Feed on
Posts
Comments

Category Archive for 'Flotsam and Jetsam'

Does anyone actually store money under their mattress?

Read Full Post »

I cannot recommend more highly George Stigler’s old autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. You will find him to be far more thoughtful, humble, generous and circumspect than any crude caricature you will ever see of him. Reading these sorts of books makes me sad for what has happened to education on two levels. First, he […]

Read Full Post »

Monday Morning Roundup

Evidence for Hanson’s filter? I find this one terrifying. Here is Marty Weitzman on negotiating global minimum carbon prices. The difficulty, as I see it, is that the “extra benefit” that country A receives from countries B through Z reducing carbon, can in fact, be negative. Gary Gorton on safe assets.  I know I am […]

Read Full Post »

Not much to round-up today (well, actually, I am not in a position to round-up much), and some is sobering. Try this one: “We find that poor economic conditions do not drive participation in ISIS. ” Paper here. Read the abstract, intro and conclusion, you will be depressed. I think Trumpists will use this one fiercely […]

Read Full Post »

In some of this week’s research findings we have: Women are much more likely to want jobs with more flexibility and stability, and to pay for it with lower wages. Science deniers take note. “While there is substantial heterogeneity in preferences, we find that women on average have a higher willingness to pay for jobs with […]

Read Full Post »

Monday Morning Roundup

Robert Lucas seems to lend additional support for the “Skill-Biased Technical Change” argument for why measured income inequality has increased. Can competitive fiat currency competition produce stable prices? It is neat to see this conversation happening again, it’s been relatively dormant for some time. We need an Uber for moving. Efficient cheating? How about we just eliminate the […]

Read Full Post »

Saving the world one plastic bag at a time. Someone spent $3,000 on it, and among the initiatives include taking up more space on campus for additional bins to recycle these. I hope the replacement bags / resusable bags clean themselves.  Of course, the fact that many bags are thrown out is definitely proof that […]

Read Full Post »

Happy Leap Day

Some tidbits from the world of economic research: Trump would hate this paper. The paper shows considerable improvements in human capital in communities that had ready access to migrant jobs. The long trail of damage left by disruptive kids in your elementary school: earnings at the age of 26 are reduced by 3 to 4%. When […]

Read Full Post »

Score another one for the importance of peer effects (in crime). Again, where is the cognitive dissonance when it comes to neighborhood based government schooling? Question for readers: do you think if we eliminated the neighborhood restrictions on schooling that the government schools would end up less segregated (not just by race by other socio-economic […]

Read Full Post »

Slaying a Shibboleth?

In the human capital field, Carruthers and Wanamaker write: The gap between black and white earnings is a longstanding feature of the United States labor market.  Competing explanations attribute different weight to wage discrimination and access to human capital. Using new data on local school quality, we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and […]

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »