Here’s what school lunches look like around the world – Vox
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of education, health economics, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: School lunches
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Life expectancy has been improving everywhere for a long time and big time
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Key facts about the gender pay gap–Pew Centre research
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice Tags: gender wage gap, labour economics, sex discrimination
Each case of measles costs $33,000 – there were over 600 cases in 2014
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
What Are “Transaction Costs” Anyway?
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
| Peter Klein |
A friend complains that management and entrepreneurship scholarship is confused about the concept of transaction costs. Authors rarely give explicit definitions. They conflate search costs, bargaining costs, measurement costs, agency costs, enforcement costs, etc. No one distinguishes between Coase’s, Williamson’s, and North’s formulations. “Transaction costs seem to be whatever the author wants them to be to justify the argument.”
It’s a fair point, and it applies to economics (and other social sciences and professional fields) too. I remember being asked by a prominent economist, back when I was a PhD student writing under Williamson, why transaction costs “don’t simply go to zero in the long run.” Indeed, contemporary organizational economics mostly uses terms like “contracting costs,” and since 1991 Williamson has tended to use “maladaptation costs” (while retaining the term “transaction cost economics”).
When I teach transaction costs I typically assign Doug Allen’s excellent 2000 essay
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Free speech for me but not for thee
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Choices have consequences for the anti-vaccination movement
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in health economics, law and economics Tags: anti-vaccination movement, freedom of association, herd immunity, Quacks
Trust, Familes, and Growth
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
Warning: this post is too long and wildly speculative.
Culture has (re)-emerged as one of the proposed “deep determinants” of economic development. A good place to get a feel for this literature is a piece in J. of Economic Perspectives by Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (GSZ). They define culture as “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.” Keep in mind, this is what GSZ a narrow definition of culture. Culture is like institutions; we seem to know it when we see it, but can’t define it.
Regardless, one of the stronger results that pops up in the culture literature that GSZ review (and often authored in the first place) is the relationship of “trust” and economic success. Population groups that tend to trust others also tend to be economically successful.
This one figure from GSZ is particularly striking. Using…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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