Texas won a big victory in the United States Court of Appeals in the long struggle over floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River to help block unlawful migration. In United States v. Abbott, the court ruled 11-7 in an en banc decision against the Biden Administration over the barrier. It is an interesting decision […]
In an interesting new paper Federal Reserve economists Marianna Kudlyak, Murat Tasci and Didem Tüzemen look at what happens to job vacancy postings when the minimum wage increases. The vacancy data in our analysis come from the job openings data from the Conference Board as a part of its Help Wanted OnLine (HWOL) data series. […]
Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Paul Brennan on Reality Check Radio, on New Zealand’s declining birth rate. You can listen to the interview here. We didn’t have time to go through all of the questions I was given beforehand, so I thought I would add some points here, along with some links to…
By Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Sarah Miller, Here is the link, but I am still sleeping. Here is the abstract: We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month […]
Edmund Phelps won the Nobel prize in economics in 2006 for “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” However, he has spent a considerable chunk of this time in the last few decades musing over strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and, more generally, a dynamic economy. Jon Hartley interviews Phelps on both topics,…
I’m in China this week, teaching about fiscal policy, convergence theory, and inequality at Northeastern University in Shenyang. So it’s a good opportunity to write about some pluses and minuses of Chinese economic policy. We’ll start this series by looking at demographics, which almost surely is the biggest long-run challenge for Chinese policymakers. How big […]
In an ageing and growing population, the failure of primary health care in New Zealand is a dire problem. Many general practices are shadows of their former selves. There are too few doctors and too many patients. Many people can’t even get enrolled. Those who are enrolled report wait times to see a GP of…
Donald Trump recently endorsed a glorious-on-net immigration proposal: giving a green card to every foreigner who graduates from a U.S. university. I was stunned when I read the fine print: Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greater schools and lesser schools that are…
Claudia Goldin’s Nobel prize lecture, “An Evolving Economic Force,” has now been published in the June 2024 issue of the American Economic Review. Or if you prefer, you can watch the watch the lecture (with more numerous slides!) from the link at the Nobel website. She writes: Women are now at the center of the…
Peter Dunne writes – In 2016 New Zealand instituted comprehensive new health and safety laws for workplaces and other areas of activity. The expectation was that the new regime the legislation introduced would dramatically improve the culture and practice around safety in the workplace, reduce the numbers of accidents and save lives. However, the most […]
From a new NBER working paper by Steven J. Davis: Two extraordinary U.S. labor market developments facilitated the sharp disinflation in 2022-23 without raising the unemployment rate. First, pandemic-driven infection worries and social distancing intentions caused a sizable drag on labor force participation that began to reverse in the first quarter of 2022, and perhaps […]
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.
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