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This page is updated every three hours2024-03-11
- Two definitions of bubbles
by ? in Econlog, 2024-03-11 03:14:53 UTCIn a recent post , I pointed out that how we define words doesn’t matter when considering substantive issues. Thus whether addition is defined as a mental illness should have no bearing on how we treat addiction. An old Noah Smith Bloomberg column reminds me of how definitions can lead us astray. Smith points out that (in 2018) Bitcoin prices had recently crashed, after previously soaring to a peak of $19,000. He acknowledges that Bitcoin prices might boom again in the future, but nonetheless defines this as a “bubble”: But for ordinary investors, who don’t tend to get in early on potentiall [...]
2024-03-06
- Japanâs Self-Inflicted Decline
by Daniel Gros in Project Syndicate, 2024-03-06 16:03:34 UTCMILAN – Japan should be doing well. It boasts a well-educated and disciplined workforce, and outdoes most other industrialized countries on both investment and spending on research and development . In fact, at 3.3% of GDP, Japanese R&D expenditure was higher even than that of the United States until recently. And yet, Japan’s relative decline continues. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan was the world’s second-largest economy, not least because of its seemingly unbeatable industrial sector. Today, however, it is the world’s fourth-largest economy, with data showing that it recently fell behind G [...]
2024-02-25
- WTO ministerial trading in low expectations and high stakes
by Ken Heydon in East Asia Forum, 2024-02-25 11:00:00 UTCThe World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) 13th Ministerial Conference takes place in Abu Dhabi on 26–29 February. It is expected to include a deal providing transparency and predictability in electronic commerce, endorse an agreement on investment facilitation for development and admit two least developed countries, Timor Leste and the Comoros, as WTO members. Though welcome, these are modest expectations. This is particularly so given the promises from the 12th Ministerial Conference — tackling fisheries subsidies and offering the hope of restoring a ‘ fully functioning dispute settl [...]
2024-02-22
- The paradox of empowerment: gender norms and intimate partner violence in PNG
by Alexander Smith in Development Policy Blog, 2024-02-22 19:00:32 UTCIntimate partner violence (IPV) is a global scourge, with nearly one in three women experiencing violence at the hands of a partner at least once in their lifetime. Rates of violence are particularly high in PNG, where the prevalence rate is one in two women. How do we change this? It is tempting to think that improving the disparity in resources or economic status between women and their partners would be an effective mechanism to reduce financial dependence and improve women’s ability to leave violent relationships. This logic is known as the household bargaining theory. It proposes that ind [...]
2024-02-16
- How AI deepfakes threaten the 2024 elections
by Rehan Mirza in Journalist's Resource, 2024-02-16 18:41:26 UTCFacebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Email Last month, a robocall impersonating U.S. President Joe Biden went out to New Hampshire voters, advising them not to vote in the state’s presidential primary election. The voice, generated by artificial intelligence, sounded quite real. “Save your vote for the November election,” the voice stated, falsely asserting that a vote in the primary would prevent voters from being able to participate in the November general election. The robocall incident reflects a growing concern that generative AI will make it cheaper and easier to spread misin [...]
2024-02-14
- Pakistanâs Middle-Class Rage Against Military Rule
by Adeel Malik in Project Syndicate, 2024-02-14 16:05:43 UTCOXFORD – Pakistan’s general election on February 8, marred by allegations of widespread voting irregularities, resulted in a hung parliament and the formation of a coalition government consisting of the country’s two major dynastic parties. Nevertheless, the outcome represents a stunning defeat for the country’s powerful military, as candidates backed by the imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan ’s Tehreek-e-Insaf Party (PTI) secured more parliamentary seats than any other political bloc despite a two-year crackdown on its voters and supporters. Although PTI did not win enough seats t [...]
- A Negative Income Tax, One Step at a Time
by Ed Dolan in Ed Dolan's Econ Blog, 2024-02-14 14:52:00 UTCThe negative income tax (NIT) sometimes seems like the carbon tax of social policy. Both are irresistibly appealing to economists and have long pedigrees. Both are supported by blindingly persuasive logic. Yet neither policy seems capable of mustering much political support in 21st-century Washington politics. I see two things as essential in repackaging the NIT for today’s America. The first essential is to recognize the reality of path dependency — the need to start from where we are, not from a clean slate, and take things one step at a time. Gerald Gaus calls that approach “exploring the [...]
2024-02-01
- Saving for college
by ? in FRED blog, 2024-02-01 14:00:00 UTCThe FRED Blog has discussed the income and wealth boosts from graduating college (a.k.a. the college premium ). This premium does seem to justify the expense of a college education, and today we discuss how to pay for it by using a 529 saving plan. 529 plans are named after the section of the federal tax code that rules their treatment. The FRED graph above shows data from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System reporting the dollar value of savings held in two types of 529 plans: College saving plans (the blue area): These are purchased shares in mutual funds administered by st [...]
2024-01-11
- Are Things Really that Bad?
by noreply@blogger.com (Michael Ward) in Managerial Econ, 2024-01-11 17:31:00 UTCBinsbergen, Bryzgalova, Mukhopadhyay, and Sharma develop an index of economic sentiment for the US (and individual states) from accumulated news reports. They use a historical collection of 170 years of digitized newspapers, which includes the text of 200 million newspaper pages from 13,000 local newspapers, collecting instances of a bunch of keywords like "profitable", "success", "opportunity" versus "failure", "insolvent", or "unsuccessful". It turns out it predicts economic activity quite well. � � � � � � However, the authors also note that sentiment trends downward significantly over the [...]
2024-01-10
- ASSA 2024 part two â the radical sessions: imperialism, profitability and climate change
by michael roberts in Michael Roberts Blog, 2024-01-10 09:40:41 UTCWithin the huge ASSA meeting, there are sessions organized by heterodox economics associations, in particular, by the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE) . Attendance at these sessions is small, but the quality of the papers is large. Let me start with annual David Gordon lecture hosted by URPE at ASSA every year. Each year, a leading radical economist gives a lecture on a subject of choice. This year, David McNally gave the 25 th lecture on Marx on Colonization: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey . David McNally has contributed a Marxist perspective on many impo [...]
2024-01-01
- Child Penalty amid Korea's Declining Fertility
by jisoohwang@snu.ac.kr (Jisoo Hwang) in Asia Economics Blog, 2024-01-01 09:26:51 UTCCo-author: Inkyung Yoo. With the gender gap in educational attainment narrowing, “child penalty” – the effect of parenthood on labor market outcomes – is considered the largest remaining obstacle in eliminating the gender pay gap in developed countries. Recent studies show that women’s earnings drop significantly following first childbirth whereas men’s earnings remain largely unaffected. Various policies are being discussed and studied with the goal of reducing the child penalty. However, from an individual woman's perspective, there is a sure way to avoid the child penalty – to not have a [...]
2023-12-28
- Annual Review 2023
by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2023-12-28 05:49:00 UTCI've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. The big new development this year is that together with Johannes Sauer and Eric Yu Sheng I took on the joint editor-in-chief role of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics . My goal, apart from the usual ones of increasing the impact, prestige, and outreach of the journal, is to get more environmental and resource economics papers published in the journal. So, if you have a suitable paper, please send it to us! We started [...]
2023-12-21
- Research Review | 21 DEC 2023 | Portfolio Design & Risk Factors
by James Picerno in The Capital Spectator, 2023-12-21 12:12:07 UTCFactor Zoo (.zip) Alexander Swade (Lancaster University) et al. October 2023 The number of factors allegedly driving the cross-section of stock returns has grown steadily over time. We explore how much this ‘factor zoo’ can be compressed, focusing on explaining the available alpha rather than the covariance matrix of factor returns. Our findings indicate that about 15 factors are enough to span the entire factor zoo. This evidence suggests that many factors are redundant but also that merely using a handful of factors, as in common asset pricing models, is insufficient. While the selected fact [...]
2023-12-18
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Florida Is Shunning the People Who Helped Build It
by Fiona Harrigan in Hit & Run blog, 2023-12-18 11:00:23 UTCIn 1980, Florida experienced an immigration restrictionist's worst nightmare: a huge, rapid, and unauthorized influx of largely unskilled migrants. That event was the Mariel boatlift , a mass migration that followed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's April 1980 announcement that Cubans wishing to leave the country could do so. In just six months, 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Florida, half of them settling in Miami. "Observers in Miami at the time of the Boatlift noted the strain caused by the Mariel immigration," wrote Uni [...]
2023-12-15
- Health Capacity to Work among Older Malaysians
by dpark@adb.org (Donghyun Park) in Asia Economics Blog, 2023-12-15 11:00:10 UTCCo-authors: Norma Mansor; Halimah Awang Malaysia is experiencing a demographic transition characterized by a steady increase in the number and proportion of elderly persons in the population. The share of population over age 65 is projected to rise from 7.5 percent in 2020 to 14.5 percent in 2040. Yet even as health and longevity have improved greatly, employment rates among older workers have declined. Extension of the working life would benefit older persons by augmenting income security and providing a sense of fulfillment. It would benefit society at large by mitigating worker shortages an [...]
2023-12-14
- The insured unemployment rate : Those receiving vs. those eligible for unemployment insurance benefits
by ? in FRED blog, 2023-12-14 14:00:00 UTCBackground The overall unemployment rate is a key macroeconomic indicator that economists, policymakers, and the media follow closely. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates it from a monthly survey of households that tallies the number of those not employed but looking for work divided by the total labor force, which itself is the sum of employed workers plus the number of those not employed but looking for work. A separate unemployment measure that receives less attention is the insured unemployment rate : It is the number of workers currently claiming unemployment insurance benefits rel [...]
2023-11-15
- WeInflate, WeMalinvest, WeWork
by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2023-11-15 03:55:00 UTCWeInflate, WeMalinvest, WeWork Authored by Peter C. Earle via the American Institute for Economic Research , The bankruptcy filing of WeWork Inc. on November 6, 2023 came with neither a whimper nor a bang, but with a laconic shrug . Although the company has been around for 13 years, it has been defined more by successive flirtations with demise and unseemly corporate revelations than by innovative ideas for the second half of its life. Few were surprised when the latest, and possibly not the final, chapter arrived. While some stories are better told starting at the end, the We [...]
2023-10-22
- Weekend reading links
by noreply@blogger.com (Urbanomics) in Urbanomics, 2023-10-22 04:36:00 UTC1. In terms of annualised returns for several time periods, the Indian stock market tops , slightly superior to even the S&P 500. While there's no doubt that for investors looking at the next decade and more, India stands at the pole position in terms of economic prospects. A large economy with relatively stable macroeconomic policies and domestic consumption being the predominant growth driver means that it's well placed to grow. But the big worry is the nature of its growth. In particular, the widening inequality and the relatively low growth in incomes for the vast majority is the problem [...]
2023-10-06
- Paved with Unintended Consequences
by ? in Econlog, 2023-10-06 12:00:27 UTCEconomists, especially those of us who criticize government interventionist policies, often point to bad unintended consequences that many of these policies lead to. Sometimes people say that we delight in pointing to such policies, but that verb certainly doesn’t apply to my attitude. There is typically nothing delightful at all in these consequences, many of them tragic. In this piece, I’ll cover six cases, but they’re a tiny fraction of the cases that exist and even a tiny fraction of the cases I know. We need to distinguish between unintended and unpredicted consequences. Many unintended [...]
2023-09-14
- Why does womenâs employment change with the seasons? : An answer from the NBER
by ? in FRED blog, 2023-09-14 13:00:00 UTCSummer is ending. As the new school year gears up, some areas of economic activity will get seasonal boosts—such as increases in retail sales of office supplies as incoming students and their families buy what they need for the classroom. Female employment also picks up at this time of year. Recent research on labor markets finds that the childcare services provided by formal schooling drive this increase in employment. The FRED graph above replicates Figure 1 in a related piece of research: the NBER Working Paper, “ The Summer Drop in Female Employment ,” by Brendan Price and Melanie Wasserm [...]
2023-09-05
- Gender income disparity in the USA
by Ivan Kitov in Economics as Classical Mechanics, 2023-09-05 20:26:00 UTCThis paper "Gender income disparity in the USA: analysis and dynamic modelling" is also of interest Abstract We analyze and develop a quantitative model describing the evolution of personal income distribution (PID) for males and females in the U.S. between 1930 and 2014. The overall microeconomic model, which we introduced ten years ago, accurately predicts the change in mean income as a function of age as well as the dependence on age of the portion of people distributed according to the Pareto law. As a result, we have precisely described the change in the Gini ratio since the start of inc [...]
- Race and gender income inequality in the USA: black women vs. white men
by Ivan Kitov in Economics as Classical Mechanics, 2023-09-05 20:23:00 UTCAlmost every day, I have a request to publish this paper " Race and gender income inequality in the USA: black women vs. white men" � in medical and social journals. Do not understand the reason for such an interest.�� Abstract Income inequality between different races in the U.S. is especially large. This difference is even larger when gender is involved. In a complementary study, we have developed a dynamic microeconomic model accurately describing the evolution of male and female incomes since 1930. Here, we extend our analysis and model the disparity between the black and white population [...]
2023-08-31
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The High Costs of Biden's Price-Controlled Drugs
by Ronald Bailey in Hit & Run blog, 2023-08-31 21:09:02 UTCGovernment-imposed price controls on goods and services always lead to shortages. For example, economic research has consistently shown that rent control results in less new housing construction . The Biden administration's imposition of price caps on prescription drugs under the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will result in much the same thing: fewer new cures developed. The IRA gives the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the [...]
2023-08-24
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Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Ballots
by Eric Boehm in Hit & Run blog, 2023-08-24 17:00:47 UTCArkansas has some of the strangest liquor laws in the country—or at least the most politically contentious. Unlike a lot of other places, the state allows counties to hold referendums to decide whether they will allow the retail sale of alcohol. That is, whether they will be "wet" or "dry." And when those elections take place, it's often existing liquor stores—the very businesses that earn money by selling booze—that campaign the hardest to keep county-lev [...]
2023-08-14
- AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes
by insider@insider.com (Emil Skandul) in Business Insider, 2023-08-14 10:00:02 UTCThe AI revolution is about the crash into the global economy and upend millions of jobs. Arantza Pena Popo/Insider A tidal wave is about to crash into the global economy. The rise of artificial intelligence has captured our imagination for decades, in whimsical movies and sober academic texts. Despite this speculation, the emergence of public, easy-to-use AI tools over the past year has been a jolt, like the future arrived years ahead of schedule. Now this long-expected, all-too-sudden technological revolution is ready to upend the economy. A March Goldman Sachs report found over 300 million [...]
2023-07-31
- The monetary multiplier and bank reserves
by ? in FRED blog, 2023-07-31 13:00:00 UTCThe FRED graph above shows two different measures of money between 2005 and 2010: The red line tracks M2, which includes cash, checking deposits, and other short-term deposits. The green line tracks the monetary base, or M0, which includes only cash and bank reserves. The ratio of M2 to M0 (blue line) is often referred to as the “money multiplier,” a measure that describes how the supply of private money (deposits) responds to the monetary base: As banks accumulate excess reserves in their account, they expand their deposits and lending activities. Between December 2007 and January 2009, M2 [...]