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Daily Archive for October 12th, 2009

Shovel Ready Indeed

Russ Roberts reminds us just how shovel ready the stimulus projects were/are: In the first eight months of the $787 billion “stimulus” package, the government has managed to spend about $111 billion, less than half of the funds that are available. What are those dollars going to? Here are the top four federal spenders: HHS […]

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There might be some empirical gymastics here (I did not read the paper), but this kind of study is one reason I find economics fun. We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and […]

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Recent Trends in Immigrant Earnings

It seems that the relative performance of new immigrants to the U.S. has been improving for a decade and a half. Here are Borjas and Friedberg: This paper studies long-term trends in the labor market performance of immigrants in the United States, using the 1960-2000 PUMS and 1994-2009 CPS. While there was a continuous decline […]

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Is there any data or evidence that could potentially be shown to you that might make you reconsider your faith in the topic? I’ll make it simpler, is there any data or evidence that at least will make you reconsider how useful the climate models are? The strange temperature trends in the tropical upper troposphere […]

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Congratulations Elinor Ostrom! She shares the prize with Oliver Williamson. I am delighted to see the work that Elinor does be recognized  because understanding commons problems and institutions is an overlooked and extremely important part of economics from the standpoint of non-economists. Williamson, by all accounts, is a deserving winner as well. My prediction was […]

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Fundamental Problem With Government

The United States government, as well as the governments at the lower levels are supposed to be governments of the people, by the people, and for the people. We have long since left the realm of the last of these three ideals. I’d change it to read government “to the people” rather than “for” the […]

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