Unfettered: Fishback 25 Years Later

A quarter century ago, economist Price Fishback published “Operations of ‘Unfettered’ Labor Markets: Exit and Voice in American Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century” in the prestigious Journal of Economic Literature. Fishback’s article is packed with insight… and understatement. But let’s back up. Virtually every standard history textbook describes U.S. labor markets before…

Unfettered: Fishback 25 Years Later

A congestion theory of unemployment fluctuations

Yusuf Mercan, Benjamin Schoefer, and Petr Sedláček, newly published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.  I best liked this excerpt from p.2, noting that “DMP” refers to the Nobel-winning Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment: This congestion mechanism improves the business cycle performance of the DMP model considerably. It raises the volatility of labor market tightness tenfold, […]

A congestion theory of unemployment fluctuations

Mattei Misjudges Hawtrey

Clara Mattei, associate professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, recently published a book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, (University of Chicago Press) in which she argues that the fiscal and monetary austerity imposed on Great Britain after World War I to restore the […]

Mattei Misjudges Hawtrey

Productivity woes….continued

In my post on Monday I drew attention (again) to the fact that New Zealand has made no progress at all in reversing the decline in relative economywide productivity (relative to other advanced countries) since what was hoped to be a turning point, with the inauguration of widespread economic reforms after the 1984 election. If anything, […]

Productivity woes….continued

40 years on

On Solow

Pension crisis

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Economic underperformance

With both the annual and quarterly national accounts data having come out recently it is time for a quick update of some old charts. First, labour productivity (real GDP per hour worked). This chart is from the period since just prior to Covid, and for both New Zealand and Australia If you want some slight consolation, […]

Economic underperformance

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Solow on Market Advantages and Market Failures

Robert Solow (1924-2023) died last week. As a starting point for understanding his life and his work on growth theory, the Nobel prize website, since he won the award in 1987, includes an overall description, a biographical essay, and his Nobel lecture. I can also strongly recommend an interview that Steven Levitt carried out with…

Solow on Market Advantages and Market Failures

How Were So Many Economists So Wrong About the Recession?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, I thought it was time to call out all the Orwellian rewriting of intellectual history going on, so here goes: As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week: “So many economists were saying there’s no way for inflation to get back to normal without it entailing a […]

How Were So Many Economists So Wrong About the Recession?

The Worst Journalism of 2023

Writing about the economic tragedy of Argentina, I’ve explained that one major problem is inflation, thanks to that country’s version of “modern monetary theory.” This is not a trivial problem. Here’s a chart, from a recent report by Reuters, showing how prices have been rising for nearly 10 years and skyrocketing for the past three […]

The Worst Journalism of 2023

190308 [Webinar] Consistent Economic Policy and Economic Development

Friedman and Schwartz agreed with Anderson, Tollison and Shughart on the public choice origins of the Great Contraction!

Corporate Taxation, Ireland, and Jealousy

Two months ago, I wrote about a remarkable example of the Laffer Curve, involving Ireland’s low 12.5 percent corporate tax rate. According to the New York Times, Ireland was collecting so much corporate tax revenue that the government was having a hard time figuring out what to do with all the money (as you might […]

Corporate Taxation, Ireland, and Jealousy

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