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Pay growth is stronger than expected, underlining dilemma over when to cut interest ratesBusiness live – latest updatesThe number of people out of work rose by more than expected in February, raising concerns that employers are beginning to lay off staff in response to high interest rates.The Office for National Statistics said the unemployment rate increased to 4.2% in February from 3.9%, well above...

FT: When it launched its fully automated stores four years ago, Germany’s regional supermarket chain Tegut billed the experiment as a window into the future of shopping. But the Fulda-based retailer has since been embroiled in a legal fight over a centuries-old principle enshrined in the German constitution: Sunday rest. Be they robotic or staffed […] The post The Culture that is Germany appeared...

In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote: At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers are low, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math […] The post Pay For Performance Increases Performance (Water...

February growth of 0.1% comes despite construction and retail being hit by wet start to yearBusiness live – latest updatesBritain’s economy has taken a step closer to exiting recession as official figures showed growth continued in February despite a washout month for construction and retail after one of the wettest starts to a year on record.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said gross domestic...

These topics seem underexplored to me: Montesquieu Economics in the Talmud Rise of econometrics in the 19th century The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered Works in any foreign language you might read Chinese economic thought Economic thought in India The funding of […] The post History of economic thought paper ideas...

I’ve long been an advocate of increasing the use of incentives in organ procurement for transplant; either with financial incentives or with rules such as no-give, no-take which prioritize former potential organ donors on the organ recipient list. What I and many reformers failed to realize, however, is that the current monopolized system is so […] The post UNOS Kills appeared first on Marginal...

In this paper, we introduce TimeGPT, the first foundation model for time series, capable of generating accurate predictions for diverse datasets not seen during training. We evaluate our pre-trained model against established statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, demonstrating that TimeGPT zero-shot inference excels in performance, efficiency, and simplicity. Our study provides compelling evidence […] The post TimeGPT-1 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t […] The post The $20 bill gets picked up,...

In annual letter to investors, Jamie Dimon warns ‘wars in Ukraine and Middle East could become far worse’The boss of the US bank JP Morgan has warned that the world could be facing the most dangerous moment since the second world war, putting lives and economic growth at risk.In his annual letter to investors, Jamie Dimon said the world had been “generally on a...

It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group […] The post Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of...

Risk of declining consumption, house price falls and defaults as tighter policy finally has impactBusiness live – latest updatesThe high proportion of UK homeowners on fixed-rate mortgages means the Bank of England should be wary of keeping interest rates too high for too long, the International Monetary Fund has warned.The IMF said many borrowers had been sheltered until now from the impact of higher...

Collaborations in economics across genders increased (12.5% increase of women coauthors per 100 men-authored papers) after #MeToo . But senior researchers reduced their new collaborations with junior women by 33% per 100 senior-authored papers. https://t.co/zIxDF2Hukx pic.twitter.com/2YplnMTFoy — Florian Ederer (@florianederer) April 7, 2024 The post Economists do it with models? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments“And 2004-2020 is a long time horizon during...

As the organisation’s anniversary nears, borders around the world are closing againWhen trade ministers gathered in the Moroccan city of Marrakech 30 years ago this month to sign the agreement creating the World Trade Organization (WTO), the mood was celebratory. The Berlin Wall had come down only recently, communism had collapsed, and there was optimistic talk of how the body would prise open new...

One MR reader, Luca Piron, writes to me:  I found myself puzzled by a thought you expressed during your interview with Professor Haidt. In particular, from my understanding you suggested that in the near future AI will be able to sum up the content a user may want to see into a digest, so that they can […] The post A simple model of AI and...

NYTimes: Treasury officials say that they fear that elevated Chinese production targets are causing its firms to produce far more electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels than global markets can absorb, driving prices lower and disrupting production around the world. They fear that these spillovers will hurt businesses that are planning investments in the United […] The post Your Subsidies are Undercutting My Subsidies!...

I will be having a Conversation with him, and please note this is the conversation I want to have, not the one you want me to have.  So what should I ask?  Note that Joe has a new book coming out The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.  That said, I also would […] The post What should I ask Joe Stiglitz?...

The mayor of an Italian island is attempting to solve an animal overpopulation problem with an unusual offer: free goats for anyone who can catch them. Riccardo Gullo, the mayor of Alicudi, in Sicily’s Aeolian archipelago, introduced an “adopt-a-goat” program when the small island’s wild goat population grew to six times the human population of […] The post Lockean homesteading for goats, bonus added...

The rise of algorithmic pricing raises concerns of algorithmic collusion. We conduct experiments with algorithmic pricing agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs), and specifically GPT-4. We find that (1) LLM-based agents are adept at pricing tasks, (2) LLM-based pricing agents autonomously collude in oligopoly settings to the detriment of consumers, and (3) variation in […] The post Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models...

This past week, the influential psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman wrote the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he explained the two systems of thinking that shape human decisions. These include “System 1,” which relies on fast, automatic […]

From Anton Korinek here is a recent paper: Generative AI, in particular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize research. I describe dozens of use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation and feedback, writing, background research, data […] The post Generative AI for economists appeared first...

Not only was he a major figure in both financial economics and industrial organization, but he did things too: First, early on Mike decided that the Journal of Finance needed competition to drag it into the era of scientific research. Despite a chockful personal research agenda, Mike started the Journal of Financial Economics that he edited for 20+ years. […] The post Michael C. Jensen, RIP appeared first...

The LLMs basically win: This paper presents a novel study on harnessing Large Language Models’ (LLMs) outstanding knowledge and reasoning abilities for explainable financial time series forecasting. The application of machine learning models to financial time series comes with several challenges, including the difficulty in cross-sequence reasoning and inference, the hurdle of incorporating multi-modal signals […] The post LLMs vs. ARMA-GARCH appeared first on...

Study shows delivery apps such as Deliveroo and Just Eat still popular after pandemic boom in ordersDelivery app riders pedalling through cities and tailbacks at drive-throughs were familiar signs of Britain’s hunger for takeaway food at the peak of the Covid pandemic. Now a study suggests it became an enduring habit.After a boom in orders on Deliveroo, Just Eat and other platforms by locked-down...