Principles Of Economics 2nd Edition Steven A. Greenlaw: University Of Mary Washington, David Shapiro: Pennsylvania State University - Solutions

Compared with the share of workers in most other high-income countries, is the share of U.S. workers whose wages are determined by union bargaining higher or lower? Why or why not?
Do unions typically oppose new technology out of a fear that it will reduce the number of union jobs? Why or why not?
Table 15.6 shows the quantity demanded and supplied in the labor market for driving city buses in the town of Unionville, where all the bus drivers belong to a union.
A group of 10 people have the following annual incomes: $55,000, $30,000, $15,000, $20,000, $35,000,$80,000, $40,000, $45,000, $30,000, $50,000. Calculate the share of total income received by each quintile of this income distribution. Do the top and bottom quintiles in this distribution have a
Susan is a single mother with three children. She can earn $8 per hour and works up to 2,000 hours per year. However, if she does not earn any income at all, she will receive government benefits totaling $16,000 per year. For every $1 of income she earns, her level of government support will be
In country B, the population is 900 million and 100 million people are living below the poverty line. What is the poverty rate?
In country A, the population is 300 million and 50 million people are living below the poverty line. What is the poverty rate?
Explain what the long- and short-term consequences are of not promoting equality or working to reduce poverty
How does a society or a country make the decision about the tradeoff between equality and economic output? Hint: Think about the political system.
Redistribution of income occurs through the federal income tax and government antipoverty programs.Explain whether or not this level of redistribution is appropriate and whether more redistribution should occur.
To reduce income inequality, should the marginal tax rates on the top 1% be increased?
What do you think is more important to focus on when considering inequality: income inequality or wealth inequality?
Explain a situation using the supply and demand for skilled labor in which the increased number of college graduates leads to depressed wages. Given the rising cost of going to college, explain why a college education will or will not increase income inequality.
The demand for skilled workers in the United States has been increasing. To increase the supply of skilled workers, many argue that immigration reform to allow more skilled labor into the United States is needed. Explain whether you agree or disagree.
Explain how a country may experience greater equality in the distribution of income, yet still experience high rates of poverty Hint: Look at the Clear It Up "How is poverty measured in low-income countries?" and compare to Table 14.5.
Think about the business cycle: during a recession, unemployment increases; it decreases in an expansionary phase. Explain what happens to TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid programs at each phase of the business cycle (recession, trough, expansion, and peak).
Many critics of government programs to help lowincome individuals argue that these programs create a poverty trap. Explain how programs such as TANF, EITC, SNAP, and Medicaid will affect low-income individuals and whether or not you think these programs will benefit families and children.
Explain how you would create a government program that would give an incentive for labor to increase hours and keep labor from falling into the poverty trap.
Exercise 14.2 and Exercise 14.3 asked you to describe the labor-leisure tradeoff for Jonathon. Since, in the first example, there is no monetary incentive for Jonathon to work, explain why he may choose to work anyway. Explain what the opportunity costs of working and not working might be for
If a family of three earned $20,000, would they be able to make ends meet given the official poverty threshold?
What goods and services would you include in an estimate of the basic necessities for a family of four?
Describe how a push for economic equality might reduce incentives to work and produce output. Then describe how a push for economic inequality might not have such effects.
Identify some public policies that can reduce the level of economic inequality.
What are the main reasons economists give for the increase in inequality of incomes?
What are some reasons why a certain degree of inequality of income would be expected in a market economy?
How has the inequality of income changed in the U.S. economy since the late 1970s?
If a country had perfect income equality what would the Lorenz curve look like?
What is measured on the two axes of a Lorenz curve?
Who is included in the top income quintile?
Briefly explain the differences between TANF, the earned income tax credit, SNAP, and Medicaid.
What is the safety net?
Who are the near-poor?
How can the effect of the poverty trap be reduced?
How does the poverty trap discourage people from working?
What is the difference between poverty and income inequality?
What is the poverty line?
How is the poverty rate calculated?
Why is there reluctance on the part of some in the United States to redistribute income so that greater equality can be achieved?
Which set of policies is more likely to cause a tradeoff between economic output and equality: policies of redistribution or policies aimed at the ladder of opportunity? Explain how the production possibility frontier tradeoff between economic equality and output might look in each case.
Here is a second hypothesis: A well-funded social safety net may lead to less regulation of the market economy.Explain why this might be so, and sketch a production possibility curve that shows this tradeoff.
Here is one hypothesis: A well-funded social safety net can increase economic equality but will reduce economic output. Explain why this might be so, and sketch a production possibility curve that shows this tradeoff.
Using two demand and supply diagrams, one for the low-wage labor market and one for the high-wage labor market, explain how a program that increased educational levels for a substantial number of low-skill workers could reduce income inequality.
Using two demand and supply diagrams, one for the low-wage labor market and one for the high-wage labor market, explain how information technology can increase income inequality if it is a complement to high-income workers like salespeople and managers, but a substitute for low-income workers like
Table 14.9 shows the share of income going to each quintile of the income distribution for the United Kingdom in 1979 and 1991. Use this data to calculate what the points on a Lorenz curve would be, and sketch the Lorenz curve.How did inequality in the United Kingdom shift over this time period?
A group of 10 people have the following annual incomes: $24,000, $18,000, $50,000, $100,000, $12,000,$36,000, $80,000, $10,000, $24,000, $16,000. Calculate the share of total income received by each quintile of this income distribution. Do the top and bottom quintiles in this distribution have a
How does the TANF attempt to loosen the poverty trap?
We have discovered that the welfare system discourages recipients from working because the more income they earn, the less welfare benefits they receive. How does the earned income tax credit attempt to loosen the poverty trap?
Imagine that the government reworks the welfare policy that was affecting Jonathan in question 1, so that for each dollar someone like Jonathan earns at work, his government benefits diminish by only 30 cents. Reconstruct the table from question 1 to account for this change in policy. Draw
Jonathon is a single father with one child. He can work as a server for $6 per hour for up to 1,500 hours per year. He is eligible for welfare, and so if he does not earn any income, he will receive a total of $10,000 per year.He can work and still receive government benefits, but for every $1 of
Describe how each of these changes is likely to affect poverty and inequality:a. Incomes rise for low-income and high-income workers, but rise more for the high-income earners.b. Incomes fall for low-income and high-income workers, but fall more for high-income earners.
Becky and Sarah are sisters who share a room.Their room can easily get messy, and their parents are always telling them to clean it up. Here are the costs and benefits to both Becky and Sarah, of taking the time to clean their room: If both Becky and Sarah clean, they each spends two hours and get
The marginal private costs and the marginal private benefits of a firm producing fuel-efficient cars is represented in the following diagram (show the equilibrium P_market, Q_market). The government would like to increase the amount of fuel-efficient cars to be produced and sold to Q_social. One
HighFlyer Airlines wants to build new airplanes with greatly increased cabin space. This will allow HighFlyer Airlines to give passengers more comfort and sell more tickets at a higher price. However, redesigning the cabin means rethinking many other elements of the airplane as well, like the
Radio stations, tornado sirens, light houses, and street lights are all public goods in that all are nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary. Therefore why does the government provide tornado sirens, street lights and light houses but not radio stations (other than PBS stations)?
Provide two examples of goods/services that are classified as private goods/services even though they are provided by a federal government.
Why is a football game on ESPN a quasi-public good but a game on the NBC, CBS, or ABC is a public good?
How do public television stations, like PBS, try to overcome the free rider problem?
Is it inevitable that government must become involved in supporting investments in new technology?
Can a company be guaranteed all of the social benefits of a new invention? Why or why not?
Explain why the federal government funds national defense.
What is the free rider problem?
Name two public goods and explain why they are public goods.
What are the two key characteristics of public goods?
What can government do to encourage the development of new technology?
Why might private markets tend to provide too few incentives for the development of new technology?
Will the demand for borrowing and investing in R&D be higher or lower if there are no external benefits?
In what ways do company investments in research and development create positive externalities?
Are the following goods nonrivalrous in consumption?a. slice of pizzab. laptop computerc. public radiod. ice cream cone
Which of the following goods or services are nonexcludable?a. police protectionb. streaming music from satellite transmission programsc. roadsd. primary educatione. cell phone service
Education provides both private benefits to those who receive it and broader social benefits for the economy as a whole. Think about the types of policies a government can follow to address the issue of positive spillovers in technology and then suggest a parallel set of policies that governments
When a neighborhood is cleaned up and kept neat, there are a number of positive spillovers: higher property values, less crime, happier residents. What types of government policies can encourage neighborhoods to clean up?
The Junkbuyers Company travels from home to home, looking for opportunities to buy items that would otherwise be put out with the garbage, but which the company can resell or recycle. Which will be larger, the private or the social benefits?
The Gizmo Company is planning to develop new household gadgets. Table 13.5 shows the company’s demand for financial capital for research and development of these gadgets, based on expected rates of return from sales. Now, say that every investment would have an additional 5% social benefit—that
Samsung’s R&D investment in digital devices has increased profits by 20%. Is this a private or social benefit?
Are positive externalities reflected in market demand curves? Why or why not?
In the Land of Purity, there is only one form of pollution, called “gunk.” Table 12.14 shows possible combinations of economic output and reduction of gunk, depending on what kinds of environmental regulations are chosen.
A city currently emits 16 million gallons (MG) of raw sewage into a lake that is beside the city. Table 12.13 shows the total costs (TC) in thousands of dollars of cleaning up the sewage to different levels, together with the total benefits (TB) of doing so. Benefits include environmental,
Table 12.12, shows the supply and demand conditions for a firm that will play trumpets on the streets when requested. Qs1 is the quantity supplied without social costs. Qs2 is the quantity supplied with social costs. What is the negative externality in this situation? Identify the equilibrium price
Refer to Table 12.2. The externality created by the production of refrigerators was $100. However, once both the private and additional external costs were taken into consideration, the market price increased by only$50. If the external costs were $100 why did the price only increase by $50 when
Show the market for cigarettes in equilibrium, assuming that there are no laws banning smoking in public. Label the equilibrium private market price and quantity as Pm and Qm. Add whatever is needed to the model to show the impact of the negative externality from second-hand smoking. (Hint: In this
Technological innovations shift the production possibility curve. Look at graph you sketched for Exercise 12.13 Which types of technologies should a country promote? Should “clean” technologies be promoted over other technologies? Why or why not?
How can high-income countries benefit from covering much of the cost of reducing pollution created by low-income countries?
Can extreme levels of pollution hurt the economic development of a high-income country? Why or why not?
Recycling is a relatively inexpensive solution to much of the environmental contamination from plastics, glass, and other waste materials. Is it a sound policy to make it mandatory for everybody to recycle?
From an economic perspective, is it sound policy to pursue a goal of zero pollution? Why or why not?
Is zero pollution an optimal goal? Why or why not?
Is zero pollution possible under a marketable permits system? Why or why not?
Will a system of marketable permits work with thousands of firms? Why or why not?
Consider two ways of protecting elephants from poachers in African countries. In one approach, the government sets up enormous national parks that have sufficient habitat for elephants to thrive and forbids all local people to enter the parks or to injure either the elephants or their habitat in
Would environmentalists favor command-andcontrol policies as a way to reduce pollution? Why or why not?
Suppose you want to put a dollar value on the external costs of carbon emissions from a power plant.What information or data would you obtain to measure the external [not social] cost?
What does a point inside the production possibility frontier represent?
In the tradeoff between economic output and environmental protection, what do the combinations on the protection possibility curve represent?
What arguments do low-income countries make in international discussions of global environmental cleanup?
What are the economic tradeoffs between lowincome and high-income countries in international conferences on global environmental damage?
As the extent of environmental protection expands, would you expect the marginal benefits of environmental protection to rise or fall? Why or why not?
As the extent of environmental protection expands, would you expect marginal costs of environmental protection to rise or fall? Why or why not?
What are better-defined property rights and what incentive do they provide to take external costs into account?
What is a marketable permit and what incentive does it provide for a firm to take external costs into account?
What is a pollution charge and what incentive does it provide for a firm to take external costs into account?

Showing 1000 - 1100 of 1475

Principles Of Economics 2nd Edition Steven A. Greenlaw: University Of Mary Washington, David Shapiro: Pennsylvania State University - Solutions

Step by Step Answers