Savings Bonds at Tax Time

Obama says: "We cannot continue on this course. And we certainly cannot go back to an economy based on inflated profits and maxed-out credit cards; the cycles of speculative booms and painful busts; a system that put the interests of the short-term ahead of the needs of long-term. We have to revive this economy and rebuild it stronger than before. And making sure that folks have the opportunity and incentive to save – for a home or college, for retirement or a rainy day – is essential to that effort. If you work hard and meet your responsibilities, this country is going to honor our collective responsibility to you: to ensure that you can save and secure your retirement. That is why we are announcing several common-sense changes that will help families put away money for the future. We’ll make it easier for people to save their federal tax refunds, which 100 million families receive. Today, if you have a retirement account, you can have your refund deposited directly into your account. With this change, we’ll make it easier for those without retirement plans to save their refunds as well. You’ll be able to check a box on your tax return to receive your refund as a savings bond."

D2D Fund has been one of the prime movers behind this for the past few years. So congratulations to them for all their amazing work on this issue! Some of the early impetus for this work came was back in 2005 when Peter Tufano and I published a piece laying out a number of ideas for reforming Savings Bond policy. One of them, inspired by an archival find in some old bound copies of IRS tax data, was the Treasury re-instate the savings bond purchase option that had been available in the 1960s.

Final thought, I heard Bob Reich this morning talking, as others have, about how household savings appears to be good for individuals (as eloquently stated above) but possibly bad for the economy as a whole which needs spending and stimulus. Obama's approach to this issue in his comments is interesting. He doesn't engage with the issue that Reich raises. Instead, he seems to focus on increased household saving as emblematic of a kind of more general cultural shift that he is trying to generate in the macro-economy.

Less is More?

One piece of conventional wisdom suggests that more is more, at least when it comes to academic CVs. It is not unusual to see senior faculty with CV's that run into the several dozen pages. We eager graduate students often seek to emulate that, but generally have much less to work with - thus the kitchen sink makes it on the Vitae page. The plus side to this is that we put it all out there and make public all the departmental service, presentations, unpublished papers, and so on that we've spent time on.

I'm wondering what the negative is. Would we be better served to throw "selected" before each section heading and only put on the really good stuff? Perhaps it's just overload to list your 200 presentations at inter-departmental seminars and regional meetings rather than your 2 ASA talks? Maybe better to forget the minor publications and just list that one big paper (for those mythical grad students who have it)?

I guess the real question here is if "junk" somehow diminishes the really good stuff. Are we better off leaving it off?

Advisable? Ethical? Obvious?

Annals of Self-Promotion: ASA

I'm going to be presenting my paper "Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation" at the ASA session on Gender, The Economy, and Work. It's coming up at 12:30pm Sunday the 9th in the Hilton, Union Square 3-4, 4th floor.

Viviana Zelizer will be the discussant and there are three other excellent-sounding papers.

Savings and Gambling

OK. Here’s how it works: You buy a lottery ticket for a $1 and at the end of the week, there’s a drawing to see which entrants will win the large cash prizes. Then, next week, the same thing happens again, except, you don’t need to buy a new ticket to enter. And, whenever you want, you can have your $1 back. Sound good?

Then you are just the latest to discover the allure of prize-linked savings products.

This past week, the FDIC’s Committee on Economic Inclusion (ComE-IN) took up the topic of prize-linked savings and heard from Peter Tufano about some new results from a pilot program run by a set of credit unions in the US. Prize-linked savings products have not been used widely in the US, but have proven very successful elsewhere around the world (the UK’s premium bond is perhaps the best known example). Mauro Guillen at Penn has a nice overview piece about these products and I’ve co-authored (along with Peter, Shawn Cole, and Daryl Collins) an HBS case study about the efforts of a South African bank to implement a similar product.

From a policy perspective, prize linked savings products are appealing because they have the potential to motivate small savers who might find the basically negligible interest earned on a $100 or even $1,000 balance to be weak incentive to save.

From a design perspective, these products work by pooling the small interest payments usually made to each individual who saves in a traditional bank account into one or several very large cash prizes and then awarding those prizes randomly to one or several savers. Each dollar invested generally earns the saver one chance at winning and while the chances of winning are certainly small, as evidenced by the success of state lotteries, that isn’t much of a deterrent to participation. But, while in state lotteries your entry stake is forfeited after each drawing, here your stake is simply your savings.

In essence, the marketing pitch is "you buy the first ticket, the rest are on us, and your money back (and maybe a whole lot more)."

Annals of Self-Promotion: SSSP Presentation

I'm going to be presenting my paper on wealth and marriage at the SSSP Annual Meetings in San Francisco on Saturday. Come check it out if you'll be around.

ATUS in Action

Very cool new interactive graphic on the NYT website that makes use of ATUS data to provide some demographic breakdowns of how Americans spend their time.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Clicking on any of the striations of the chart brings up averages (by group), data that has already been easily accessible in the BLS's own tables. But, seeing the time distribution of tasks is really interesting and not something that I've seen much of before.

I've mostly focused on housework in my use of the ATUS data and I was struck here by how much housework still gets done in the middle of the day. Some of that is being done by retired folks, but a lot of it seems to be attributable to people not in the labor force.

Totally unrelated to housework, I was struck by how little time Americans spend on average on the internet - just about 8 minutes a day. I'm feeling pretty atypical. Also, really interesting to compare sleep schedules by age and race. Perhaps we're seeing a night shift effect in the different distributions of day-time sleep by race?

Annals of Somebody Should Make A: CV Repository

When I'm working on a lit review or learning a new area of research, my main resources are academic search tools like google scholar. But, once I identify a key author in the literature, I also often check out that person's CV to get a quick summary of everything he or she has written on the topic. That works well for folks who are still active. But, it doesn't work at all for scholars who were researching before the age of online CVs and it won't work so well when folks who currently have their CVs online start retiring.

So: Somebody should make an online repository of CVs, each archived at the point when faculty retire and reflective of their whole publication record. Participation would be voluntary, but I have the feeling most academics would be willing to have their CVs preserved for posterity. This kind of thing could also be useful for resarch on the profession, such as charting out networks of collaboration based on where people spent time as faculty members.