Today, I’ll add an entry to my occasional reviews of interesting academic papers. The paper: “Price Level and Inflation Dynamics in Heterogeneous Agent Economies,” by Greg Kaplan, Georgios Nikolakoudis and Gianluca Violante. One of the many reasons I am excited about this paper is that it unites fiscal theory of the price level with heterogeneous agent…
‘You have the watches, but we have the time.’ (Taliban saying, possibly apocryphal, page 93) Summary This is a quite mind-blowing, jaw-dropping analysis of the incompetence, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, bad planning, profligacy, bureaucratic in-fighting, politicking, terrible leadership, lack of strategy, appalling mismanagement and ineptitude which characterised the British Army campaigns in Iraq (2003 to 2009) and […]
TweetDavid Barker, writing in the Wall Street Journal – and appropriately praising my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein’s remarkable journal, Econ Journal Watch – exposes just how very shoddy some eminent “scholarship” really is. Two slices: Climate change hurts the economy, according to a celebrated 2012 paper by economists Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin…
By Paul Homewood The pervasive narrative about offshore wind in recent years has been that costs are falling and that wind power is cheap. But scratch below the surface and you find that things are not quite so rosy. Turbine manufacturers have been losing money hand over fist in recent years. Collectively over […]
A few weeks ago I wrote a post surveying the range of fiscal indicators (local ones and IMF/OECD metrics) to look at recent New Zealand fiscal policy across time and across countries. I included in that post this chart, which I had cobbled together using IMF April data for other countries and their estimates for […]
There is a headline in the Washing Post (in an entry in their live blog today) that says, “Netanyahu and Gantz form unity government.” This is misleading. No new government has been formed; therefore, there’s no unity government. All ministers of Bibi’s narrow right-wing/Haredi coalition remain in place. Benny Gantz and a couple others from […]
For her work explaining Gender Gaps in wages and employment. From the Economist:Since around 2005 the wage gap has hardly budged. Here Ms Goldin’s work questions popular narratives that continue to blame wage discrimination. Instead, in a book published in 2021, Ms Goldin blames “greedy” jobs, such as being a consultant or lawyer, which offer…
Earlier in the week a journalist asked me for some thoughts on which political party in government had managed the economy better – in overall macroeconomic terms – over the years since we moved to MMP. My initial response was that the answer would be pretty dull. Pressed to write something anyway, I outlined briefly […]
It’s been a while since I posted a book review, as I’ve been busy with teaching and various research evaluation activities (this year I’m a panellist for both the Royal Society’s Marsden Fund, and the Health Research Council). However, recently I did manage to finish reading Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian. The…
Households and businesses faced with crippling power bills are just another bad optic for renewable energy rent seekers. The political support upon which the seemingly endless flow of massive subsidies depends, in turn, depends on the proles’ attitude to those charged with delivering reliable and affordable power. Having just been whacked with 20-30% increases in […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Recent Comments