms (US) | Since 1980, whenever substantial growth effects have been required to make a tax reform plan revenue neutral, the actual outcome has invariably been a fall in tax revenue as a share of GDP. (Agree)
Inequality and Skills (US) | One of the leading reasons for rising U.S. income inequality over the past three decades is that technological change has affected workers with some skill sets differently than others. (Agree)
Ten-Year Budgets (US) | Comparing two plans that would reduce federal budget deficits by identical amounts in each of the next 10 years, one that did so partly by reducing significantly the long-term growth rate of Medicare and Medicaid spending would do more to make the U.S. budget fiscally sustainable than one that did not lower the growth of these spending programs. (Agree)
College Athletes (US) | If the NCAA let colleges pay athletes with more than scholarships (which currently may cover tuition, books, room and board), then top colleges in men’s basketball and football would pay most athletes substantial sums beyond full scholarships. (Agree)
Tax Reform (US) | Eliminating tax deductions for non-investment personal interest expenses (e.g., on mortgages), with reductions in personal tax rates that are both budget neutral and keep the burden of taxes by income group the same, would lead to more efficient financing decisions by individuals. (Agree)
Ride Sharing (EU) | Assuming that taxi and ride-sharing companies were treated as substantively similar — including requirements that they operate on an equal footing regarding safety, insurance and taxation — letting ride-sharing services compete without restrictions on prices or routes would raise consumer welfare. (Agree)
Economic Stimulus (US) | Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill. (Agree)
Fiscal Cliff (US) | If the fiscal changes that are planned under current US law take place next year — including Bush era tax cuts expiring, Medicare payment rates to doctors being cut, the AMT applying to many more taxpayers, and automatic cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending kicking in — then US real GDP growth in 2013 will be lower than it would be under the CBO's alternative fiscal scenario, in which the above changes do not occur. (Agree)
The CBO (US) | Adjusting for legal restrictions on what the CBO can assume about future legislation and events, the CBO has historically issued credible forecasts of the effects of both Democratic and Republican legislative proposals. (Agree)
Vaccines (US) | Considering the costs of restricting free choice, and the share of people in the US who choose not to vaccinate their children for measles, the social benefit of mandating measles vaccines for all Americans (except those with compelling medical reasons) would exceed the social cost. (Agree)
US Fiscal Risks (US) | If the United States fails to make scheduled interest or principal payments on government debt securities, even as an unintended consequence of political brinksmanship, US families and businesses are likely to suffer severe economic harm. (Agree)
Exchange Rates (US) | The Chinese government pursues policies that keep the renminbi's exchange rate vis à vis the dollar lower than it would be if the currency floated without those policies. (Agree)
Bank Bailouts (US) | Because the U.S. Treasury bailed out and backstopped banks (by injecting equity into them in late 2008, and later committing to provide public capital to any banks that failed the stress tests and could not raise private capital), the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without these measures. (Agree)
Infrastructure Spending (US) | The US should increase spending now on roads, railways, bridges and airports (including new projects, maintenance or both). (Agree)
Economic Policy Advice (US) | The Council of Economic Advisors is likely to give the US president better policy advice if the Chair and Members of the CEA have published peer-reviewed economics research. (Agree)
Stock Prices (US) | Plausible expectations of future dividends, discounted using a plausible risk-adjusted interest rate, explain well the level of stock prices for recently listed internet businesses in 1999. (Disagree)
Medicare (US) | Consider the other of two proposals for restraining future Medicare spending, each by the same amount: The method that Governor Romney advocates — giving future seniors a fixed payment for premiums and letting private insurers compete with Medicare — imposes risks on future Medicare patients because competition may not be powerful to enough to offer future seniors the same quality of care that is currently promised without supplementing their premium support. (Agree)
Cuba’s Economy (US) | Cuba’s low per-capita income growth — 1.2 percent per year since 1960 —has more to do with Cuba’s own economic policies than with the U.S. embargo on trade and tourism. (Agree)
Aging (EU) | Without changes in policy, a rising share of people who are over age 65 will exert a substantial downward influence on per capita real GDP in western European countries. (Agree)
Italy’s Banks (EU) | If Italy were to inject public funds into its banks without imposing losses on at least some claimants, an important cost would be the effect on future incentives (economic or political) in Europe. (Agree)
Congress and Monetary Policy (US) | Legislation introduced in Congress would require the Federal Reserve to "submit to the appropriate congressional committees…a Directive Policy Rule", which shall "describe the strategy or rule of the Federal Open Market Committee for the systematic quantitative adjustment of the Policy Instrument Target to respond to a change in the Intermediate Policy Inputs." Should the Fed deviate from the rule, the Fed Chair would have to "testify before the appropriate congressional committees as to why the [rule]…is not in compliance." Enacting this provision would improve monetary policy outcomes in the U.S. (Disagree)
Money Market Funds (US) | The way in which money market funds normally trade – at one dollar per share, even though the per-share value of the assets backing them varies over time – made them vulnerable to a run in 2008 before they received taxpayer guarantees. (Agree)
Free Trade (US) | On average, citizens of the U.S. have been better off with the North American Free Trade Agreement than they would have been if the trade rules for the U.S., Canada and Mexico prior to NAFTA had remained in place. (Agree)
Fed Policy (US) | Enactment of the Senate bill to subject the Federal Reserve's monetary policy and discount window decisions to an audit by the Comptroller General of the U.S. would improve the Fed's legitimacy without hurting its decision making. (Disagree)
Ethanol (US) | Ethanol content requirements and protectionism against imported ethanol (which includes fuel from sugarcane) raise food prices without significantly reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. (Agree)
Online Sales Taxes (US) | Subjecting online sales from out-of-state vendors to the same retail sales taxes imposed on in-state sales would raise more tax revenue in the states making this change while reducing the pro-online bias of current policy. (Agree)
Infrastructure (revisited) (US) | Because the US has underspent on new projects, maintenance, or both, the federal government has an opportunity to increase average incomes by spending more on roads, railways, bridges and airports. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on May 23, 2013. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Local Tax Incentives (EU) | Europe as a whole benefits when European cities or countries compete with each other by giving tax incentives to firms to locate operations in their jurisdictions. (Disagree)
Oil Prices (US) | The recent decline in oil prices will promote higher real GDP in the US over the next couple of years. (Agree)
Tax Reform (US) | Reducing the deductibility of interest expenses for non-financial businesses to equalize the overall tax cost of debt and equity financing, while using the extra revenue to reduce personal and corporate tax rates in a budget neutral fashion that also keeps the burden of taxes the same, would lead to more efficient financing decisions by firms. (Agree)
Fogel on Slavery (US) | Slavery in the United States was eradicated because of social and political events, not because it was an unprofitable institution for slaveholders. (Agree)
Small Firms (US) | The federal government would make the average U.S. citizen better off by using policies that directly focus more on increasing small business growth than growth of economic output overall. (Disagree)
100-Day Plan (US) | If all of the “Seven actions to protect American workers” in President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan (see link) are enacted, it will more likely than not improve the economic prospects of middle-class Americans over the next decade. (Disagree)
Taxing Capital and Labor (US) | Although they do not always agree about the precise likely effects of different tax policies, another reason why economists often give disparate advice on tax policy is because they hold differing views about choices between raising average prosperity and redistributing income. (Agree)
Taxes (US) | The cumulative budget shortfalls in the US over the next 10 years can be reduced by half (or more) purely by increasing the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income for those in the top tax bracket. (Disagree)
ECB Asset Purchases (EU) | The ECB's asset purchases over the past two years have reduced the threat of deflation in the euro area as a whole. (Agree)
Ride Sharing (EU) | Regardless of how ride-sharing services are treated, existing regulations for traditional taxi firms in many European cities harm consumers by limiting competition. (Agree)
Fast-Track Authority (US) | Past major trade deals have benefited most Americans. (Agree)
100-Day Plan (US) | If all of the “Seven actions to protect American workers” in President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan are enacted, it will more likely than not improve the economic prospects of low-skilled Americans over the next decade. (Disagree)
Baumol’s Cost Disease (US) | Because labor markets across different sectors are connected, rising productivity in manufacturing leads the cost of labor-intensive services — such as education and health care — to rise. (Agree)
France’s Labor Market (EU) | Revising France’s labor market policies — by reducing employment protection, decentralizing labor negotiations to the firm level, and making training programs more accessible and responsive to labor demands — would, all else equal, increase productivity in France’s economy. (Agree)
Robots (US) | Advancing automation has not historically reduced employment in the United States. (Agree)
Gary Becker (US) | Employers that discriminate in hiring will be at a competitive disadvantage, if their customers do not care about their mix of employees, compared with firms that do not discriminate. (Agree)
Drug Use Policies (US) | The Netherlands restrictions on “soft drugs” combined with a moderate tax aimed at deterring their consumption would have lower social costs than continuing to prohibit use of those drugs as in the US. (Click here for a summary of the Netherlands restrictions.) (Agree)
Trade and Toughness (US) | An important reason why many workers in Michigan and Ohio have lost jobs in recent years is because US presidential administrations over the past 30 years have not been tough enough in trade negotiations. (Disagree)
Universal Basic Income (US) | Granting every American citizen over 21-years old a universal basic income of $13,000 a year — financed by eliminating all transfer programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing subsidies, household welfare payments, and farm and corporate subsidies) — would be a better policy than the status quo. (Disagree)
High-Skilled Immigrant Visas (US) | If the US significantly lowers the number of H-1B visas now, employment for American workers will rise materially over the next four years. (Disagree)
Bitcoin (US) | A bitcoin's value derives solely from the belief that others will want to use it for trade, which implies that its purchasing power is likely to fluctuate over time to a degree that will limit its usefulness. (Agree)
China’s Growth (US) | China’s growth model, specifically the unusually high investment rate and low consumption rate, is unsustainable. (Agree)
Economic Stimulus (revisited) (US) | Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on February 15, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Trump and Share Prices (US) | US share prices have risen since Donald Trump’s election victory at least partly because the policies he seems poised to implement are likely to increase US after-tax corporate profits. (Agree)
Infrastructure (US) | Because the US has underspent on new projects, maintenance, or both, the federal government has an opportunity to increase average incomes by spending more on roads, railways, bridges and airports. (Agree)
Bailouts: Banks and Automakers (US) | Because GM and Chrysler were bailed out in 2008-09, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would it have been if Congress and the executive branch had not intervened. (Agree)
Japan’s Deflation (US) | The persistent deflation in Japan since 1997 could have been avoided had the Bank of Japan followed different monetary policies. (Agree)
Piketty on Inequality (US) | The most powerful force pushing towards greater wealth inequality in the US since the 1970s is the gap between the after-tax return on capital and the economic growth rate. (Disagree)
Health Insurance Subsidies (US) | Expanding health insurance to more people through the ACA’s public subsidies and Medicaid expansion will generate gains in the health and well-being of the newly insured that exceed the costs. (Agree)
Manufacturing (US) | Because firms and inventors do not capture the full returns from research and development, the government would increase the average well-being of Americans (and potentially of others too) by favoring R&D; using the tax code. (Agree)
Monetary Policy (US) | All else equal, the Fed's new plan to increase the maturity of its Treasury holdings will boost expected real GDP growth for calendar year 2012 by at least one percentage point. (Disagree)
Money Market Funds (US) | Taxpayers would be better protected if each money market fund in the U.S. were instead required to trade at its floating net asset value. (Agree)
Ticket Resale (US) | Laws that limit the resale of tickets for entertainment and sports events make potential audience members for those events worse off on average. (Agree)
Standardized Tests (US) | Comparing their students’ average gains on standardized tests over the school year makes it easier to predict which teachers — all else equal — are more likely to improve their student’s long-term life outcomes. (Agree)
Brexit (EU) | Because of the Brexit vote's outcome, the rest of the EU's real per-capita income level is likely to be lower a decade from now than it would have been otherwise. (Agree)
U.S. State Budgets (revisited) (US) | During the next two decades some U.S. states, unless they substantially increase taxes, cut spending, and/or change public-sector pensions, will require a combination of severe austerity budgets, a federal bailout, and/or default. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on October 1, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Europe (US) | The main reason other eurozone countries need to worry about Greek banks losing access to ECB support is because the ensuing chaos in Greece could trigger bank runs in peripheral countries. (Agree)
$15 Minimum Wage (US) | Increasing the federal minimum wage gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020 would substantially increase aggregate output in the US economy. (Disagree)
French Labor Policies (US) | Reducing the minimum retirement age in France from 62 back to age 60, permanently, would reduce long-term French economic growth and substantially raise French debt relative to GDP over time. (Agree)
Ten-Year Budgets (US) | Because federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid will continue to grow under current policy beyond the 10-year window of most political budget debates, it is easy for a politician to devise a budget plan that would reduce federal deficits over the next decade without really making the U.S. fiscally sustainable. (Agree)
LNG Exports (US) | Restricting US exports of liquefied natural gas would have adverse effects on the US economy. (Agree)
Manufacturing (US) | The federal government would make the average U.S. citizen better off by using policies that directly focus more on increasing manufacturing employment than employment in other sectors. (Disagree)
Fiscal Policy and Savings (US) | Sustained tax and spending policies that boost consumption in ways that reduce the saving rate are likely to lower long-run living standards. (Agree)
Textbook Prices (US) | Since students can resell college textbooks or rent electronic versions, the net burden on students is substantially lower than retail prices for new textbook purchases would suggest. (Agree)
Short Selling (US) | Bans on the short selling of financial securities, such as stocks and government bonds, lead to prices that are further, on average, from their fundamental values. (Agree)
Italy’s Debt (US) | Credible assumptions for inflation, GDP growth and primary budget deficits in Italy imply that either the Debt-to-GDP ratio in Italy would increase sharply if Italian interest rates on 10-year government debt remained at the November 30 level of around 7 percent or Italy would lose access to the bond market. (Agree)
Health-Care Licensing (US) | Loosening current licensing restrictions on the range of services that nurses, physician assistants, dental hygienists and pharmacists are permitted to perform would help patients on balance, because the additional safety risks would be small compared to the decreased costs in waiting time and fees. (Agree)
Taxes and Mandatory Spending (US) | Long run fiscal sustainability in the US will require some combination of cuts in currently promised Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000. (Agree)
Oil Price Speculation (US) | Large movements in monthly oil prices, either up or down, are driven primarily by speculators, as opposed to changes in the current (and planned) supply or demand for oil. (Disagree)
Gary Becker (US) | Rising market wages are an important reason — over and above any changes in medical technology, social norms or preferences — why family sizes have fallen over the past century in rich countries. (Agree)
US Interest Rates (US) | The Fed should have raised interest rates sooner, rather than leaving them near zero for this long. (Disagree)
Robots and Artificial Intelligence (EU) | Rising use of robots and artificial intelligence in advanced countries is likely to create benefits large enough that they could be used to compensate those workers who are substantially negatively affected for their lost wages. (Agree)
Trade Balances (US) | A typical country can increase its citizens’ welfare by enacting policies that would increase its trade surplus (or decrease its trade deficit). (Disagree)
France’s Labor Market (EU) | Reducing employment protection would reduce the equilibrium unemployment rate in France. (Agree)
Health Insurance Subsidies (US) | Expanding health insurance to more people through the ACA’s public subsidies and Medicaid expansion will reduce total healthcare spending in the economy. (Disagree)
Science, Technology and Immigration (US) | Allowing US-based employers to hire many more immigrants with advanced degrees in science or engineering would lower (at least temporarily) the premium earned by current American workers with similar degrees. (Agree)
Christmas Spending (US) | An annual December spending surge on parties, gift-giving and personal travel delivers net social benefits. (Agree)
Sports Stadiums (US) | Providing state and local subsidies to build stadiums for professional sports teams is likely to cost the relevant taxpayers more than any local economic benefits that are generated. (Agree)
US Median Income (US) | The 9% cumulative increase in real US median household income since 1980 substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago. (Agree)
Economists and Conventions (US) | A US city hosting a big convention will enjoy a higher boost to incremental spending — holding the number of visitors and their average incomes fixed — if those visitors are auto dealers rather than economists. (Agree)
Cadillac Tax (US) | The “Cadillac tax” on expensive employer-provided health insurance plans will reduce costly distortions in US health care if it is allowed to take effect as scheduled in 2018. (Agree)
Money Market Funds (US) | In the absence of floating net asset values, taxpayers would be better protected if each money market fund in the U.S. were required to set aside capital to protect against losses while holding back a portion of shareholders' cash for a time when they seek to withdraw all of their money. (Agree)
Bah, Humbug (US) | Giving specific presents as holiday gifts is inefficient, because recipients could satisfy their preferences much better with cash. (Disagree)
Brexit (US) | If the UK exits the EU, then it substantially increases the chances that some other current region of the EU will also exit within the following decade. (Agree)
Student Loans (US) | Rules that tie each college's eligibility for federal student loans to its students' graduation rates and post-schooling employment outcomes would better protect taxpayers from losses on student loans. (Agree)
Charitable Deductions (US) | Reducing the income-tax deductibility of charitable gifts is a less distortionary way to raise new revenue than raising the same amount of revenue through a proportional increase in all marginal tax rates. (Agree)
QE3 (US) | Even if inflationary pressures rise substantially as a result of quantitative easing and low interest rates, the Federal Reserve has ample tools to rein inflation back in if it chooses to do so. (Agree)
Price Gouging (US) | Connecticut should pass its Senate Bill 60, which states that during a “severe weather event emergency, no person within the chain of distribution of consumer goods and services shall sell or offer to sell consumer goods or services for a price that is unconscionably excessive.” (Disagree)
Italy’s Banks (EU) | Setting the EU rules aside, and assuming it would take 2.5% of Italy’s GDP to recapitalize its banks, the Italian government would improve financial stability in Europe if it injected this amount of public funds into its banks. (Agree)
Bailouts: Banks and Automakers (US) | Taking into account all of the economic consequences — including the incentives of banks to ensure their own liquidity and solvency in the future — the benefits of bailing out U.S. banks in 2008 will end up exceeding the costs. (Agree)
Inflation Target (US) | Raising the inflation target to 4% would make it possible for the Fed to lower rates by a greater amount in a future recession. (Agree)
City of London (EU) | All else equal, there are substantial advantages to having much of Europe’s human capital and infrastructure for international financial activity clustered in a single city, as they are at present in London. (Agree)
Textbook Prices (US) | Most college professors who assign textbooks would not be able to guess, within 10% of the actual figure, the retail price that their students pay for new copies of those books. (Agree)
Local Tax Incentives (US) | The US as a whole benefits when cities or states compete with each other by giving tax incentives to firms to locate operations in their jurisdictions. (Disagree)
Student Loans (US) | Loans to students attending for-profit colleges are especially risky because students attending them have had default rates that greatly exceed those for comparable students attending public and non-profit private institutions. (Agree)
Big Banks (US) | The U.S government should make further efforts to shrink the size of the country's largest banks — such as by capping the size of their liabilities or penalizing large banks more heavily through taxes or other means — because the existing regulations do not require the biggest banks to internalize enough of the "too-big-to-fail" risks that they pose. (Agree)
Big Banks (US) | The economic benefits to the U.S. of having a handful of banks with balance sheets greater than $1 trillion are small. (Agree)
Patents (US) | All else equal, Patent Assertion Entities — which specialize in acquiring and asserting patents and are popularly known as “patent trolls" — promote innovation in the U.S. (Disagree)
Repatriated Profits (US) | Lowering the effective marginal tax rate on US corporations’ repatriated profits for a year would boost US capital investment significantly. (Disagree)
Fed Policy (US) | The Fed should not reduce its purchases of mortgage-backed securities and treasurys until there is clearer evidence of strong and sustained employment growth. (Agree)
Scottish Independence (US) | Although there are many issues for Scotland’s voters to consider, one consequence of separating from the rest of the UK would be greater macroeconomic instability for Scotland for many years. (Agree)
School Vouchers (US) | The main drawback to allowing all public school students to take the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools) would be that some students would not make an active choice and would be left with much worse peers and a weaker school. (Agree)
City of London (EU) | All else equal, Britain’s rules on hiring, firing and working hours are significantly more conducive to financial activity than those in other large European countries. (Agree)
Trade Within Europe (EU) | Freer movement of goods and services across borders within Europe has made many low-skilled western European citizens worse off since the 1980s. (Disagree)
Buy American (US) | Federal mandates that government purchases should be “buy American” unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have a significant positive impact on U.S. manufacturing employment. (Disagree)
Brexit II (US) | Because of the Brexit vote's outcome, the UK's real per-capita income level is likely to be lower a decade from now. (Agree)
Economic Stimulus (US) | Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs. (Agree)
French Labor Policies (US) | France’s overall employment is higher today because of the 35 hour work week than it would be without a limit on weekly hours. (Disagree)
Poverty and Measurement (US) | The association between health and economic growth in poor countries primarily involves faster growth generating better health, rather than the other way around. (Agree)
Europe (US) | Assuming that Germany eventually agrees to backstop the debt of southern European countries, the eurozone as a whole will be better off if that bailout is unconditional, rather than accompanied by the labor market reforms and future budget controls that Germany is demanding of countries in return. (Disagree)
Migration Within Europe (EU) | Freer movement of people to live and work across borders within Europe has made many low-skilled western European citizens worse off since the 1980s. (Disagree)
Supplying Kidneys (US) | A market that allows payment for human kidneys should be established on a trial basis to help extend the lives of patients with kidney disease. (Agree)
Amazon and Market Power (US) | Amazon has sufficient monopsony power that regulatory intervention is likely to make consumers of books better off, taking into account implementation costs and the effect of intervention on incentives. (Disagree)
School Vouchers (US) | If public school students had the option of taking the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools), most would be better off. (Agree)
Ride Sharing (EU) | Consumers will be better off, on balance, if European cities treat firms that provide ride-sharing platforms (such as Uber) as substantively different from taxi firms, and thus not necessarily warranting the same regulation. (Agree)
Cable-Satellite TV Fees (US) | Consumers would not necessarily be better off if cable and satellite TV firms were required to offer a la carte pricing for individual channels, because the networks' programming charges and the satellite-and-cable fees could adjust in response to this rule. (Agree)
Low-Skilled Immigrants (US) | Unless they were compensated by others, many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year. (Agree)
Low-Skilled Immigrants (US) | The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year. (Agree)
Indexing (US) | The annual indexing of Social Security benefits to increases in the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (the CPI-W) leads to higher benefits than would be required to compensate recipients for genuine cost-of-living increases. (Agree)
Bailouts: Banks and Automakers (US) | Taking into account all of the economic consequences — including effects on corporate managers' incentives and on creditors' expectations of how their claims will be treated in future bankruptcies — the benefits of bailing out GM and Chrysler will end up exceeding the costs. (Agree)
Brexit II (US) | Because of the Brexit vote's outcome, the rest of the EU's real per-capita income level is likely to be lower a decade from now. (Agree)
US Interest Rates (US) | The Fed should raise its target interest rate when it meets in mid-December. (Agree)
Minimum Wage (US) | The distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy. (Agree)
Too Big to Fail (US) | The average size of the 19 financial firms that just completed the Federal Reserve stress tests (i.e. the CCAR) would be substantially smaller if they did not have implicit government support. (Agree)
QE3 (US) | Even if the third round of quantitative easing that the Fed recently announced increases annual consumer price inflation over the next five years, the increase will be inconsequential. (Agree)
Refugees in Germany (EU) | The influx of refugees into Germany beginning in the summer of 2015 will generate net economic benefits for German citizens over the succeeding decade. (Agree)
Innovation and Growth (US) | Future innovations worldwide will not be transformational enough to promote sustained per-capita economic growth rates in the U.S. and western Europe over the next century as high as those over the past 150 years. (Disagree)
Net Neutrality II (US) | Considering both distributional effects and changes in efficiency, it is a good idea to let companies that send video or other content to consumers pay more to Internet service providers for the right to send that traffic using faster or higher quality service. (Agree)
Executive Pay (US) | Mandating that U.S. publicly listed corporations must allow shareholders to cast a non-binding vote on executive compensation was a good idea. (Agree)
Brexit (US) | If the UK opts to withdraw from the European Union, and assuming Scotland stays in the UK, the level of the UK's real per-capita income a decade later will be lower than if it remains part of the EU. (Agree)
Quarterly Earnings (US) | A switch from quarterly to annual earnings reports would, on net, benefit shareholders. (Disagree)
Trade Deals (US) | Refusing to liberalize trade unless partner countries adopt new labor or environmental rules is a bad policy, because even if the new standards would reduce distortions on some dimensions, such a policy involves threatening to maintain large distortions in the form of restricted trade. (Agree)
Amazon and Market Power (US) | Amazon has monopsony power in the market for books that is significantly reducing the supply of books. (Disagree)
Infrastructure (revisited) (US) | Past experience of public spending and political economy suggests that if the government spent more on roads, railways, bridges and airports, many of the projects would have low or negative returns. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on May 23, 2013. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Fracking (revisited) (US) | New technology for fracking natural gas, by lowering energy costs in the United States, will make US industrial firms more cost competitive and thus significantly stimulate the growth of US merchandise exports. (The experts panel previously voted on this question on May 23, 2012. Those earlier results can be found here.) (Agree)
Education (US) | Public school students would receive a higher quality education if they all had the option of taking the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools). (Agree)
Capital Outflows (US) | Experience over the past 30 years shows that for the typical emerging market nation facing rapid capital outflows, spending foreign currency reserves to defend its currency is a better policy for its citizens than not doing so. (Disagree)
Medicare (US) | Consider one of two proposals for restraining future Medicare spending, each by the same amount: The method that President Obama enacted in the Affordable Care Act — reducing Medicare-related payments to private insurers and altering the payment system for doctors and hospitals — imposes risks on future Medicare patients because over time the supply of doctors, hospitals and insurers willing to offer them health services may decline in response to restrained payments. (Agree)
Deficits (US) | If the US reduced its fiscal deficit, then its trade deficit would also shrink. (Agree)
Fannie and Freddie (US) | Prior to the crisis, the benefits from the funding advantage that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had by virtue of perceived government support mostly went to their shareholders, rather than into substantially lower interest rates on residential mortgages. (Agree)
Early Education (US) | Using government funds to guarantee preschool education for four-year olds would yield a much lower social return than the ones achieved by the most highly touted targeted preschool initiatives. (Agree)
Student Credit Risk (US) | Conventional economic reasoning suggests that it would be a good policy to enact the recent Senate bill that would let undergraduate students borrow through the government Stafford program at interest rates equivalent to the primary credit rates offered to banks through the Federal Reserve's discount window. (Agree)
Poverty and Measurement (US) | The decline in the fraction of people with incomes under, say, $1 per day is a good measure of whether well-being is improving among low-income populations. (Agree)
Textbook Prices (US) | Even though the professors who select textbooks are different form the people who pay for them, the price of new edition college textbooks reflect classic forces of supply and demand. (Disagree)
Taxing Capital and Labor (US) | Despite relabeling concerns, taxing capital income at a permanently lower rate than labor income would result in higher average long-term prosperity, relative to an alternative that generated the same amount of tax revenue by permanently taxing capital and labor income at equal rates instead. (Agree)
Border Adjustment Tax (US) | Implementing a "destination based cash flow tax (including border adjustment)" of the type advocated by Speaker Ryan would substantially reduce the US trade deficit within the next few years. (Disagree)
US Fiscal Risks (US) | With or without a default, current uncertainty over future taxing and spending policies of the US government is likely to depress private investment and hiring by enough to reduce GDP growth by at least a quarter of a percentage point over the next 12 months. (Agree)
Currency Manipulation (US) | Bank of Japan monetary policies that result in a weaker yen make Americans generally worse off. (Disagree)
Security Screening (US) | The former head of the Transportation Security Administration is correct in arguing that randomizing airport “security procedures encountered by passengers (additional upper-torso pat-downs, a thorough bag search, a swab test of carry-ons, etc.), while not subjecting everyone to the full gamut" would make it "much harder for terrorists to learn how to evade security procedures." (Agree)
Greece’s Referendum (US) | The median Greek citizen will be better off if there is a “yes” vote in the July 5 referendum on whether to accept the terms of the bailout package offered by Greece's creditors. (Agree)
Infrastructure (US) | Past experience of public spending and political economy suggests that if the government spent more on roads, railways, bridges and airports, many of the projects would have low or negative returns. (Agree)
Breaking Up Banks (US) | The four largest domestic US banks currently have around 40% of the industry’s domestic assets (an average of 10% each). In early 1998, before Glass-Steagall ended and before Citicorp merged with Travelers, they held 13.2% (an average of 3.3% each). Thirty years ago, before interstate branching was fully permitted, that combined share was around 8% (an average of 2% each). Capping US banks’ size so that no single bank could be larger than 4% of the sector's domestic assets would lower systemic risk in the US. (Agree)
European Debt (US) | The recent oversubscribed debt issues of Greece and Portugal suggest that sovereign default by any euro area country is unlikely in the foreseeable future. (Agree)
Executive Pay (US) | The typical chief executive officer of a publicly traded corporation in the U.S. is paid more than his or her marginal contribution to the firm's value. (Agree)
Laffer Curve (US) | A cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would lead to higher GDP within five years than without the tax cut. (Agree)
College Tuition (US) | An important reason why private college and university tuition has risen faster than the CPI during the past few decades is because competition for faculty members — whose potential earnings in other sectors have steadily improved — has driven up their pay faster than their productivity. (Agree)
Italy’s Debt (US) | Absent outside help to deal with runs, such as a pledge of fiscal support from Germany or an unlimited commitment by the ECB to buy bonds, there is no spending-and-tax plan Italy can announce that would be credible enough to hold its interest rates low enough to stabilize its Debt-to-GDP ratio. (Agree)
Border Adjustment Tax (US) | Implementing a “destination based cash flow tax (including border adjustment)” of the type advocated by Speaker Ryan would substantially raise prices for US consumers. (Agree)
Dynamic Scoring (US) | For large proposed changes in tax rates or the tax base, official revenue forecasts provided to Congress would probably be more accurate if the CBO and JCT tried to estimate fully how the proposed tax changes would affect growth-driven revenue. (Agree)
ECB Asset Purchases (EU) | If the economic outlook in the euro area becomes less favorable, then increasing the ECB's asset purchase program (in size or duration) would substantially increase the euro area's economic growth over the following five years. (Disagree)
AT&T and Time Warner (US) | A merger of AT&T; and Time Warner would likely increase consumer surplus over the ensuing decade. (Disagree)
$15 Minimum Wage (US) | If the federal minimum wage is raised gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020, the employment rate for low-wage US workers will be substantially lower than it would be under the status quo. (Agree)
Trump and Share Prices (US) | US share prices have risen since Donald Trump’s election victory at least partly because the policies he seems poised to implement are likely to increase US real GDP growth. (Disagree)
Europe (US) | If Germany fails to bail out the southern tier of Europe, its own economy will be hurt more — because of output and asset losses — than it would be by an unconditional bailout. (Agree)
Raising Interest Rates (US) | The Fed should wait until its preferred measure of inflation (Core PCE) is clearly rising — and not just forecast to rise — before it begins hiking interest rates. (Agree)
QE3 (US) | Even if the third round of quantitative easing that the Fed recently announced increases real GDP growth over the next two years, the increase will be inconsequential. (Agree)
European Debt (US) | Even if all the official-sector funding that Greece received from 2010 through August 2012 is written off, propping up Greece to buy time for the rest of Europe to prepare for Greek default has been better for citizens of the Eurozone outside of Greece than a policy that would have cut off funding sooner. (Agree)
Dynamic Scoring (US) | To the extent that a given tax change might affect revenues partly by affecting national-income growth, existing research provides enough guidance to generate informative bounds on the size of any growth-driven revenue effect. (Disagree)
Inflation Target (US) | If the Fed changed its inflation target from 2% to 4%, the long-run costs of inflation for households would be essentially unchanged. (Disagree)
Net Neutrality (US) | Allowing Internet service providers to charge content companies for access to the ISPs' customers would provide net benefits to consumers. (Disagree)
Infrastructure Spending (US) | The advisability of increasing federal spending on roads, railways, bridges and airports is independent of whether the US also enacts tax cuts that substantially lower revenues. (Disagree)
European Debt (US) | Unless there is a substantial default by some combination of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain on their sovereign debt and commercial bank debt, plus credible reforms to prevent excessive borrowing in the future, the euro area is headed for a costly financial meltdown and a prolonged recession. (Agree)
Russia Sanctions (US) | Past experience suggests that economic sanctions do little to deter the target countries from their course of action. (Disagree)
Fracking (US) | New technology for fracking natural gas, by lowering energy costs in the United States, will make US industrial firms more cost competitive and thus significantly stimulate the growth of US merchandise exports. (Agree)
Obesity and Soft Drinks (US) | Taxes or bans on large bottles of soft drinks containing sugar are not likely to have a significant effect on obesity rates because people will substitute towards consuming excessive calories in other ways. (Agree)
Patents (US) | Within the software industry, the US patent system makes consumers better off than they would be in the absence of patents. (Disagree)
Too Big to Fail (US) | The 19 financial firms that just completed the Federal Reserve stress tests (i.e. the CCAR) are big primarily because of economies of scale and scope, rather than because of implicit government support. (Agree)
Local Tax Incentives (EU) | Giving tax incentives to specific firms to locate operations in a country typically generates domestic benefits that outweigh the costs to the country providing the incentives. (Disagree)
Robots (US) | Information technology and automation are a central reason why median wages have been stagnant in the US over the past decade, despite rising productivity. (Agree)
Greece (US) | In 10 years, per capita purchasing power in Greece will be higher if — rather than continuing to service its debts over the next decade and complying with the budget rules currently in place — it refuses to accept a continuation of its current troika program and explicitly defaults on its debt held by the official sector. (Agree)
Inequality and Monetary Policy (US) | The ratio of the 90th to the 10th percentile of the US income distribution has been unaffected by the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policies since the financial crisis. (Disagree)
Quarterly Earnings (US) | Letting publicly traded US firms report earnings annually rather than quarterly would lead their executives to place more weight on long-term issues in their investments and other decisions. (Agree)
Repatriated Profits (US) | Permanently lowering the effective marginal tax rate on US corporations’ repatriated profits, such as by moving to a territorial-based tax system, would boost US capital investment significantly. (Disagree)
Minimum Wage (US) | Raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment. (Agree)
European Debt (US) | A substantial sovereign-debt default by some combination of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain is a necessary condition for the euro area as a whole to grow at its pre-crisis trend rate over the next three years. (Disagree)
Currency Manipulation (US) | Economic analysis can identify whether countries are using their exchange rates to benefit their own people at the expense of their trading partners’ welfare. (Disagree)
Breaking Up Banks (US) | The US financial system would contribute more to the average American's welfare if the size of US banks were capped so that none could be larger than 4% of the sector's domestic assets. (Disagree)
Robots and Artificial Intelligence (EU) | Holding labor market institutions and job training fixed, rising use of robots and artificial intelligence is likely to increase substantially the number of workers in advanced countries who are unemployed for long periods. (Agree)
Local Tax Incentives (US) | Giving tax incentives to specific firms to locate operations in a city or state typically generates local benefits that outweigh the costs to the city and/or state providing the incentives. (Agree)

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Questions of the IGM Economic Experts Panel, sorted by consensus