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New Economist

  • IMF: "Risks to financial stability have intensified"

    For those hoping that credit conditions might gradually be returning to normal, today's IMF Global Financial Stability Report market update contained a stark warning: Risks to financial stability have intensified since October 2008. Macroeconomic risks have risen as global growth has fallen precipitously alongside a sharp slowdown of global trade.' [...]
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    Posted: January 28, 2009, 3:06pm EST
    by New Economist

  • CBO: largest growth shortfall since the Great Depression

    The Congressional Budget Office's new director, Douglas W. Elmendorf, testified on the state of the US economy before the House Budget Committee today. It makes sober reading. An accompanying blog post summarises his three key points: The economy is currently weathering a recession that started more than a year ago, [...]
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    Posted: January 27, 2009, 6:39pm EST
    by New Economist

  • 'Lone dove Danny' quits the MPC

    Controversial Monetary Policy Commitee member and Dartmouth professor Danny Blanchflower is leaving the Bank of England, according to The Times: Man who wanted early rate cuts David Blanchflower steps down from MPC Professor Blanchflower, who has voted to cut interest rates every month since October last year, said that he [...]
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    Posted: December 11, 2008, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Are emerging Asia’s reserves really too high?

    Aside from China, no, according to a new IMF working paper by Marta Ruiz-Arranz and Milan Zavadjil. This is in large part an attempt to insure against a repeat of the 1997 Asian currency crisis: The paper has presented evidence that to a large extent explains Asia’s large reserve accumulation [...]
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    Posted: August 21, 2008, 2:31am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Austan Goolsbee

    The September/October 2008 edition of the MIT Technology Review has a feature by Mark Williams on Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee: Obama's Geek Economist No earth shattering insights, but another reminder of just how Chicago-ist an Obama presidency could be. [...]
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    Posted: August 20, 2008, 4:29pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • The credit crunch: what happened?

    While Ken 'worst is yet to come' Rogoff is trying his level best to scare global financial markets about the credit crunch, research is now starting to filter through about just what happened last year. A new IMF working paper by Nathaniel Frank, Brenda González-Hermosillo and Heiko Hesse, Transmission of [...]
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    Posted: August 19, 2008, 5:07pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Back again

    The very welcome return of Dave Altig's Macroblog last week has prompted me to consider posting again too. Apologies for the protracted absence. My non-virtual life has been rather hectic in recent months. Now that things have settled down a little, I hope to return to semi-regular postings again. It's [...]
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    Posted: August 18, 2008, 5:28pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Skilled migration boosts innovation

    A recent paper by McGill University's Jennifer Hunt to an NBER labour studies programme conference asks whether the increase in foreign-born college graduates has contributed to innovation in the United States. Her paper, How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation? (PDF), finds that it does: In this paper I have demonstrated [...]
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    Posted: May 01, 2008, 3:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • How rural villages have gained from China's great migration

    Inter-county migration in China - mostly rural migrants moving to urban areas - increased four-fold during the 1990s, from just over 20 million in 1990 to 79 million by 2000. With what effect? Co-authors Alan de Brauw from the International Food Policy Research Institute and Michigan State University's John Giles [...]
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    Posted: April 30, 2008, 3:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Why people emigrate

    Semi-regular blogging service resumes this week with a few posts on migration - still a very topical issue on both sides of the Atlantic. The first paper I'd like to highlight is by the University of Chicago's Jeffrey Grogger, and UCSD's Gordon H. Hanson. Their recent NBER Working Paper No. [...]
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    Posted: April 29, 2008, 3:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • The trouble with Joe

    Ever been to a concert or play where the rest of the audience were in raptures, but you weren't? That's been my experience every time I've gone to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak on globalisation in London. Each time I've come away wondering how such a first rate economist can offer [...]
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    Posted: April 07, 2008, 3:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Should we kill the king?

    Are autocratic leaders an impediment to democratisation? An intriguing question, which some economists have recently sought to answer. A year ago a JPE article by Harvard's Ben Olken on corruption in Indonesia attracted attention for its innovative appproach. The American magazine has a profile of him by Michael Moynihan, Graft' [...]
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    Posted: March 06, 2008, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • How China thinks

    We know a lot about the Chinese economy - but how do the Chinese think? What do they discuss? Are they all Maoist automatons, or is there a lively debate occurring which Western observors are barely aware of? Veteran think tanker Mark Leonard favours the latter view, which he puts [...]
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    Posted: February 27, 2008, 3:01pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Globalisation: good for jobs?

    Chris Giles summarises a new report on globalisation by the Ifo-affiliated European Economic Advisory Group in today's Financial Times: Globalisation ‘a blessing’ for west Europe Increased trade, outsourcing and offshoring do not create unemployment but boost the number of jobs in advanced economies, a study of European labour markets says [...]
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    Posted: February 26, 2008, 5:10pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Winning American Idol: try to be last

    If you are appearing on American Idol or the X-Factor, try to be one of the last to sing. That's the conclusion from a new paper presented at a University of Westminster seminar today. Lionel Page and Katie Page look at an important topic - the evaluation of a sequential [...]
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    Posted: February 11, 2008, 4:06pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Meet the authors...

    There may be no such thing as a free lunch - but London has plenty of free public lectures. Readers living in the old dart have the opportunity to hear about two new and - by all acounts - exciting tomes. This Wednesday evening (6 February, 6.30pm) undercover economist and [...]
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    Posted: February 04, 2008, 3:03pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Rethinking free trade?

    Is support for free trade losing ground amongst economists? Business Week Washington bureau chief Jane Sasseen writes of an apparent shift in mood: Economists Rethink Free Trade: ..something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We're not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. [...]
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    Posted: February 01, 2008, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • The IFS Green Budget: time for some prudence

    The Institute for Fiscal Studies launched its IFS Green Budget 2008 at a half-day conference yesterday. A preview of the official UK Budget due mid-March, it's comprehensive and thought provoking document for anyone with an interest in the state of the UK economy or public finances. Both the full 312 [...]
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    Posted: January 31, 2008, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • The mixed benefits of remittances

    Recent years have seen international agencies like the World Bank and IMF extol the econmic benefits of remittances. Sending money to the folks back home boosts the incomes of developing countries and helps to offset losses fom the 'brain drain'. What's not to like? Well, we wouldn't be economists if [...]
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    Posted: January 30, 2008, 3:33pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Growth diagnostics: the dangers of agnosticism

    Why does income grow faster in some countries than others? A common empirical approach in recent growth analysis has been to adopt an 'agnostic' approach and let the data do the talking (i.e. weak priors). But a new paper by Antonio Ciccone from Barcelona's ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and ECB economist [...]
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    Posted: January 25, 2008, 1:44pm EST
    by New Economist

  • The Stern report revisited

    Australia's Productivity Commission today published a very useful assessment of the Stern report on climate change. The 125 page staff working paper by Rick Baker, Andrew Barker, Alan Johnston, and Michael Kohlhaas, The Stern Review: an assessment of its methodology, provides both an excellent summary and a balanced assessement of [...]
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    Posted: January 24, 2008, 3:08am EST
    by New Economist

  • Britain's super rich: racing away?

    The latest Institute for Fiscal Studies briefing note, Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes, focuses on the 'super-rich'. Authors Mike Brewer, Luke Sibieta and Liam Wren-Lewis define this group of 'high income individuals' as the richest 1 in every 1,000 taxpayers (i.e. the top 0.1%) The [...]
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    Posted: January 18, 2008, 4:25pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Growth theory: Solow or Lucas?

    I've just come across a new OECD economic working paper on growth theory: Solow or Lucas? Testing growth models using panel data from OECD countries. Authors Jens Arnold, Andrea Bassanini and Stefano Scarpetta test whether the growth experience of a sample of OECD countries over the past three decades is [...]
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    Posted: January 17, 2008, 5:22pm EST
    by New Economist

  • US recession risk revisited

    My previous posts, Is the US heading into a recession? seems to have a caused a flurry of comments. I remain of the view that the US economy will just scrape through 2008 without one. Admittedly, the run of data since that post has hardly been encouraging, with a plunge [...]
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    Posted: January 10, 2008, 2:01pm EST
    by New Economist

  • New econoblogs

    The Bayesian Heresy has alerted me to some new econoblogs of note, which I have added to my blogroll. Most are by academic economists: * The visible hand in economics blog, written by several New Zealand economists, has as its mission: Exploring government and society’s role in economics * Modeled [...]
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    Posted: January 07, 2008, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Econoblogger navel gazing

    There are few things more tedious than bloggers writing about blogging. So apologies for the navel gazing. I just wanted to note, for those who may find it of interest, the following recent posts: * The Bayesian Heresy blog has posted its Economics Blog Awards 2008 * Aaron Schiff at [...]
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    Posted: January 06, 2008, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Academic outsourcing

    Though co-authorship between leading academics and graduate students is common, and can often be of mutual benefit, it is reasonable to expect the professor in question to make a substantial contribution to the end product - especially if they are the lead author. A key issue is how much credit [...]
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    Posted: January 05, 2008, 12:01pm EST
    by New Economist

  • How useful is Okun's Law?

    Edward S. Knotek asks an interesting question in the latest Kansas City Fed's Economic Review: How Useful is Okun's Law? (PDF) From the beginning of 2003 through the first quarter of 2006, real gross domestic product in the United States grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent. As [...]
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    Posted: January 04, 2008, 3:03pm EST
    by New Economist

  • 2008: No US recession

    I guess it's time I made some of my own predictions for the new year. The really big question this year (aside from the Presidential election) is what fate the US economy in the wake of the credit crunch, oil at $100 a barrel and collapsing house prices? Will the [...]
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    Posted: January 03, 2008, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Cityphilia

    Like most of us I have been reading a lot of commentary about the credit crunch lately. A more personal perspective about the City and the recent crisis is presented by John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books. Here is a short extract from his piece, Cityphilia: This [...]
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    Posted: December 31, 2007, 7:39pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Is the US heading into a recession?

    "The American economy is slipping into its second post-bubble recession in seven years." So writes Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's official doomster and chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, in today's New York Times. I don't agree - and neither do some of the other contributors in today's issue: Six experts assess [...]
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    Posted: December 16, 2007, 10:21am EST
    by New Economist

  • Do economic sanctions deter?

    Harvard doctoral graduate Ioana M. Petrescu has studied a much-discussed but little-studied subject: do economic sanctions actually work? Her recent paper, Rethinking Economic Sanction Success: Sanctions as Deterrents (PDF), finds that they do appear to deter future disputes: Economic sanctions are one of the most common foreign policy tools. Despite [...]
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    Posted: December 13, 2007, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • What drives the growth in FX activity?

    Earlier this year the Bank for International Settlements published their Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity. The survey reported a massive jump in daily turnover: Turnover in traditional foreign exchange instruments increased by an unprecedented 71% to $3.2 trillion. What has been driving this upsurge? [...]
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    Posted: December 12, 2007, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • 'The continuing muddles of monetary theory'

    One of the more lively papers delivered at this week's 75th Anniversary Lionel Robbins Conference in London was by the LSE's Charles Goodhart: The Continuing Muddles of Monetary Theory: A Steadfast Refusal to Face Facts (PDF). Goodhart believes monetary economics has "a long way yet to go", and few economists [...]
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    Posted: December 12, 2007, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • The nature and significance of economic science: Lionel Robbins revisited

    This year marks the 75th anniversary of Lord Lionel Robbins's An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science - the book where he famously redefined the scope of economics to be: the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between scarce means which have alternative uses. As [...]
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    Posted: December 11, 2007, 4:01pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Do central banks react to house prices?

    Some do and some don't, according to a new working paper by Swedish Riksbank economists Daria Finocchiaro and Virginia Queijo von Heideken: The substantial fluctuations in house prices recently experienced by many industrialized economies have stimulated a vivid debate on the possible implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we [...]
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    Posted: December 11, 2007, 3:18pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Productivity vs employment growth: a zero-sum game?

    All economists know productivity matters. But they also know it isn't easy to measure, nor to explain the often large and persistent productivity gaps between nations. A new paper by Harvard's Ian Dew-Becker and Northwestern University's Robert J. Gordon makes a provocative contribution to the productivity debate. Presented at a [...]
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    Posted: December 10, 2007, 5:54pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Hollywood and the cost of revealed talent

    Why are there more mediocre films being made by Hollywood now than during the 'golden years' of the studio system in the 1930s and 1940s? Drawing on a new paper by Berkeley's Marko Tervio, Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling offers a plausible explanation in his post Superstars and talent: [...]
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    Posted: December 09, 2007, 7:37am EST
    by New Economist

  • Obese American women's rising wage penalty

    The latest foray into the economics of obesity debate comes from David Lempert of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His new economic working paper, Women's Increasing Wage Penalties from Being Overweight and Obese, finds that overweight working women in the United States face a rising wage penalty: This paper first [...]
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    Posted: December 07, 2007, 3:10pm EST
    by New Economist

  • OECD Economic Outlook: "not that bad in view of the recent shocks"

    The OECD released its latest Economic Outlook today. Though some fear that falling house prices and the global credit crunch might drive the US into a recession, that view is not shared in Paris. Their US forecast expects weakness in the US housing sector to drag down growth in the [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2007, 4:22pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Vietnam: the world's next factory?

    Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee has been to Ho Chi Minh City - and he likes what he sees: After China, Vietnam Will Be World's Factory After China, Vietnam is emerging as the world's next factory of choice for labor-intensive goods. One can see that in the changing composition of the country's [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2007, 2:29pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Why Is Elvis on Burkina Faso postage stamps?

    The University of Michigan's Joel Slemrod has a fascinating new paper examining how many small states commercialise their state sovereignty. This can ioccur in a variety of ways, from stamps to tax havens. His paper, Why Is Elvis on Burkina Faso Postage Stamps? Cross-National Evidence on the Commercialization of State [...]
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    Posted: December 03, 2007, 3:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Should public schools be privatised? A bloggish debate

    Two Australian econo-bloggers, Labor supporter Andrew Leigh and 'classical liberal' Andrew Norton, are running "a bloggish debate" over the next week or so on the topic: Should public schools be privatised? The Day 1 post is by Andrew Norton. He writes: People are used to the idea of state schools, [...]
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    Posted: December 02, 2007, 11:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Born to be mild?

    A new IZA discussion paper by Andrew Clark, Born To Be Mild? Cohort Effects Don’t (Fully) Explain Why Well-Being Is U-Shaped in Age, advances the long-running debate on the relationship between age and happiness. Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling explains it well: For some time, those of us in [...]
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    Posted: December 01, 2007, 12:19pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Is there a 'marriage premium' for gay men?

    No, according to a new IZA discussion paper by Madeline Zavodny: Controlling for observable characteristics, cohabiting gay men do not earn significantly more than other gay men or more than unmarried heterosexual men. But she also finds that: Cohabiting heterosexual men also do not earn more than non-cohabiting heterosexual men. [...]
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    Posted: November 29, 2007, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • If you can understand this blog you must be a genius

    I had always assumed that the New Economist was a fairly readable weblog. An online readability test suggests otherwise, gving it a 'genius' rating. (Hat tip: Christine Chen at FP's Passport blog) So how do other popular econoblogs compare? Many are almost as unreadable as mine: try Dani Rodrick (college [...]
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    Posted: November 29, 2007, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • In praise of Alfredo Perez

    One of the non-economic weblog's I used to check regularly was the Political Theory Daily Review. Hardly an inspiring name, to be sure - but in fact it was an intellectual treasure trove of daily finds, ranging far wider than the name might suggest. Book reviews, interviews, academic papers, controversies [...]
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    Posted: November 28, 2007, 5:18pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Can China find an 'eastern' model of development?

    Not quite heretical - but certainly controversial - comments on China's economic development: ...from my own layman's point of view, I don't believe China will ever manage to find its own uniquely "eastern" model of development. The past is the past, and there is no room for "what ifs". More [...]
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    Posted: November 28, 2007, 3:21pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Notable

    To appear in the December 2 edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, here is a sneak preview of their 100 Notable Books of 2007. Other newspapers publish their own lists, but few do it so well. [...]
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    Posted: November 28, 2007, 3:57am EST
    by New Economist

  • Welcome to 2008, the year of free

    Another article of note in The World in 2008 is by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail. His piece, Freeconomics, explains the merits of giving it away: ..What is getting too cheap to meter is processing power, storage, bandwidth and all the other enabling [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2007, 3:48am EST
    by New Economist

  • Has the City lost its cool?

    It's not quite The Beano Annual, but you know that Xmas is approaching when the Economist's annual glossy hits the newstands. In a pleasant change, most of the content of The World in 2008 is available free online. Another (new?) development is that author's names are now included - still [...]
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    Posted: November 26, 2007, 5:33pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Supercapitalism or super-hype?

    Tony Judt's piece in the latest New York Review of Book, The Wrecking Ball of Innovation, presents quite a telling assessment of Robert Reich's new tome, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy. While Judt agrees with much of Reich's account of what's gone wrong, he despairs at the lack of [...]
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    Posted: November 25, 2007, 9:25am EST
    by New Economist

  • In conversation with Richard Freeman

    One of America's most prolific and well respected economists, Harvard's Richard Freeman, talks about his career and his research at UC Berkeley, available on YouTube: Global Capitalism, Labor Markets, and Inequality Hat tip: BookForum.com [...]
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    Posted: November 24, 2007, 4:04am EST
    by New Economist

  • Private equity: who profits?

    Private equity has been growing rapidly in recent years, presumably reflecting superior performance? Maybe not. A new study for the European Commission by Oliver Gottschalg from HEC business school in Paris suggests a quite limited improvement in returns, and which is scooped up in management fees. Martin Arnold reports in [...]
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    Posted: November 23, 2007, 3:05am EST
    by New Economist

  • Hefei: China's Silicon Valley?

    The December 2007 issue of Prospect magazine has an article by Rob Gifford about Hefei. Almost unknown outside China, it aspires to be The Silicon Valley of China. Here's the first pargraph: In the US, there are nine cities with more than 1m inhabitants. In China, there are 49. You [...]
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    Posted: November 22, 2007, 3:01pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Forecast combination

    One for the econometricians and forecasters amongst my audience. Call me a nerd, but I was quite excited to come across this new IMF working paper, The Use of Encompassing Tests for Forecast Combinations, by Turgut Kisinbay: The paper proposes an algorithm that uses forecast encompassing tests for combining forecasts. [...]
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    Posted: November 21, 2007, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • Rate cuts due next year as UK growth slows

    Today's Bank of England Inflation Report contains a whiff of stagflation in its latest economic projections. Inflation is heading higher, at least in the short-run, while growth risks are to the downside: In the central projection, higher energy and import prices push inflation above the target in the near term. [...]
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    Posted: November 14, 2007, 4:05pm EST
    by New Economist

  • The UK public school 'exodus'

    The Saturday Telegraph front page carries a rather alarmist lead story by Graeme Paton and Toby Helm: Middle classes abandon state schools Here are the first two paragraphs: A growing proportion of middle-class parents are giving up on state education after 10 years of Labour rule by paying to educate [...]
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    Posted: November 10, 2007, 7:01am EST
    by New Economist

  • More from the UK migration debate

    With not just tabloids like the Daily Mail but even government Ministers emphasising the potential downsides of the UK's recent migration experience, a few commentators have sought to present more thoughtful accounts. Here are three: David Smith of the Sunday Times wrote on 28 October that Migrants ease the inflation [...]
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    Posted: November 08, 2007, 3:15pm EST
    by New Economist

  • Inequality - a threat to India's boom

    While it is right to celebrate India's economic resurgence, not all its citizens have benefited from this growth; many are landless, and poverty remains endemic.FT journalist Jo Johnson warns that Inequality threatens India’s economic boom It is a fair bet that when the ruling elite of a poor developing country [...]
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    Posted: November 02, 2007, 2:48am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Who's on top?

    Lists and rankings fascinate many, from Letterman's top ten to People magazine's best and worst dressed. Even economies have their own such lists. This week the Economist Intelligence Unit published its business environment rankings, with the United States the 9th most attractive place for business out of 82 countries, "the [...]
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    Posted: November 01, 2007, 5:14pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Is divorce such a disaster for kids?

    Philip Larkin may have written that your mum and dad f*%k you up. But what, specifically, about divorce? The British tabloids regularly run features lamenting the "devastating" consequences of divorce on the "tots". But a recent paper by Shirley Liu from the University of Miami undermines some of those assertions. [...]
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    Posted: October 23, 2007, 2:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Interaction models - don't get caught!

    In my naivety I had assumed most social scientists understood how to model interaction effects. Then I read this post by Omar on orgtheory.net, and realised maybe I was wrong: So we are agreed interaction models are awesome. However, as your stats 101 teacher told you, you have to be [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2007, 3:14pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Nodding off in Beijing

    Channel 4 News' China correspondent Lindsey Hilsum tried not to nod off while attending the 17th Party Congress in Beijing. She was not alone: Never before have I felt at one with the former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. But halfway through President Hu Jintao's two-and-a-half-hour speech at the 17th Congress [...]
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    Posted: October 18, 2007, 4:31pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Has world poverty really fallen?

    The short answer is: maybe, maybe not. Here's a slightly longer answer: We evaluate the claim that world consumption poverty has fallen since 1990 in light of alternative assumptions about the extent of initial poverty and the rate of subsequent poverty reduction in China, India, and the rest of the [...]
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    Posted: October 16, 2007, 4:47pm EDT
    by New Economist

  • Caste out

    Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is unimpressed by the paper by Northwestern University's Kripa Freitas on the Indian caste system that I posted about just over a week ago. Here are the key points from his post, Was the Indian caste system efficient? I have a few points: 1. No [...]
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    Posted: October 14, 2007, 8:11am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Outsourcing India

    It was bound to happen, but it's a remarkable story nonetheless. Thousands of jobs taken by India from the west are being re-exported as wages shoot up. The Guardian's Randeep Ramesh reports that India outsources outsourcing: From his tree-top-high office, Kris Gopalakrishnan, the head of India's giant software company Infosys, [...]
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    Posted: October 13, 2007, 7:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Why should men care about women's rights?

    UCLA's Matthias Doepkey and Stanford's Michèle Tertilt ask a good question about women's rights and development: Women’s Liberation: What Was in It for Men? (PDF). Here is their answer: Women’s rights are closely related to economic development. This is true both across countries, where women have most rights in the [...]
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    Posted: October 12, 2007, 7:33am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Explaining the T-bond 'conundrum'

    In February 2005, then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan referred to the decline in long-term rates in the wake of the Fed increasing the target for the federal funds rate by 150 basis points as a "conundrum" St Louis Fed's Daniel L. Thornton has investigated Greenspan's remarks and provides an answer, [...]
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    Posted: October 11, 2007, 7:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • The economics of happiness: a progress report

    Little by little, psychology's insights into happiness and well-being are being integrated into economic theory and debate. Happiness has become one of the hot topics in economics over the last decade, with both the size and depth of the literature increasing at a rapid rate. Though US-based psychologists Daniel Kahneman [...]
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    Posted: October 11, 2007, 2:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Monetary policy transparency - what impact?

    Monetary policy transparency is generally considered these days to be a 'good thing' - though it was not always so. But what impact has greater transparency had? Carin van der Cruijsen and Sylvester Eijffinger from Tilburg University have reviewed the literature. Their paper, The Economic Impact of Central Bank Transparency: [...]
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    Posted: October 10, 2007, 7:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • New book: 'Economics and Psychology'

    A belated post to acknowledge a welcome new volume, Economics and Psychology: Developments and Issues, published in July by MIT Press. Edited by the University of Zurich's Bruno S. Frey and University of Basel's Alois Stutzer, it appears to have a first rate selection of contributions. You can read the [...]
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    Posted: October 10, 2007, 2:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Who took the money out of monetary policy?

    In a recent economic discussion paper, Will Monetary Policy Become More of a Science?, Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin reviewed the progress economists have made in monetary theory and policy in recent decades. He had some good news for central bankers: Monetary policy will however never become as boring as [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2007, 7:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • What was special about Europe?

    Gregory Clark's new book A Farewell to Alms is not the only recent take on the emergence of the industrial revolution. Dartmouth's Meir Kohn has a forthcoming work too. Titled The Origins of Western Economic Success: Commerce, Finance and Government in Pre-Industrial Europe, the book manuscript is available online. As [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2007, 2:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Are divorce lawyers worth the money?

    Not according to an Austrian study presented at the recent EALE 2007 annual conference. Martin Halla's paper, Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers (PDF), examined the divorce strategic game: ..we formulate a simply model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire a lawyer in their divorce process. A lawyer [...]
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    Posted: October 08, 2007, 7:01am EDT
    by New Economist

  • Living in a Post-Freakonomics World: What 'The Poseidon Adventure' can tell us about this unexpected spate of pop economics books with long silly titles

    The 1970s were not just a decade of sex, drugs, flares, bad hair and crap music. They were also the decade when a spate of Hollywood disaster movies dominated the box office. It was kicked off by Airport in 1970, with the US box office gross coming second after the [...]
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    Posted: October 08, 2007, 3:01am EDT
    by New Economist
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