Does fiscal policy cause inflation?
11 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, fiscal policy, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetary economics Tags: budget deficits, fiscal policy, inflation
Milton Friedman on the onset of the Great Depression from the standpoint of 1930s macroeconomics
11 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
Thai Junta Revokes a Famed Academic’s Passport in Its Crackdown on Dissidents
11 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in politics Tags: democracy, military coup, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, rule of law, Thailand
An old graduate school mate of ours from our Japan days, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a prominent Thai political scholar and outspoken opponent of the country’s coup, has had his passport revoked as part of the Thai junta’s on-going campaign against dissent.
He is based at Japan’s Kyoto University, and is expected to seek asylum in Japan.
via The Thai Junta Revokes a Famed Academic’s Passport in Its Crackdown on Dissidents | TIME.
Armen Alchian, The Economists’ Economist
10 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics
Armen Alchian was one of the finest economists of the 20th century.
The first time that I ever heard of Armen Alchian was when I took introductory economics at UCLA as a freshman, and his book (co-authored with his colleague William R. Allen who was probably responsible for the macro and international chapters) University Economics (the greatest economics textbook ever written) was the required text. I had only just started to get interested in economics, and was still more interested in political philosophy than in economics, but I found myself captivated by what I was reading in Alchian’s textbook, even though I didn’t find the professor teaching the course very exciting. And after 10 weeks (the University of California had switched to a quarter system) of introductory micro, I changed my major to economics. So there is no doubt that I became an economist because the textbook that I was taught from was written by Alchian.
In my four years as an…
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Doing bad when trying to do good: the cost of employment protection laws
10 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, macroeconomics Tags: employment protection laws, offsetting behaviour, unintended consequences
A policy designed to protect workers from unemployment, over time, will increase the duration of unemployment spells through a chilling effect on job creation. Employment protection laws are a tax on job creation. With fewer vacancies posted, the unemployed will take longer to find jobs.
Richard Tol’s 2014 Corrected and Updated Estimates of the Welfare Impact of Climate Change
10 Jul 2014 1 Comment
in economics
(changed estimates in bold; previously omitted estimates in italics)
| Study | Warming
(°C) |
Impact (% GDP) | |||
|
Central estimate |
SD |
Min |
Max |
||
| Estimates from papers summarized in Tol (2009)
(Nordhaus 1994b) |
3.0 |
− 1.3 |
|||
| (Nordhaus 1994a) |
3.0 |
− 4.8 |
− 30.0 |
0.0 |
|
| (Fankhauser 1995) |
2.5 |
− 1.4 |
|||
| (Tol 1995) |
2.5 |
− 1.9 |
|||
| (Nordhaus and Yang 1996) |
2.5 |
− 1.7 |
|||
| (Plambeck and Hope 1996) |
2.5 |
− |
− 11.4 |
− 0.5 |
|
| (Mendelsohn et al. 2000) |
2.5 |
0.0 |
|||
|
2.5 |
0.1 |
||||
| (Nordhaus and Boyer 2000) |
2.5 |
− 1.5 |
|||
| (Tol 2002) |
1.0 |
2.3 |
1.0 |
||
| (Maddison 2003) |
2.5 |
− 0.1 |
|||
| (Rehdanz and Maddison 2005) |
1.0 |
− 0.4 |
|||
| (Hope 2006) |
2.5 |
− |
− |
0.2b |
|
| (Nordhaus 2006) |
2.5 |
− 0.9 |
0.1 |
||
|
3.0 c |
− |
0.1 c |
|||
| (Nordhaus 2008) c |
3.0 c |
− |
|||
| New estimates that appeared after Tol (2009)
(Maddison and Rehdanz 2011) |
3.2 |
− 11.5 | |||
| (Bosello et al. 2012) |
1.9 |
− 0.5 |
|||
| (Roson and van der Mensbrugghe 2012) |
2.9 |
− 1.8 |
|||
|
5.4 |
− 4.6 |
||||
| (Nordhaus 2013) |
2.9 |
− 2.0 |
|||
Notes: The welfare impact of climate change is expressed as an equivalent income gain or loss in percent GDP. SD is standard deviation.
-
This estimate was reported incorrectly as 2.5 percent in Table 1 but correctly as − 2.5 percent in Figure 1 of Tol (2009).
-
This estimate was reported incorrectly as 0.9 percent with confi dence interval as [0.02, 2.7] in Table 1 and Figure 1 of Tol (2009).
-
These estimates, an additional one from Nordhaus (2006) and one from Nordhaus (2008), are overlooked estimates that did not make it into Tol (2009).
Source: Tol, Richard S J. 2014. “Correction and Update: The Economic Effects of Climate Change.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(2): 221-26.
Robert Lucas explained his support for U.S. monetary policy in 2008 as follows
10 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, Robert E. Lucas Tags: fiscal policy, GFC, monetary policy, Robert Lucas
- There are many ways to stimulate spending, but monetary policy was the most helpful counter-recession action because it was fast and flexible.
- There is no other way that so much cash could have been put into the system as fast, and if necessary it can be taken out just as quickly. The cash comes in the form of loans.
- There is no new government enterprises, no government equity positions in private enterprises, no price fixing or other controls on the operation of individual businesses, and no government role in the allocation of capital across different activities. These were important virtues.
What Sam Walton do to make his family rich?
10 Jul 2014 2 Comments
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, market efficiency, survivor principle, technological progress Tags: entrepreneurship, innovation, Walmart
HT: antidismal.blogspot via cafehayek
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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