Government promises

Promises, promises.

In the target article I argued that cognitive neuropsychologists have increasingly deviated from the original goals and methods of the subject. In this reply to the commentators, I argue that future progress using neuropsychological approaches to understanding behaviour is most likely to be made by the use of converging sources of evidence that are garnered by an interdisciplinary methodology. ...

Promises, promises.

It’s easy to think that there is no problem facing medicine that information technology can’t solve. Experience in the US gives little reason for optimism. Huge investments havemostly failed to solve old problems and have created new ones. US doctors report spending two hours on computer tasks for every hour with patients (doi:10.7326/M16-0961). Poor usability and limited interoperability of el...

Electronic medical records--promises, promises!

Discretionary Taxes and Public Investment when Government Promises are not Enforceable

We characterize Markov-perfect equilibria in a setting where the absence of government commitment affects the financing of productive public capital. We show that at any date, a government in office only considers intertemporal distortions over two consecutive periods in choosing taxes. We then use our framework to quantify the value of commitment, which we define as that obtained from binding ...

Distortionary Taxes and Public Investment when Government Promises are not Enforceable∗

We characterize Markov-perfect equilibria in a setting where the absence of government commitment affects the financing of productive public capital. We show that at any date, a government in office only considers intertemporal distortions over two consecutive periods in choosing taxes. We then use our framework to quantify the value of commitment, which we define as that obtained from binding ...