Promoting public retirement savings accounts during tax filing: evidence from field experiments

In 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department launched myRA, a no-fee retirement account designed for people who lacked employer-sponsored retirement options. We report findings from two behavioral field experiments intended to motivate interest in using the tax refund to open and fund myRAs directly through the tax-filing process. These experiments, administered to more than 100,000 low-income tax filers in 2016, embedded persuasive messages in emails sent to filers and directly within online tax-filing software. We find that interest in myRA was generally very low, although interest and enrollment intentions varied depending on the framing of the program's benefits.

Malthus in Smith Clothing

In this op-ed, Robert Fletcher reviews The Dasgupta Review, a report commissioned by the UK Treasury Department on The Economics of Biodiversity, which was released in February 2021. Fletcher argues that rather than offering a fresh or timely analysis of biodiversity loss and how to counter it, the Review continues a long line of similar reports that leave capitalism in the background as a given, and lay blame for what ails the world at the feet of "population." Such disavowed capital-centric Malthusianism, Fletcher argues, renders the popular report a distraction from desperately needed analyses of the political economy of biodiversity loss.

Executive Orders

This chapter provides some background on the collation of executive orders generally, then details the creation of the institution of “central clearance” in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Central clearance has served as both a proactive and protective process for presidents since the 1930s, especially after OMB (then known as the Bureau of the Budget) moved into the Executive Office of the President from the Treasury Department in 1939. It matches well with the kind of “governance structure” an information-seeking president might rationally construct in order to evaluate and winnow proposals for executive action.

Washington will be flexible on its Myanmar sanctions

Significance The Treasury Department soon after activated one provision of the EO by designating ten individuals in the Myanmar military and three military-linked companies for sanctions. Biden’s administration has set out the measures it could take to increase pressure on the junta. Impacts International confidence in Myanmar’s business environment will fall as the junta tightens its grip and protests widen. The diversion of global attention from the Rohingya crisis will enable the Myanmar military to tighten control over Rakhine State. Periodic internet blackouts will make it harder for external observers to monitor the situation in Myanmar.

Classification of Documents from Archival Fonds of City Magistrates of the Kursk Viceroyalty of the Second Quarter of the 18th Century

The article classifies documents of magistrates of the Kursk viceroyalty, which are stored in the State Archive of Kursk Region in the fonds of the Kursk viceroy’s office, Kursk magistrate, and Oboyan magistrate. For studying legal proceedings, demography, and administration in the second quarter of the 18th century, researchers prefer materials of the Kursk Chambers of Civil and Criminal Court, treasury department, and the viceroy’s office. Thus, studying external and internal documentation of magistrates is significant for revealing their role in the cities’ political and economic life. Until the early 1990s, in the Russian historiography there have been no specialized works on composition of documents of magistrates. The use of materials of city courts was thematic. Socio-economic studies put emphasis on a statistical documentation, while legal works focused on established practice in applying the law. Nevertheless, the scholarship of the second half of the 19th century developed two main principles of systematization of magistrate documents: chronologically-nominal and structurally-functional. Historians noted that, despite losing their tax and administrative competencies in the 1780s, magistrates continued to control these issues. The work is to structure documents of city courts of the Kursk viceroyalty. The author has developed her own structural and functional classification scheme, taking into account organizational and competence specifics of these institutions. For this typologization, a contextual analysis of materials has been carried out in order to evaluate the documents’ legal force and to identify which area of relations they regulate. Thus, the documents have been divided in two groups (organizational/administrative and competence-based), each further subdivided in 4 classes. The first block includes materials regulating activities of magistrates (internal and external regulatory legal acts) and those springing from their functioning (accounting, personnel, accounting and registration, reporting documents). The second block includes materials which the magistrates created while executing their direct and indirect powers. The given classification reflects the composition of city courts’ documents and procedures of their clerical work, as well as their place and role in the city development of the Kursk viceroyalty in the second quarter of the 18th century.

THE IMPACT OF THE 2017 TAX ACT ON CERTAIN PERSONAL INJURY PLAINTIFFS

The 2017 Tax Act was the most sweeping federal tax legislation in over a generation. While many of its reforms, from dramatically lowering the corporate tax rate to altering the international tax rules, have already received significant attention, comparatively little attention has been paid to the 2017 Tax Act’s effects on personal injury plaintiffs. This Article explores those impacts. The 2017 Tax Act added a new provision that indirectly affects plaintiffs who allege sexual harassment or abuse. The new provision disallows the defendants’ deductions if the parties enter into a nondisclosure agreement. While targeted at defendants, the provision likely unwittingly harms plaintiffs by reducing settlement offers. The provision also suffers from a host of ambiguities that the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service will need to resolve. The 2017 Tax Act also eliminated so-called miscellaneous itemized deductions. In certain types of personal injury claims, such as defamation or emotional distress, this development causes the plaintiff to be taxed on the full settlement amount even if, as is often the case, one-third or more of the settlement is paid as a contingent fee to the plaintiff’s attorney. Legislative or administrative action is required to remedy this patent unfairness.

The Perception and Culture of Operational Risk in the Banking Sector: Evidence From Northern Cyprus

This study aims to analyze the attitudes toward and the perception of the risk culture with regard to operational risk (OR) among Northern Cyprus (TRNC) banking sector employees working in related departments. Although most previous studies have concentrated on the measurement and management of OR, the research remains extremely limited on the perception side as well as the formation of cultural background by human resources departments. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that it investigates OR from the perspective of human perceptions and cultural development in the context of a small banking industry. In addition, via addressing the relationship between personnel structure and the prevention of ORs in small banking sectors, this study fills an important gap in the literature. For this purpose, a survey was designed and the collected data has been analyzed by using Factor Analysis. The results are gathered under eight factors where both OR perception and cultural formation were analyzed under these eight factors. The sensitivity of perception and cultural development were then analyzed by taking into account the demographic information of the respondents. The results indicate that employees working in the treasury department are strongly sensitive toward OR. Furthermore, older staff who have experienced a banking crisis are more sensitive compared with their younger counterparts. Other findings include that developments in the financial sector increase the OR, senior management appropriation decreases the OR, and an effective OR database is required. The findings of this study can potentially serve as a guide for senior executives in the banking sector in terms of policy development and applications related to internal systems, particularly in small economies.

Déjà Vu

Like the credit boom of the 1920s, the toxic credit bubble of the 2000s precipitated a devastating global financial crisis. The desire to earn quick profits from originating and securitizing subprime loans corrupted the risk management practices of large financial conglomerates and the credit review practices of credit ratings agencies that assigned investment ratings to mortgage-related securities. By the end of 2006, U.S. credit markets resembled an inverted pyramid of risk, in which multiple layers of financial bets depended on the performance of high-risk subprime loans held in securitized pools. When housing prices began to fall and subprime loans began to default in large numbers in 2007, the leveraged bets on top of that pyramid of risk blew up and inflicted devastating losses on financial institutions and investors in the U.S. and Europe. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic were slow to recognize and respond to the severity of the crisis. The Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department missed multiple warning signs that should have caused them to increase their oversight of major U.S. banks and other large financial institutions during 2007 and early 2008.

Minnesota wild hemp: a crucial botanical source in early cannabinoid discovery

Renewed and sustained Cannabis chemistry exploration was initiated by Roger Adams at the University of Illinois Chemistry Department with cooperation from the Treasury Department Narcotics Laboratory in the early 1940’s. This partnership and time investment by both parties made practical sense. Adams was able to explore natural products chemistry and the Narcotics Laboratory began to clarify the chemistry mysteries of Cannabis. Minnesota wild hemp, often viewed as just a roadside weed, was employed as the critical botanical source. Based on its widespread cultivation during World War II, this was also a very pragmatic decision. Although the unique Illinois – Washington D. C. collaboration lasted only a few short years (1939–1942), the stunning results included the isolation and extensive characterization of cannabidiol, the structure elucidation and total synthesis of cannabinol as well as the identification of the tetrahydrocannabinol structure as an intoxicating pharmacophore. Furthermore, this research well prepared many junior chemists for prolific careers in both academia as well as industry, inspired the discoveries of later Cannabis investigators and also provided a successful model of a productive academic-government partnership.

Republic of Moldova

In response to a request from the European Department, a Public-Sector Debt Statistics (PSDS) technical assistance (TA) mission was conducted in Chisinau during October 2–8, 2019. The mission funded by the Data for Decisions (D4D) multi-donor trust fund and followed up on a D4D Public Sector Debt Statistics (PSDS) workshop held in Vienna, Austria during July 2019, where participants from Moldova identified data gaps with current compilation of debt statistics. The mission primarily worked with the Ministry of Finance (MOF) Public Debt Department (PDD), but also had discussions with the Budget and Treasury Department. Outside the MOF, the mission had meetings with the Public Property Agency (PPA), the Municipality of Chisinau and the National Bank of Moldova (NBM). Finally, the mission also held a joint meeting with representatives of a separate IMF TA Mission on sectoral accounts with Treasury and attended the concluding meeting of that mission with the NBM.