~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (170)

There is a new paper on this topic, with what seems to be very good data: This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across establishments. An establishment with the […] The post How sticky are wages in nominal...

The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 3-12, 2024. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as newly minted PhDs will also be considered. […] The post Duke History of Economic Thought Summer...

By me, from Bloomberg: The main culprit could be the fertility crisis. In Latin America, for instance, fertility rates are coming in much lower than had been expected. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Cuba all have fertility rates of about 1.3. In one decade, Mexico had a 24% drop in births. Brazil, by far the region’s most populous […] The post Shrinking populations will limit convergence appeared...

By a lot.  I was briefly on the island, and also visited Próspera there (I thank my hosts for their time and efforts, and I believe Vitalia will be posting my session with them on-line, much of it covering life extension and crypto). I have been to plenty of both Latin America and the Caribbean, and […] The post Is real estate in Roatan undervalued?...

I usually don’t like arguments like the one that follows, as purely short-run second best considerations tend to rub me the wrong way.  Nonetheless I had never thought of it before, so I am happy to present it for our collective enlightenment: Mortgage interest deductions and other homeownership subsidies are widely believed to be harmful […] The post Is the mortgage interest deduction a...

The country was not quite as rich in the early days as it is sometimes made out to be: Argentina’s performance on this measure is frequently exaggerated.  In 1929, for example, Argentina’s per capita income was less than half of the average of other temperate agrarian societies (such as Canada and Australia) and of European […] The post Argentina fact of the day appeared...

I think that’s part of the explanation of the “soft landing.” Back during the inflationary spurt in 2022, nominal wages were growing very rapidly. The public sector struggles in that kind of situation, because it has much less flexibility to offer opportunistic wages or to pay new hires differently from old hires. So a bunch […] The post Matt Yglesias on the “soft landing”...

In September I alerted you to a crowdfunding campaign to produce a dominant assurance contract/refund bonus platform. Many of you stepped up and it’s now and up and running! The platform is called EnsureDone. It’s starting up small, with just a few projects, but already the projects are quite interesting. MakeSunsets, for example, had a […] The post World’s First Dominant Assurance Contract Platform...

…while one would certainly like to have these drugs available to these patients, if the price of these drugs doesn’t come down, you can make a good argument their cost will literally break Medicare. Why? Well, roughly 35% of Medicare patients are overweight or obese. Roughly 75% of people over 65 have coronary artery disease. […] The post The economics of semaglutide appeared first...

But a hundred years ago, birds were seen as the best remedy for the weeds and insect pests that threatened the country’s food supply and cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And in order to identify the precise impact that birds had on agriculture, a field called economic ornithology was born. According […] The post Economic ornithology appeared first on Marginal...

Take the pig’s ear first. Unveiled in 2008 as a $15bn smart city project, Konza Technopolis was supposed to be the heart of Kenya’s “silicon savannah” that, by 2020, would create 100,000 jobs and add 2% to gdp. Three years and many missed deadlines later, there is still far more evidence of savannah than silicon. By […] The post *The Economist* on Tatu City, Kenya...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler sat down with Patrick to discuss signature fields on the back of credit cards, whether bank tellers or waitstaff are more trustworthy, the gremlins behind spurious credit card declines, how debt collection and maple syrup heists should change your model […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Patrick...

“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said. He said that an influx of low-value coinage would have been welcomed in Peru at the dawn of the 20th century. The country’s economy was reeling from the recent War of the Pacific, and the government was focusing on printing larger-denomination paper […] The post The efficiency of counterfeiting in 19th...

As she did on the LBRY case (n.b. I was a LBRY advisor), SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce released a statement about the failings of the SEC with regards to the recently approved Bitcoin spot ETPs. It’s rare to read something this brutal coming from the inside. We squandered a decade of opportunities to do our […] The post Hester Peirce on the SEC appeared...

We assess statistical power and excess statistical significance among 31 leading economics general interest and field journals using 22,281 parameter estimates from 368 distinct areas of economics research. Median statistical power in leading economics journals is very low (only 7%), and excess statistical significance is quite high (19%). Power this low and excess significance this […] The post Department of Uh-Oh, economic research edition...

Maybe so: We administer a Turing Test to AI Chatbots. We examine how Chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, \textit{etc.}, as well as how they respond to a traditional Big-5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and […] The post Are chatbots better than we are?...

Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less […] The post Back to the Future: Power Dishwashers!...

Probably not forever, but we are living in strange times: Now the theory needs major revision. Political leaders still wish to manipulate economic variables in their favor, of course. But economies, as well as voters, are not going along — and so the standard mechanisms for political business cycle theory are broken… Under political business […] The post Political business cycle theory has been...

The negative AD shift comes from the Fed’s extreme tightening plus the phasing out of fiscal stimulus.  That might hurt housing markets the most, plus whatever consumers were wanting to spend their extra cash on (travel, restaurants?).  It should hurt a lot of service sectors with sticky nominal prices quite a bit.  And, we are […] The post What if you have a favorable...

I was wondering if you would consider writing a post about the German debt brake in light of recent developments? Personally, I am not a huge fan of discussions about fiscal policy (or even worse, austerity…), as I feel they are mostly Rorschach test without much deep thinking. But I did find the recent developments […] The post Kamil Kovar on the German debt...

History of Economic Thought syllabus The honor code applies to this class. Accommodations will be made for disabilities in accord with the policies of George Mason University. Your grade is 2/3 based on your paper, 1/3 based on a final exam. You are required to submit short progress reports on your paper on a regular […] The post My history of economic thought reading...

That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: One study of Ethiopia looked at the psychological impact of raising aspirations. The researchers created a randomized control trial, showing one group of people short films about business and entrepreneurial success in the community. Six months later, those who had seen the films had worked […] The post The economic returns to psychological interventions...

He is starting a new podcast and I am perhaps the first episode?  There is video and text and audio.  Here is an excerpt: Lindsey: Did they recognize early on that you were different and that they had a job to do to push you, or no? Cowen: Well, my father thought I was weird, so he […] The post My podcast with Brink Lindsey appeared...