Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton.

“Over-regulated America” was the headline in the Feb. 18 issue of The Economist. “The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation,” began the accompanying article.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Everyone who manages an American business corporation – be it for profit or not – is likely to agree with that headline. Having served in the past on the boards of two hospital companies, one a for-profit hospital chain and the other a nonprofit academic health center, I can sympathize with the headline as well.

The question is why this regulatory burden is visited on Americans.

Are we just victims of government, an alien force sent hither by some sinister, extraterrestrial creature – perhaps Darth Vader — tasked with suffocating us upright earthlings with mindless rules?

Or should we seek the answer in the wisdom of Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo, who is credited with the phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us”?

That thought occurred to me as I presented to my students in first-year economics a sketch of what economists call “constrained optimization”:

An investor-owned company, for example, is modeled by economists as seeking to maximize the wealth that the company represents to its owners, without violating the laws of the land. Management is assumed to pursue this objective, subject to the constraints of the input and output markets, technological constraints, legal (regulatory) constraints and ethical constraints.

The ethical constraints imposed on this process are part of the company’s ethical culture – some of it written down in its code of ethics. That culture is thought to be forged by the “tone at the top,” that is, a management code of ethics. Another word for these ethical constraints might be “decency.”

What is legal is not necessarily decent. Although one should think that this is obvious, it increasingly seems to escape political and business leaders who, caught in dubious behavior, assert, “I did nothing wrong,” and may well even believe it. By “nothing wrong,” they mean that they did nothing that a high-priced lawyer could not defend as somehow legal in a court of law.

I am reminded here of the exasperated lament of former Senator Fred Thompson, Republican of Tennessee, after Congressional hearings on the managerial, accounting and financial scandals of the late 1990s. “The real scandal here may be not what is illegal, but what is totally permissible,” Mr. Thompson said, adding, “The system is clearly not designed with the interest of the general public or the investor in mind.”

There is a trade-off between the ethical and regulatory constraints that limit our actions in business, as elsewhere. The more pervasive the incidence of ethically dubious behavior, the more vigorously the rest of society will respond with ever more government regulations. As The Economist notes, “Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded.”

To illustrate, the predictable response to the scandals of the late 1990s was the highly regulatory American Competitiveness and Corporate Accountability Act of 2002, commonly known as Sarbanes-Oxley.

That bill was drafted by former Senator Paul Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, and Representative Michael G. Oxley, Republican of Ohio. It was passed by a Republican House and a Republican Senate and signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, in spite that party’s oft-stated misgivings of government regulations.

Sarbanes-Oxley prescribes strict new accounting and governance standards for American corporations, some of which have been faulted as too burdensome, especially on small business.

The much-criticized Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 — widely known as Dodd-Frank – was a predictable reaction to the ethically dubious practices that had crept into the financial sector in the preceding decade. That bill entirely is the handiwork of Democrats.

As The New York Times reported on May 5, federal regulators are trying to prevent the financial disasters that arose out of interest-rate swaps sold to unsophisticated treasurers of municipalities, nonprofit organizations and school districts.

Transactions in modern finance, just as in modern medical practice, must confront the problem of asymmetric information: one side of the transaction (e.g., the physicians or the sellers of financial products) has technically superior knowledge of the product being traded and could exploit that superiority to their financial advantage. Medicine’s code of ethics forbids such exploitation. Should there be a parallel in finance as well?

Finally, the myriad and often burdensome regulations imposed on our health care sector did not just rain down on a perfectly well-behaved industry. Act by act and regulation by regulation, they were regulatory responses to some sufficiently widespread mischief by members of a sector that had come to view public treasuries as a commons that could be grazed without inhibition. Pogo’s dictum applies here, too.

We are left with the question of why, if regulations are usually a legitimate response to mischievous games played by some parties in the private sector, these regulations are often so inchoate, if not outright silly.

Lack of competence among the rule writers — especially unfamiliarity with the operations of those they seek to regulate – may be part of the answer, but probably not a large part.

More important, in my view, is the gantlet that legislation and rule-making must run under our system of governance.

Before an original bill passes Congress, it has been worked over (“marked up”), in each of the two chambers, by sundry committee fiefs whose members may be beholden to a variety of moneyed interest groups, each eager to steer the legislators’ hands.

The specific regulations called for in a bill, once passed, must also survive the scrutiny and influence of special interest groups, which typically work through members of Congress or the upper levels of the executive branch, whose affection they have acquired.

Even the best-written original bill cannot emerge from that process in the form of a coherent set of rules. Many a rule may appear puzzling to straight-thinking people, and some even silly. Chances are they make sense to some interest group that had purchased it, so to speak.

Nothing influences presidential elections more than the direction of the economy in the months before Election Day.

DAVID LEONHARDT

Thoughts on the economic scene.

To track the economy this year, The Times is creating a weekly report on the predicted path of job growth and the unemployment rate between now and the election. The forecasts come from Moody’s Analytics, a research group whose work is used by the Federal Reserve and private businesses, and are based on a wide range of economic data.

History suggests that this year’s election is likely to be very close if the economy adds 100,000 to 175,000 jobs a month in the six months before Election Day. (These benchmarks come from work by Nate Silver, of The Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog.) Job growth above 175,000 would tend to make President Obama a favorite. Growth below 100,000 would make Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, the favorite.

The current economic forecast suggests that Mr. Obama is better positioned than Mr. Romney, but only slightly. Moody’s Analytics predicts that the economy will add an average of 182,000 between now and October. By comparison, it added 188,000 jobs a month in the first four months of the year but only 115,000 in April.

The economy will obviously not be the only factor in voters’ minds. A war or other unexpected event could affect the election as well. But barring a major surprise, the economy’s direction will probably shape the campaign more than anything else.

Historically, nothing — not social issues, campaign advertisements or gaffes — has influenced voters more heavily than the direction of the economy in an election year. In only three races since World War II has the outcome been different from what the economy’s direction would have suggested: 1952 (when the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower was running), 1968 (when the Vietnam War hobbled the Democrats) and 1976 (when Watergate hobbled the Republicans).

The Moody’s forecast also projects the unemployment rate to be 8 percent in September and 7.9 percent in October. That would be down from 8.1 percent last month and 8.3 percent in Mr. Obama’s first full month in office.

Much of the decline since 2009, however, has occurred because people have stopped looking for work and are no longer considered officially unemployed. The percentage of adults with jobs (58.4 percent last month) is likely to be lower on Election Day than when Mr. Obama took office (60.3 percent in mid-February 2009).

The forecast is based on weekly data on jobless claims, surveys that measure business activity and previous monthly jobs reports, among other things.

The latest analysis by the Moody’s economists Ryan Sweet and Mark Zandi follows. A chart and a discussion of the methodology appear on the firm’s Dismal Scientist blog.

New labor data over the past week leave us cautiously optimistic that the U.S. job market is improving. Because of recent gains in small business hiring plans and stable initial claims for unemployment insurance, we expect a net addition to nonfarm payrolls of 165,000 in May, a better performance than the 115,000 initially estimated by the Labor Department for April. The unemployment rate is likely to remain at 8.1%.

It will take time before the economy regains the pace of job creation reached earlier this year. Payback for early growth spurred by the warm winter could continue into May. Factoring in weather and other temporary effects, underlying monthly job growth is probably running between 175,000 and 200,000. This isn’t a boom, but it is fast enough growth to lower the unemployment rate, which we forecast will end 2012 below 8%.

The main concern about the spring slowdown in U.S. job and income growth is that it may damage consumer confidence, creating a negative feedback loop. Fortunately there is little evidence of this so far. Although employment growth will not be impressive in May, it will not be weak enough to spur new monetary policy activity by the Federal Reserve.

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

Almost exactly two years ago, at the height of the Senate debate on financial reform, a serious attempt was made to impose a binding size constraint on our largest banks. That effort — sometimes referred to as the Brown-Kaufman amendment — received the support of 33 senators and failed on the floor of the Senate. (Here is some of my Economix coverage from the time.)

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

On Wednesday, Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, introduced the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Banking Act, or SAFE Banking Act, which would force the largest four banks in the country to shrink. (Details of this proposal, similar in name to the original Brown-Kaufman plan, are in this briefing memo for a Senate banking subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, available through Politico, and in this news release).

His proposal, while not likely to become law immediately, is garnering support from across the political spectrum — and more support than essentially the same ideas received two years ago.

The proposition is simple: Too-big-to-fail banks should be made smaller, and preferably small enough to fail without causing global panic. This idea had been gathering momentum since the fall of 2008 and, while the Brown-Kaufman amendment originated on the Democratic side, support was beginning to appear across the aisle.

But big banks and the Treasury Department both opposed it, and parliamentary maneuvers ensured there was little real debate. (For a compelling account of how the financial lobby works, both in general and in this instance, look for a forthcoming book by Jeff Connaughton, former chief of staff to former Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware.)

The issue has not gone away. And while the financial sector has pushed back with some success against various components of the Dodd-Frank reform legislation, the idea of breaking up very large banks has gained momentum.

In particular, informed sentiment has shifted against continuing to allow very large banks to operate in their current highly leveraged form, with a great deal of debt and very little equity. There is increasing recognition of the huge and unfair costs that these structures impose on the rest of the economy.

The implicit subsidies provided to too-big-to-fail companies allow them to increase compensation by hundreds of millions of dollars. But the costs imposed on the rest of us are in the trillions of dollars. This is a monstrously unfair and inefficient system, and sensible public figures are increasingly pointing this out.

American Banker, a leading trade publication, recently posted a slide show, “Who Wants to Break Up the Big Banks?” Its gallery included people from across the political spectrum, with a great deal of financial sector and public policy experience, along with quotations that appear to support either Senator Brown’s approach or a similar shift in philosophy with regard to big banks in the United States. (The slide show is available only to subscribers.)

According to American Banker, we now have in the “break up the banks” corner (in order of appearance in that feature): Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Sheila Bair, former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Thomas Hoenig, a board member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City; Jon Huntsman, former Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Utah; Senator Brown; Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent of Vermont; and Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America. (I am also on the American Banker list.)

Anat Admati of Stanford and her colleagues have led the push for much higher capital requirements — emphasizing the particular dangers around allowing our largest banks to operate in their current highly leveraged fashion. This position has also been gaining support in the policy and media mainstream, most recently in the form of a powerful Bloomberg View editorial.

(You can follow her work and related discussion on this Web site; on Twitter she is @anatadmati.)

Senator Brown’s legislation reflects also the idea that banks should finance themselves more with equity and less with debt. Professor Admati and I submitted a letter of support, together with 11 colleagues whose expertise spans almost all dimensions of how the financial sector really operates.

We particularly stress the appeal of having a binding “leverage ratio” for the largest banks. This would require them to have at least 10 percent equity relative to their total assets, using a simple measure of assets not adjusted for any of the complicated “risk weights” that banks can game.

We also agree with the SAFE Banking Act that to limit the risk and potential cost to taxpayers, caps on the size of an individual bank’s liabilities relative to the economy can also serve a useful role (and the same kind of rule should apply to nonbank financial institutions).

Under the proposed law, no bank holding company could have more than $1.3 trillion in total liabilities (i.e., that would be the maximum size). This would affect our largest banks, which are $2 trillion or more in total size, but in no way undermine their global competitiveness. This is a moderate and entirely reasonable proposal.

No one is suggesting that making JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo smaller would be sufficient to ensure financial stability.

But this idea continues to gain traction, as a measure complementary to further strengthening and simplifying capital requirements and generally in support of other efforts to make it easier to handle the failure of financial institutions.

Watch for the SAFE Banking Act to gain further support over time.

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

The Department of Agriculture’s food-stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was originally intended as a program for the poor. But it has transformed itself into an important source of support for the unemployed.

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Perspectives from expert contributors.

Traditionally, food-stamp program participants were subject to an asset test – households with a total of more than a few thousand dollars of assets in their bank accounts, automobiles and other assets were not eligible even if income was zero. In this way, food stamps had a lot in common with Medicaid and other antipoverty programs.

The welfare reform of the 1990s also required able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients, without children, to be working or enrolled in a job-training program, or their eligibility would be limited to a few months.

For these two reasons, the food-stamp program had little in common with unemployment insurance, which offers weekly cash benefits to people who have lost their jobs and have been unable to find and start a new job.

Unemployment insurance has no asset test; even people with money in the bank can receive benefits from the program, as long as they have been laid off from a job and continue to look for a new one. Unemployment insurance also has no work requirement. Indeed, it has just the opposite – a person going back to work has his or her unemployment benefits terminated.

As a result of the very different eligibility rules for the two programs, a vast majority of people receiving unemployment insurance were not receiving food stamps. By my estimates, only about one-quarter of households with a head or spouse unemployed were receiving food stamps in the early 2000s.

But the food-stamp eligibility rules have changed markedly in the last several years, bringing the program closer to unemployment insurance. Food stamps effectively no longer have an asset test. States have also received waivers from work requirements during the recession (for a while, the requirements were waived nationwide by the 2009 stimulus law).

As a result, food-stamp participation is now more common among the unemployed. I constructed the chart below from Department of Agriculture quality-control data on the activities of non-elderly food-stamp recipients back to 2000 and from Census Bureau data on the prevalence of unemployment among the non-elderly population.

Sources: Department of Agriculture, Census Bureau

The former source gives me the number of non-elderly household heads and spouses who are both unemployed and receiving food stamps for their households, and the chart shows their number as a share of the total unemployment among non-elderly household heads and spouses.

The ratio was about one to four in the early 2000s and actually fell during the 2001 recession as unemployment increased more than food stamp participation did. The ratio rose in the mid-2000s as states relaxed their eligibility rules and again in 2008 as the federal government relaxed its rules.

By the 2010 fiscal year, half of non-elderly households with an unemployed head or spouse were receiving food stamps.

Meanwhile, the eligibility rules for unemployment insurance are scheduled to tighten this year, as the federal government puts shorter limits on the length of time that people can receive benefits. Thanks to the waivers cited above, food-stamp participation effectively has no time limit.

I expect that soon the food-stamp program will support more unemployed households than unemployment insurance does.

After hemorrhaging jobs during the recession – and over the last decade, for that matter – manufacturing has been one of the few bright spots of the recovery, restoring 489,000 jobs since the beginning of 2010.

But there have been some significant geographic distinctions in that recovery, as well as some toppled assumptions, one of which is that factory jobs have steadily shifted from the Midwest to the South.

A new report from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program shows that since the beginning of 2010, manufacturing employment has increased by 5.2 percent in the Midwest, while it has gone up by only 2.2 percent in the South.

The study also analyzes which metropolitan areas have the highest concentration of manufacturing workers, both as a proportion of jobs in the area and as a multiple of the proportion of manufacturing jobs to all jobs nationally. Of the 20 metropolitan areas that rank as “most manufacturing-specialized,” half are in the Midwest.

Southern regions remain relatively strong in manufacturing, with eight metropolitan areas on that list. But the usual narrative of an inexorably declining Rust Belt seems not quite accurate – or at least for now. “It’s possible that this bounce-back is just a bounce-back and won’t last,” said Howard Wial, an economist and fellow at the Brookings Institution who was one of the authors of the report. “But there is an opportunity for it to be more.”

The study also examined the clustering of manufacturing companies in particular regions. Very high-tech manufacturing companies are concentrated in the Northwest and West, for example, while chemical companies are found mostly in the South.

The authors indicated that most state and local governments do little to foster a thriving manufacturing industry when they offer tax breaks and other incentives to companies or pass right-to-work laws that tend to suppress wages. Instead, they say, governments should focus on research and development and work-force training aimed at specific manufacturing sectors.

“Manufacturing has been unfashionable for a long time,” Mr. Wial said. The attitude of many government officials, he said, has been “why bother to spend money and exert energy to strengthen what we have if it’s going away anyway.” (Economists, even those close to the Obama administration, have been divided over the policy value of fostering domestic manufacturing.)

Mr. Wial said that there was some evidence that manufacturing could make more of a comeback in the United States because labor costs are rising in developing countries and “many large companies are starting to reconsider the costs and benefits of offshoring.”

To capitalize on such trends, the report’s authors encourage geographically centered investments in research and technology and work force training, based on detailed knowledge of the existing manufacturing base within communities.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

On April 30, the Treasury Department announced that 461 Americans had renounced their citizenship in the first quarter of 2012. A 1996 law requires that every person doing so be named, with their names published in the Federal Register. The idea is to shame those who may be renouncing their citizenship solely to escape taxation.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The extreme step of renouncing one’s citizenship is necessary to escape taxation by the United States, because the United States, alone among the major nations of the world, taxes its citizens wherever on earth they live.

Other countries tax only those who live and work within their borders; if their citizens live and work in another country, they are liable only for taxes incurred in that country.

Americans living abroad, however, must not only pay taxes in the country in which they are living, but United States taxes as well, although there is an exemption of $93,000 that is adjusted for inflation annually. The only legal way for American citizens to avoid American taxes is to renounce their citizenship and live their lives permanently in another country.

In recent years, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship has increased. According to the international tax lawyer, Andrew Mitchel, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship rose to 1,781 in 2011 from 231 in 2008.

This led William McGurn of The Wall Street Journal to warn that the tax code is turning American citizens living abroad into “economic lepers.” The sharply rising numbers of Americans renouncing their citizenship “are canaries in the coal mine,” he wrote.

The economist Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute was more explicit in a 2010 column in Forbes, “Rich Americans Voting With Their Feet to Escape Obama Tax Oppression.”

According to Andrew Mitchel’s research, the sharp rise in Americans renouncing their citizenship since 2008 is less pronounced than it appears if one looks at the full range of data available since 1997, when it first was collected. As one can see in the chart, the highest number of Americans renouncing their citizenship came in 1997.

United States Treasury

Mr. Mitchel hypothesizes that the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control may have forced many residents of that former colony with dual citizenship to renounce their American citizenship, because China does not recognize dual citizenship.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast bulk of those renouncing American citizenship do so for reasons unrelated to taxation. Americans who marry foreign nationals, for example, often adopt the citizenship of their spouse’s nation. Also, many of those on the Treasury list are not actually American citizens, but foreigners who had permanent residence status in the United States. Those born with dual citizenship sometimes prefer to have only one to simplify their lives.

However, reports by Bloomberg News and the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger suggest that increased scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service of Americans living in Switzerland, where a number of banks are suspected of aiding tax evasion, may have led some American expatriates living in that country to renounce their citizenship.

The mobility of individuals with a large net worth – who generally have no difficulty finding a nation to welcome them and their capital – has unquestionably increased in the last several years, especially within the European Union, where barriers against the movement of people have fallen sharply. This has reduced the ability of all governments everywhere from engaging in soak-the-rich policies.

As I noted in a recent post, Britain recently reduced its top income tax rate in part because of a belief that it would reduce the number of Britons living abroad. And the victory of the Socialist François Hollande in France’s presidential election on Sunday, on a platform of raising the top tax rate to 75 percent, may lead to some relocation from there, according to an article in The Financial Times.

However, while there is no doubt that some people do migrate solely because of taxes, the number is small even when it doesn’t involve a loss of citizenship.

¶ A 2006 study in the journal International Tax and Public Finance found that taxes played no role in internal migration flows in Canada.

¶ Also in 2006, a study in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found no evidence that taxes affected migration within Switzerland despite a wide dispersion in local tax burdens.

¶ An April 2011 study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts found that taxes play almost no role in a person’s decision to move from a state, although it will influence her or his decision of where to live once the decision to move has been made.

¶ A June 2011 study in The National Tax Journal found little evidence that a sharp increase in New Jersey’s top income tax rate in 2004 had any impact on the migration patterns of those affected by it.

¶ A new study by the University of Chicago economist Tino Sanandaji examined the international movement of billionaires from 1996 to 2010. He found that 87 percent stay in the country in which they were born; only a third of those who moved appear to have done so for tax reasons.

The reality is that taxes are just one factor among many that determine where people choose to live. Factors including climate, proximity to those in similar businesses and the availability of amenities like the arts and cuisine play a much larger role.

That’s why places like New York and California are still magnets for the wealthy despite high taxes. And although a few Americans may renounce their citizenship to avoid American taxes, it is obvious that many, many more people continually seek American residency and citizenship.

FLOYD NORRIS

Notions on high and low finance.

The Greeks appear to have come up with an interesting way to deal with the fact that any Greek government will face intense pressure from Germany and some other European countries to accept more and more austerity that will be rejected by most Greeks.

Don’t have a government.

The elections held Sunday seem likely to result in an impasse over the formation of a government. The two traditional parties got fewer than a third of the votes between them, which may seem fitting considering that they got Greece into the mess. Nearly all the rest went to parties that oppose the austerity deal but also despise each other.

If no coalition government can be formed, a caretaker administration would be formed — with no mandate to do anything — and new elections called. Would Europe pull the plug on such government? If not, the stalemate could go on for a while, with no assurance that a second or third Greek election would settle anything.

The German position, repeated by Chancellor Angela Merkel after the Greek vote, has been that the European austerity agreement is sacred and must be respected. Her position would be stronger if that deal had actually been ratified. If one or more countries refuse to do so, there is no agreement.

Perhaps that could lead to a less onerous deal. Eventually, Germany could conclude that it cannot maintain the euro zone as it is, with the rest of Europe suffering while Germany prospers, and that it will either have to compromise or accept a breakup of the zone that would hurt Germany badly.

In the meantime, investors presumably will worry, and prices of the new Greek bonds could continue to fall. The new 10-year bond, issued in the recent restructuring with a 2 percent coupon, was trading for about 24 percent of face value on Friday, for a yield to maturity of 20.6 percent. Today the price is under 21 percent of par, for a yield of 23.3 percent.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

On April 30, the Treasury Department announced that 461 Americans had renounced their citizenship in the first quarter of 2012. A 1996 law requires that every person doing so be named, with their names published in the Federal Register. The idea is to shame those who may be renouncing their citizenship solely to escape taxation.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The extreme step of renouncing one’s citizenship is necessary to escape taxation by the United States, because the United States, alone among the major nations of the world, taxes its citizens wherever on earth they live.

Other countries tax only those who live and work within their borders; if their citizens live and work in another country, they are liable only for taxes incurred in that country.

Americans living abroad, however, must not only pay taxes in the country in which they are living, but United States taxes as well, although there is an exemption of $93,000 that is adjusted for inflation annually. The only legal way for American citizens to avoid American taxes is to renounce their citizenship and live their lives permanently in another country.

In recent years, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship has increased. According to the international tax lawyer, Andrew Mitchel, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship rose to 1,781 in 2011 from 231 in 2008.

This led William McGurn of The Wall Street Journal to warn that the tax code is turning American citizens living abroad into “economic lepers.” The sharply rising numbers of Americans renouncing their citizenship “are canaries in the coal mine,” he wrote.

The economist Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute was more explicit in a 2010 column in Forbes, “Rich Americans Voting With Their Feet to Escape Obama Tax Oppression.”

According to Andrew Mitchel’s research, the sharp rise in Americans renouncing their citizenship since 2008 is less pronounced than it appears if one looks at the full range of data available since 1997, when it first was collected. As one can see in the chart, the highest number of Americans renouncing their citizenship came in 1997.

United States Treasury

Mr. Mitchel hypothesizes that the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control may have forced many residents of that former colony with dual citizenship to renounce their American citizenship, because China does not recognize dual citizenship.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast bulk of those renouncing American citizenship do so for reasons unrelated to taxation. Americans who marry foreign nationals, for example, often adopt the citizenship of their spouse’s nation. Also, many of those on the Treasury list are not actually American citizens, but foreigners who had permanent residence status in the United States. Those born with dual citizenship sometimes prefer to have only one to simplify their lives.

However, reports by Bloomberg News and the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger suggest that increased scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service of Americans living in Switzerland, where a number of banks are suspected of aiding tax evasion, may have led some American expatriates living in that country to renounce their citizenship.

The mobility of individuals with a large net worth – who generally have no difficulty finding a nation to welcome them and their capital – has unquestionably increased in the last several years, especially within the European Union, where barriers against the movement of people have fallen sharply. This has reduced the ability of all governments everywhere from engaging in soak-the-rich policies.

As I noted in a recent post, Britain recently reduced its top income tax rate in part because of a belief that it would reduce the number of Britons living abroad. And the victory of the Socialist François Hollande in France’s presidential election on Sunday, on a platform of raising the top tax rate to 75 percent, may lead to some relocation from there, according to an article in The Financial Times.

However, while there is no doubt that some people do migrate solely because of taxes, the number is small even when it doesn’t involve a loss of citizenship.

¶ A 2006 study in the journal International Tax and Public Finance found that taxes played no role in internal migration flows in Canada.

¶ Also in 2006, a study in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found no evidence that taxes affected migration within Switzerland despite a wide dispersion in local tax burdens.

¶ An April 2011 study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts found that taxes play almost no role in a person’s decision to move from a state, although it will influence her or his decision of where to live once the decision to move has been made.

¶ A June 2011 study in The National Tax Journal found little evidence that a sharp increase in New Jersey’s top income tax rate in 2004 had any impact on the migration patterns of those affected by it.

¶ A new study by the University of Chicago economist Tino Sanandaji examined the international movement of billionaires from 1996 to 2010. He found that 87 percent stay in the country in which they were born; only a third of those who moved appear to have done so for tax reasons.

The reality is that taxes are just one factor among many that determine where people choose to live. Factors including climate, proximity to those in similar businesses and the availability of amenities like the arts and cuisine play a much larger role.

That’s why places like New York and California are still magnets for the wealthy despite high taxes. And although a few Americans may renounce their citizenship to avoid American taxes, it is obvious that many, many more people continually seek American residency and citizenship.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Among the lowlights of the jobs report for April was the news that the share of adults who are either working or looking for work fell. For men, this measure — called the labor force participation rate — was at its lowest level since 1948, when the government first began keeping track.

I’ve received a number of e-mails from readers asking whether this decline can be attributed to the wave of baby-boomer retirements.

Yes, as America ages, its overall labor force participation rate will fall because older people are less likely to work. But even excluding older Americans, labor force participation rates have still fallen sharply over the last few decades, and especially in the last five years.

This chart shows the share of Americans 25 to 54 years old who are involved in the labor force, either by working or actively looking for work:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

As you can see, this age group is also dropping out of the labor force. The participation rate fell after the 2001 recession, never recovered, and then started another slide that began in the financial crisis. This trend among prime-working-age Americans cannot be explained by baby boomers’ retiring.

You may notice that the labor force participation rate had been climbing from the 1940s through about 1990. That rise reflects the fact that more women entered the labor force as gender roles evolved. Women’s labor force participation rate continued rising through the late 1990s, dropped a couple of percentage points, and then more or less flat-lined.

The main reason the labor force has been declining in the last couple of decades, then, is that men have been dropping out in droves. Here is a chart of labor force participation for workers 25 to 54, but showing men only:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Where are all these men going, and how are they supporting themselves, if they’re not in the work force? My colleagues David Leonhardt and Louis Uchitelle looked into this question a few years ago.

Camille Olson, one of the nation’s leading lawyers in advising employers about internship programs, says internships can be an excellent way for employers to get a good sense of a potential hire — to kick the tires, so to speak — and see, for example, how hard-working or creative someone is. If an intern performs well, it seems natural for the employer to offer a regular, permanent job. But if the intern is not up to snuff, it is much less painful to let the person go after three months than to lay off a recently hired regular employee after three months. That latter course not only hurts the worker, but also helps give the employer a reputation as an undesirable place to work.

As for the use of unpaid interns — something I wrote about at length in a Sunday article in The New York Times — Ms. Olson generally gives that idea a thumbs-down.

Ms. Olson generally advises employers, especially profit-making employers, to pay their interns, noting that it should not be much of a financial strain to pay them minimum wage. She points out that the Labor Department’s guidelines are quite strict about when employers can legally avoid paying interns at least the minimum wage: the internships must resemble vocational education; the internship experience must be for the benefit of the interns; the interns must work under close supervision; their work cannot be used as a substitute for that of regular employees; and their work cannot be of immediate benefit to the employer.

My Sunday article explained that with the unemployment rate so high — 13.2 percent — for workers 20 to 24 years old, many young Americans are reluctantly taking unpaid internships as a way to get valuable experience as well as a foot in the door in the field where they hope to make a career. Several interns praised their unpaid internships, saying they learned valuable skills, like Web site design, that helped them land paying jobs.

But several graduates I interviewed voiced considerable dismay with their internships, saying those positions were far less educational than they had anticipated. The phrase “grunt work” came up time and again in interviews. Several described unpaid internships that seemed to conflict with the Labor Department guidelines.

Dedunu Sylvia Suraweera took an internship at a Manhattan theater group soon after graduating from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2010. For two months, she said, she and a dozen other unpaid interns gathered at 9 each morning in the living room of the director’s apartment and made hour after hour of phone calls to small businesses to urge them to contribute items to a silent auction that would raise money so the theater could mount a production. After two months, Ms. Suraweera quit, frustrated that she was not learning anything or doing any theater.

“I definitely felt taken advantage of,” said Ms. Suraweera, who is now studying for a master’s degree in social work.

Marra Green, a fashion design major who graduated from the University of Delaware last year, had an internship last fall at the Diane von Furstenberg fashion house in Manhattan. She said the internship was not very educational — indeed sometimes it sounded as if she was working as her boss’s valet.

“I did some work on spreadsheets on various projects,” Ms. Green said. “But I was always in the merchandising closet looking for things,” that is, fashion items.

“I would spend my day looking for things,” she added. “I did a lot of lunch runs. I also did some weird personal errands. I picked up clothes which my boss ordered from the store. I returned her children’s clothes to various stores. I went to Barneys to pick up Christmas presents — my boss gave me her credit card. I had to get her cellphone from her house several times when she left it there.”

The DVF fashion house issued a statement: “We are very proud of our internship program, and we take all concerns of this kind very seriously.”

Stacey Wood had a hard time finding a paying position after obtaining a master’s degree in counseling psychology in 2008 from the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif. Alarmed that she might not make the deadline for getting the required number of hours of practice to obtain a full license, she took an unpaid internship as a grief counselor at a hospice. She was 38, and she and her husband had run up more than $200,000 in student debts from college and graduate school.

“It would have been nice if they had paid me minimum wage,” Ms. Wood said. “You got bills to pay.” Still, she said she received valuable experience and guidance as an intern at the hospice.

In their comments about my article, many readers gave two thumbs down to unpaid internships. A reader from Ohio, in a comment highly recommended by other readers, wrote: “Unpaid internships are commonly a means around the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is exploitation at its worst and needs to be stopped.” That reader added, “Unpaid internships are yet another reflection our new Gilded Age where winners take all and have pulled up the ladder by which others used to ascend to the top.”

Professor David Yamada of the Suffolk University Law School in Boston wrote in to make a point that I had made in a 2010 article on unpaid internships, but did not discuss in my article on Sunday. Missing from the article, Professor Yamada wrote, “is the fact that unpaid internships have huge social class impacts on folks who cannot afford to work for free, reinforcing economic barriers to certain professions long associated with the well-to-do.”

In other words, college graduates with wealthy parents who can underwrite their living costs during their internships get a leg up because they get a head start with coveted employers, like film production companies, publishers, literary agencies and fashion houses. But college grads whose parents cannot support them say they often have to turn to an $8.50-an-hour job at McDonald’s or Target and cannot afford to take an unpaid internship.

This helps explain why Occupy Wall Street has declared war against unpaid internships. Occupy’s Arts and Labor Committee has written to arts publications and job boards to urge them to stop carrying notices seeking unpaid interns. “This system benefits people who already possess financial means and can afford to work for free, thus propagating social inequality in the art world,” the committee wrote.