In the long run, a rising standard of living is always and everywhere based on productivity growth. Thus, Austan Goolsbee notedin a keynote address at the “Summit” conference held at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) in February (“Remarks on Productivity Growth and Monetary Policy,” February 28, 2025): As Goolsbee notes, annual productivity…
Unionized plants have worse incentive alignment: 26% less likely to offer performance-based bonuses. 11% less likely to promote based on performance 13% less likely to dismiss workers for poor performance. Consequently, unionized plants have: Higher rates of business closures, lower investment slower employment growth BOTTOM LINE: right-to-work states (no unions) have higher employment and better outcomes. CITE:Maksimovic, Vojislav and…
Racial differences in mortality are large, persistent and likely caused, at least in part, by racism. While the causal pathways linking racism to mortality are conceptually well defined, empirical evidence to support causal claims related to its effect on health is incomplete. In this study, we provide a unique set of facts about racial disparities […]
LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.) Deutsche Bank analysts […]
In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at similar rates, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. Gaps between race/ethnic groups have also widened. To understand these patterns, we develop a model of individual and family […]
Regulations about abortion are often wildly controversial. But what effects to they actually have? Caitlin Myers addresses these issues in “From Roe to Dobbs: 50 Years of Cause and Effect of US State Abortion Regulations” (Annual Review of Public Health 2025, pp. 433-446). As a starting point, consider the years before and after the 1973 US Supreme Court…
A new study from the University of Alabama in Huntsville addresses the question of how much the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is responsible for the higher temperatures at weather stations across the world. Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy have spent several years developing a novel method that quantifies, for the first time, the average UHI warming effects related to population density. Their finding: no less than 65% of “runaway global warming” is not caused by our emissions of carbon dioxide, but by the urbanization of the world.
TweetNicholas Bloom, Kyle Handley, André Kurmann, and Philip A. Luck revisit the “China Shock.” Two slices: Our research investigates the extent to which the opposing trends in manufacturing and services job growth are related. Our findings reveal that local labor markets more exposed to Chinese import competition experienced larger manufacturing job losses. But these losses…
I’ve written a couple of times about information interventions designed to attract more female students to study economics (see here and here). The results have generally been disappointing. That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. If it was really simple to get people to change their behaviour with information, then advertising would be far…
Jon Hartley serves as interlocutor in “Revisiting Empirical Macroeconomics with Robert Barro” (Hoover Institution, Capitalism and Freedom Podcast, March 25, 2025, audio and transcript available). Here are a few of the comments from Barro that especially caught my eye. One basic question in economics is about “the multiplier”–that is, how much will an increase in…
This short note shows that accounting for capital adjustment is critical when analyzing the long-run effects of trade wars on real wages and consumption. The reason is that trade wars increase the relative price between investment goods and labor by taxing imported investment goods and their inputs. This price shift depresses capital demand, shrinks the […]
This was the post I was planning to write this morning to mark Orr’s final day. That said, if the underlying events – deliberate attempts to mislead Parliament – were Orr’s doing, the post is more about the apparent uselessness of Parliament (specifically the Finance and Expenditure Committee) in holding him and the rest of […]
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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