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2026-05-06

• Could development economics be more useful?
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2026-05-06 06:08:15 UTC

  Source: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde The above image is from a recent tweet by University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (henceforth referred to as “JFV”), in which he criticizes the field of development economics for ignoring the big questions. He writes: A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are [...]

2026-04-29

• Simplifying the Regulation of Small Nuclear Reactors
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2026-04-29 11:47:36 UTC

  If the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island nuclear power accidents hadn’t occurred, how much electricity would be generated each year using nuclear power? Regulations were triggered by these shocks and these regulations have slowed the growth of clean nuclear power and nuclear power innovation. M y 2007 paper on rare disasters as regulatory catalysts explores this point. Few PHD students enter this field because they don’t expect that there is demand for their services. This ugly Catch 22 creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nuclear power would be safer if more talent enters the field but yo [...]

2026-04-16

• The cost of markets
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-04-16 08:17:59 UTC

  There is, wrote (pdf) Ronald Coase, “a cost of using the price mechanism.” It comprises such things as discovering suppliers; finding the best prices; forecasting future changes in one’s requirements; and negotiating and enforcing contracts. It is because of these costs that companies exist. They, in effect, replace the market with a hierarchical relationship. Rather than finding a contractor for every job the employer can simply tell an employee what to do. Instead of looking for a supplier of parts, the company can make them itself. And rather than worry about having to renegotiate contracts [...]

2026-04-10

• Monetary Tightening and the Price Puzzle in Asian Economies
  by a.kumar@soton.ac.uk (Abhishek Kumar) in Asia Economics Blog, 2026-04-10 11:24:24 UTC

  In theory, an exogenous increase in the policy interest rate should lead to a decline in inflation, assuming the demand side effects dominate the supply side effects. However, for emerging market economies many empirical studies based on structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) find that an increase in the policy rate is followed by a rise in prices, a phenomenon known as the price puzzle (e.g., Sims, 1992 ). One explanation for this puzzle is the misidentification of monetary policy shocks ( Ramey (2016) . To address this issue, some studies have incorporated proxies for inflation expectatio [...]

2026-04-09

• "In it for themselves"
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-04-09 07:54:12 UTC

  “MPs are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world.” I don’t know how true these cliched sentiments are; like Elizabeth I, I have no window into people’s souls. But I know something else - that they are irrelevant. Almost everybody in work is in it for themselves. Doctors, binmen, guys on the checkout at Lidl - none would be there if they weren’t being paid. And do you care what a dentist or mechanic knows about the real world? No. Why, then, do we put our trust into these people who are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world? And why, so ofte [...]

2026-04-01

• Evaluating India's Energy Ambitions: Evidence from Electricity Generation Project-Level Data
  by Anurodh in Ajay Shah's blog, 2026-04-01 08:10:00 UTC

  by Upasa Borah, Akshay Jaitly and Renuka Sane . India's electricity demand has been growing rapidly, at 9% per annum since 2021 . Meeting this demand by 2030 would require around 777 GW of installed capacity, as estimated by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA). At the same time, India has committed to achieving 500 GW of installed non-fossil capacity by 2030. A study by CEEW (2025) finds that meeting this target would require adding around 56 GW of non-fossil capacity every year between 2025 and 2030, failing which India would need an additional 10 GW of coal-based capacity to meet future [...]

2026-03-30

• Transforming Corporate Governance to Improve Access to Medicines in the Global South
  by Padmashree Gehl Sampath, Öner Tulum, William Lazonick in INET Blog, 2026-03-30 15:41:00 UTC

  Affordable medicines remain out of reach for millions because pharmaceutical innovation is organized around value extraction, not public health. How do shareholder-driven governance and fragmented global health financing reinforce inequity, and what structural reforms are needed to reverse it? Every year, millions of people die in the Global South from causes that are entirely preventable. Many of these deaths could be averted with timely and affordable access to medicines. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), of the roughly 2.7 billi [...]

2026-03-25

• Neutral Rates of Interest in East Asia: The Interplay between Business and Financial Cycles
  by psiklos@wlu.ca (Pierre L. Siklos) in Asia Economics Blog, 2026-03-25 06:41:28 UTC

  Co-authors:  Dora Xia and Hongyi Chen   Evaluating the stance of monetary policy for the open economies of East Asia requires a different approach than that developed for the US.  In recent years, the discussion has centered around the concept of the neutral real interest rate, or r*. A commonly used definition of r* is the interest rate that prevails when economic slack is zero and inflation is stable. Observers then ask, by comparing r* with the existing policy rate, whether current monetary conditions are too accommodative or too restrictive. The neutral rate of interest is inherently unobs [...]

2026-03-19

• Electricity prices have increased and vary by region : The latest BLS data and recent research
  by ? in FRED blog, 2026-03-19 13:00:00 UTC

  Residential electricity prices have increased steeply in recent months, and there are noticeable geographical differences in prices. Our FRED graph above uses data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to show just how high and variable electricity prices are: Between April 2020 and January 2026, country-wide average electricity prices increased by 44.4% . The average price of electricity was highest in the Northeast Census Region, at $0.265 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), and lowest in the South Census Region, at $0.164 per kWh. (For the states in the various Census regions, see this map .) [...]

2026-03-17

• Alternative or mainstream? The shifting media of the internet
  by Dalton,A in LSE Review of Books, 2026-03-17 11:55:39 UTC

  This edited extract from Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory by Bart Cammaerts explores how the internet and its convergent technologies fostered subcultures, transformed alternative media, and was later appropriated by commercial, data‑driven models. Given this shift from early countercultural ideals to today’s surveillance capitalism and the fluidity of our digital landscape, is the binary of “mainstream” and “alternative” media still meaningful? Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory. Bart Cammaerts . Routledge. 2026 . How the internet fostered subcultures The [...]

2026-03-02

• Bad incentives in politics
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-03-02 09:33:29 UTC

  “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” said Charlie Munger. In politics, we can reverse this. We’ve seen the outcome, so what are the incentives? The outcome, we know, is bad. Recent Prime Ministers have seen near-record levels of unpopularity . And no wonder, because they have failed even on their own terms: Cameron wanted to keep us in the EU but failed; May wanted a Brexit deal but failed; Johnson wanted to remain PM but failed; Truss wanted a tax-cutting Budget but failed; and Sunak wanted to save the Tory party but failed. Bad outcomes suggest bad incentives. And these are [...]

2026-02-28

• Trilemma, Dilemma, or Amalgamation? The Effect of Global Forces on Domestic Interest Rates
  by calla.wiemer@acaes.us (Calla Wiemer) in Asia Economics Blog, 2026-02-28 23:12:03 UTC

  In a landmark 2015 paper provocatively titled “ Dilemma Not Trilemma ”, Hélène Rey argued that the policy space for small open economies does not, after all, afford a choice, given open capital accounts, between exchange rate stabilization and monetary policy independence. The bulk of the paper documents a global financial cycle under which capital flows, credit, leverage, and asset prices all move in sync across international boundaries. It is then taken on faith that with such ebbs and flows of finance washing around, the only way to carve out space for independent monetary policy is through [...]

2026-02-27

• January 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages
  by Joseph Rickert in R-bloggers, 2026-02-27 00:00:00 UTC

  [This article was first published on R Works , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. Two hundred forty-one of the new packages submitted to CRAN in January were still there in mid-February. Here are my Top 40 picks in nineteen categories: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Methods, Data, Dynamical Systems, Ecology, Economics, Epidemiology, Finance, Genetics, Genomics, High Performance Computing, Mathematics, Machine Lear [...]

2026-02-15

• Economic growth as social change
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-02-15 10:44:36 UTC

  Economic development has historically always meant a far-reaching transformation of society’s economic, social and political structure (Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth ). Every society, when left on its own, will be technologically creative for only short periods. Sooner or later the forces of conservatism...take over and manage through a variety of legal and institutional channels to slow down and if possible stop technological creativity altogether ( Joel Mokyr ). Baran and Mokyr are not ideological soulmates. But they both saw a fact missing from politics now - that sometimes, s [...]

2026-02-07

• Why America's extremes will both fail
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2026-02-07 11:21:46 UTC

  " Antifa (50840022832) " by Chad Davis from United States , CC BY 2.0 These days it seems like the only things to write about are politics and AI. I wrote about AI last time, so today I’ll write about politics. Here is my basic theory of American politics in the 2020s: The United States is a nation of moderates ruled by a fringe of extremists. The extremists rule because they are more engaged than the moderates — they spend more time thinking about politics and doing political activism. In Martin Gurri’s terms , the extremists are the “public” and the moderates are the “populace”. There are se [...]

2026-01-17

• On regulatory capture
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-01-17 09:50:08 UTC

  Why are regulators so spineless? I ask because Ofcom’s inquiry into X’s publishing child sex abuse material is likely to take some weeks , even after cajoling by the government, and is not expected to take strong action against the company. David Allen Green has written: Ofcom may take decisive action against X, like requiring it to apologise in eight months on a webpage so buried that nobody will read it. Such scepticism is based in the evidence that regulators have consistently given companies a free ride. Ofcom has repeatedly allowed GBNews to broadcast biased news. Ofwat allows water compa [...]

2026-01-16

• To Combat Academic Fraud, Scholars Confront Hallowed Tradition
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2026-01-16 23:25:00 UTC

  To Combat Academic Fraud, Scholars Confront Hallowed Tradition Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations , This is the fourth part of a series on the crisis in academic research and publishing. Read the first three parts here,   here and here . The driving ethos of academia, “publish or perish,” is fighting for its life.  The requirement that scholars constantly publish or face academic ruin has been considered the primary engine of scientific discovery for decades. But a growing movement of universities and researchers is trying to banish the practice to the arch [...]

2026-01-12

• What can mortgage loans do? : Purchases, re-fis, and cashouts
  by ? in FRED blog, 2026-01-12 14:00:00 UTC

  Mortgage loans allow households to buy a home or to borrow money against the value of a home they already own. With mortgage loans, the real estate is offered as collateral, a payback guarantee for the lender. Our FRED graph above shows the billions of dollars lent by large US banks to consumers in newly issued mortgage loans. Data are available between the third quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2025. Each of the three lines represents a separate purpose for borrowing these funds: Purchasing a home (solid blue line) Refinancing the mortgage to secure more affordable repayment terms, [...]

• The price of expertise
  by Jerusalem Demsas in The Argument, 2026-01-12 11:37:33 UTC

  Trump photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Powell photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images; artful composition by Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell put out an astonishing statement revealing that the Trump administration was using the threat of a criminal indictment to punish him for not setting interest rates at the whim of the president. Powell’s statement is the model of resistance — if only we’d seen the same from universities, law firms, and big business throughout the last year. In response, the price of gold shot through the roof as markets finally be [...]

2025-12-30

• The Weeb Economy
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2025-12-30 09:43:45 UTC

  This March I published a book in Japanese, called Weeb Economy . Half of the book was republished (translated) posts from my blog, and half was a new section. I’ve been publishing that new section as a series of posts ( Part I , Part II , Part III ). But instead of publishing the final part as a fourth post, I figured I’d just publish the entire new section as a single post. So here you go! This is the entire new section of my book. It’s about a big idea for how to partially reverse the economic stagnation that has gripped Japan since the late 2000s. Part I: I want the Japanese future back! Ja [...]

2025-12-29

• Tracking recent financial market conditions
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-12-29 14:00:00 UTC

  The FRED Blog has discussed how the daily operations of the Federal Reserve Banks and, specifically, the New York Fed generally maintain the effective federal funds rate within the target range set by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As part of this management effort, the New York Fed monitors a variety of overnight interest rates that help take the pulse of financial markets and the overall cost of borrowing. Data added to FRED last October allow us to see how recent changes to the Federal Reserve System’s balance sheet have impacted money market conditions. The FRED graph above sho [...]

2025-12-23

• The NIMBY Christmas cinematic universe
  by Jerusalem Demsas in The Argument, 2025-12-23 11:02:45 UTC

  Chad Michael Murray presenting his evil plan at a community meeting ( An Autumn Romance trailer screenshot) If you’ve been enjoying The Argument and would like to share it with friends and family for the holidays, you’re in luck! You can save 15% now through Dec. 24 when you gift a subscription to The Argument using the link below. Gift a subscription If I only watched movies where the character turns directly to the camera and says “I’m exactly the kind of liberal you are,” I would not watch very many movies. Still, it’s hard not to doom when every holiday season I’m accosted with anti-develo [...]

2025-12-20

• Wallowing in poverty
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-12-20 10:37:52 UTC

  Imagine we were to suffer an economic catastrophe in which our real incomes fall by 30%, which would be by far the greatest recession in modern times. The response, one might imagine, would be equally dramatic; there’d be a backlash against the government - very likely causing serious political unrest - and our politics would be dominated by the question of what caused the slump and what to do about it. In fact, we don’t have to imagine such a disaster. It has actually happened. In the last 20 years real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6% a year compared to 2.3% per year in the previous 50 [...]

2025-12-17

• FDI is the Missing Piece of Japan’s Puzzle
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2025-12-17 10:04:22 UTC

  Photo by Sanjo via Wikimedia Commons My book, Weeb Economy came out in March, but only in Japanese. Half of the book was a series of translated posts from my blog, so those are already in English. The other half was a new part that I wrote in English and had translated into Japanese by my excellent translator, Kataoka Hirohito. So while I’ll eventually republish the whole book in English, what I can do right now is to publish my English-language first draft as a series of posts on this blog. The first installment was entitled “ I Want the Japanese Future Back! ”. In that post, I explained why [...]

2025-11-18

• From Statute to Zero-Cost: Section 31A and the Bombay High Court's Zero-Cost Culture
  by Anurodh in Ajay Shah's blog, 2025-11-18 08:38:56 UTC

  by Prashant Narang and Vishnu Suresh. Why this matters now In 2015, Parliament rewrote Section 31A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act to make loser-pays the default i.e., compensate the winner and deter abuse. A decade on, our mixed-methods study of the Bombay High Court's arbitration docket(2023-24) shows a stark gap between that legislative design and courtroom reality. Out of 102 decisions under Sections 11 (appointment) and 34 (set-aside), costs were imposed in only four (3.9%). Even then, costs were framed as exceptional sanctions for egregious conduct - not as routine reimbursement [...]

2025-11-06

• On competenciness
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-11-06 12:24:17 UTC

  Geoff Mulgan has written a great piece on the shortcomings of a centrism which wants “to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic.” I agree that Mulgan is right to call this a dead-end. I want to argue, though, that it is a dead-end in its own terms: a genuinely realistic competence would see that a government cannot survive merely by aspiring to competence. Charlie Munger once said something very wise and important: One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it. And even the best polit [...]