There’s a fundamental misconception at the root of President Trump’s tariff policies, which is the mistaken claim that the existence of a US trade deficit proves that trade is unfair. There are two related mistaken claims. One is a claim that if tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade were removed, then trade would be balanced.…
Myron Scholes was on top of the world in 1997, having won the Nobel Prize in economics that year for his work in financial economics, work that he had applied in the real world in a wildly successful hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. But just one year later, LTCM was saved from collapse only […]
Once upon a time, economists were backroom advisers, crunching numbers and developing theories, but rarely in the limelight and certainly not the central actors in political decision-making. However, as Binyamin Appelbaum outlines in his 2019 book The Economists’ Hour, that all changed in the late 1960s. The title of the book references the period from…
Brian Easton writes – While there have been decades of complaints – from all sides – about the workings of the Resource Management Act (RMA), replacing is proving difficult. The Coalition Government is making another attempt. To help answer the question, I am going to use the economic lens of the Coase Theorem, set out […]
Eric Crampton writes – The pendulum theory of politics suggests that policies often swing from one extreme to another without finding a balanced middle ground. Consider New Zealand’s supermarkets. Current regulations have made it near-impossible for new large-scale grocers to enter the New Zealand market.
Chris Bishop and Simon Court announced principles for the RMA replacement, and they generally look very good (but not perfect). Some key aspects: The new system will be based on the economic concept of “externalities”. Effects that are borne solely by the party undertaking the activity will not be controlled by the new system (for […]
The White House released a list of countries and the tariff rates they charged the US. It was clearly wrong as NZ has an average tariff of around 1.7% on US imports and the list said 20%. I thought it was because they were including our GST of 15%. That would have been very dumb, […]
New Zealand’s economic development has always been a partnership between the public and private sectors. Brian Easton writes – Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) have become fashionable again, partly because of the government’s ambitions to accelerate infrastructural development. There is, of course, an ideological element too, while some of the opposition to them is also ideological. PPPs […]
It appears that Trump wants to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s with a global trade war. That is going to be very bad news for workers, consumers, taxpayers, manufacturers, farmers, and exporters. But there are two bits of good news. At least for small slices of the populations First, lobbyists will get rich as […]
TweetHere’s a note to a new correspondent. Mr. P__: Thanks for your feedback on Phil Gramm’s and my piece, in yesterday Wall Street Journal, on trade deficits. You believe that I “and Sen. Gramm omit that every US trade deficit means Americans are consuming more than they are producing, a habit that is unsustainable.” With…
This paper examines the effects of the Big Five personality traits on labor market outcomes and gender wage gaps using a job search and bargaining model with parameters that vary at the individual level. The analysis, based on German panel data, reveals that both cognitive and noncognitive traits significantly influence wages and employment outcomes. Higher […]
Cato has a good summary of Deregulation in Argentina: The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has […]
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.
“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.
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