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Wojtek Kopczuk 🇵🇱🇺🇦 Profile picture
Wojtek Kopczuk 🇵🇱🇺🇦
@wwwojtekk
Economist, tax policy/inequality. Editor of @JPubEcon. Professional skeptic. Anti-illiberal. Persiflageur.
3 subscribers
Nov 15 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This nonsense keeps getting repeated. Countries use tariffs when they don't have more efficient tools of taxation, because all they can control and enforce is the border. Reliance on tariffs is the sign of being a developing country, not something that you aspire to. Tariffs are inefficient taxes. They distort trade and make you lose gains from comparative advantage. They distort production because they are to the large extent taxes on intermediate inputs. They have narrow base so require high tax rates to raise meaningful revenue
Mar 19, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This got more attention than I expected, so let me summarize what I think about gender wage gaps (based on a casual reading of the literature, so certainly subject to criticism by experts) /1 The raw wage gap (no controls) is a mix of preferences, choices, market conditions, and - potentially - discrimination. You can "eliminate" almost all of it by controlling for individual and job characteristics /2
Feb 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Image Let me be the first one to say that the end of communism has massively increased prosperity. Also, not bad times for peace ImageImage
Nov 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Among white students admitted to Harvard, 54% are athletes+legacy+dean's list+faculty/staff children (column 2). Just 10% is regular admission

Big athletic school, Harvard... The rest of the table 👇. Any time I look at it, it seems crazier than what I remembered

brown.edu/Departments/Ec…
Aug 30, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
There were three types of comments on yesterday’s thread on optimal policy and politics, I’ll collect and summarize what I think about them 1. “optimal” is based on your choice of the objective function and that’s arbitrary/political.
The first part is definitely true; economists tend to be utilitarian and in most cases “optimal” is based on some notion of utilitarian welfare function or something adjacent.
Mar 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Bravo Przemyśl!

This is what this is about:
ft.com/content/0d33d2…
You probably shouldn't go to the Polish-Ukrainian border right now for a photo op if that's your history Image The mayor of Przemyśl offered that Salvini can join him to visit the refugees as long as he is wearing that t-shirt.
Mar 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"In the westsplaining framework, the concerns of Russia are recognized but those of Eastern Europe are not."
🔥🔥🔥

newrepublic.com/article/165603… I'll add that, once you include Ukraine, "Eastern Europe" is about same number of people as Russia and higher gdp
Mar 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is why EU is central to Ukraine's development. It's extremely hard to pursue stable market oriented policy when domestic economic discontent from transition can be politically exploited (including by foreigners). Promise of EU imposed good constraints on everyone So, when Putin objected to Ukrainian association agreement with the EU, he really objected to Ukrainian development.

And, by the way, Ukraine has the lowest GDP per capita in Europe
Mar 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Russia is 140 million people, economy the size of Netherlands+Belgium. You can't ignore it because it has nukes, but it's a rogue state not a "great power". These "realists" put no weight on liberal democracy, they just dream about 1800s power politics

You'll note that he is unwavering in his commitment to ignore the right of Ukrainians to live in a liberal democracy Image
Feb 13, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Since I tweeted a number of times about Ukraine in frustration, a brief thread to clarify how this particular Eastern European thinks about it
1. Russia is the unambiguous aggressor here, Ukraine is a separate country and ethnicity with its own long complicated history. Duh... 2. If you grant Russian sphere of influence, or are flippant about the distinctiveness of Ukrainians, or legitimize Russian claims, you are effectively supporting an imperial colonial power ruled by a corrupt quasi-fascist regime. As simple as that.
Feb 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We finally found a good picture illustrating how oppressive capitalism looks like.
Sep 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Since kids are mostly unvaccinated everywhere, the most likely interpretation here is that effectively unvaccinated adults are putting kids in hospitals
nytimes.com/interactive/20… Yes, base rates for kids are still low but they are growing (and driven by unvaccinated places).

Just your regular externalities in action.
Sep 8, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Apr 29, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Not a proof but suggestive evidence that FDA managed to screw up one more time It could be coincidence - around the same time everyone was becoming eligible so the run up and the decline could be related to that. Maybe supply, but J&J was fairly small anyway.
But, the whole PR around it made zero sense.
Apr 20, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
There are 170,000 gas stations in the US. Did we subsidize building them? Tax carbon and let the market figure out how many charging stations to build and where Talk about corporate welfare
Apr 19, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
UEFA consists of 55 national federations. To give an example I'm familiar with, the Polish one (PZPN) has 6679 registered clubs and 500,000 registered players (the country of 38m people). There is a pyramid of different levels of competitions - youth, amateurs, professionals /1 That's a lot of teams (my hometown of 300,000 people has 6, but there is a village of 350 people close by that has one & it competes in a league), a lot of money, a lot of vested interests and a lot of politics too. You have good (inclusivity), bad (corruption) and opaque. /2
Nov 1, 2019 • 29 tweets • 7 min read
As promised: long and boring thread about income vs consumption tax. TL;DR they are not as different as you might think. Income taxation distorts saving and consumption taxes are harder to make progressive in the short term, but they are close cousins 1/29 Let’s start with (national) income identity:
Labor income (L)+Capital Income (K)+Transfers (G) -Taxes (T)=Consumption (C)+Saving (S)
where T should be thought of here as taxes other than consumption/income tax that we are about to introduce.
I’ll mostly ignore foreigners 2/29
Oct 15, 2019 • 34 tweets • 11 min read
Time for my substantial comments about the @gabriel_zucman and Emmanuel Saez tax series. I'll run with numbers for top 0.01%, over 1962-2014. I'm still to fully digest top 400 and projections to 2018. So, first things first: the QJE and the paper show different patterns: Just to make sure it is not missed: these are very different patterns. Between 1962 and 2014, the QJE series shows 3.3pp drop. The book one shows 18.7pp drop. Volatility differs to.
Oct 14, 2019 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
I'll post a longer thread with substantial comments later, but for now I'll just describe where the bodies are buried in the comparison of the refereed QJE DINA paper and the book/NYT animation

Tl;dr - here is my animation
/thread I'll show everything for top 0.01%. Because the QJE stops in 2014, I'll stop there too and I'll show it starting in 1962 when micro files start and QJE has details.

Note the milder pattern in the blue line and a strong trend in the red one - that's where we are heading.
Oct 11, 2019 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
Following up on the major discrepancy between NYT visualization and the published QJE paper (see the quoted thread). Below is the comparison of what is in the two sources. They generally don't line up and the discrepancy goes in the direction of the trend visible in NYT graphics To illustrate - compare 1969, 1984, 1999, 2014