Papers

A family of working papers on distribution-contingent policy: how monetary, fiscal, competition, and tax instruments interact to determine the labor share of income. Across wages, health care, and the direction of AI, the same externality recurs, a private gain against a common cost, and each paper works out one instrument that corrects it. All are posted on SSRN. 

Monetary and fiscal

The Reaction-Function Ratchet: Wage Suppression as a Monetary Externality, and Its Correction Monetary policy that disciplines wages but tolerates margins ratchets the labor share down over the cycle, manufacturing the fiscal-dominance inflation it cannot later fight. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7073658

Gaming the Trigger: Strategic Pass-Through Under Distribution-Contingent Monetary Policy Whether a distribution-contingent monetary tolerance rule can be gamed by strategic price-setters, and how to build the trigger so that gaming it becomes restraint. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7102178

he Base, Not the Rate: The Fiscal Instrument of Distribution-Contingent Monetary Policy A rent tax built on the margin base rather than the rate pairs with the monetary rule and resists pass-through, taxing the markup rather than marginal cost. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7102238

The direction of AI

The Signed Error: The Direction of AI Adoption and Its Correction AI adoption's direction is distorted by a tax code that subsidizes replacing labor over employing it; a labor-share screen corrects the sign without defining or restricting the technology. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7107538

The Labor-Share Screen: A Pigouvian Correction for the Direction of AI Adoption The full statement of the screen, its policy tiers, and its answer to the case against intervention. https://ssrn.com/abstract_id=7107558

Health care

The Missing Claimant: Healthcare's Cost Ratchet and the Design of Its Repair Health care has no residual claimant on its own cost: every agent is paid a share of the bill, so the cost base ratchets upward. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7106798

Repair the Claimants: De-Linking Compensation from the Cost Base to Break Healthcare's Cost Ratchet The design that severs each middleman's pay from the size of the bill, link by link. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7106878

All papers: SSRN author page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=4529454

Earlier Work

The Taylor Principle and Inflation Targeting without a Phillips Curve https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3761460

The Financial Decelerator Channel https://ssrn.com/abstract_id=4558560

Financial Efficiency and the Lucas Puzzle https://ssrn.com/abstract_id=3761443