Marco Arment is the brains behind one of my favorite apps. Instapaper allows you to store articles off the Web for later reading; very useful, for example, when I am surfing and come across an article I want to share with my students or use in a future blog post. And the editor of Instapaper periodically shares excellent reads that I might [...]
Archive for April, 2011
Why Free Is a Bad Price
Posted in Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged Apple, Instapaper, Internet, Pricing on April 29, 2011 | 4 Comments »
A Tepid Quarter for GDP
Posted in Data, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, Economy, GDP on April 28, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Thursday morning brought the first official look at GDP growth in the first quarter. Headline growth was a disappointing, if not surprising, 1.8%. Here’s my usual graph of how various components of the economy contributed to overall growth: Consumers continued to spend at a moderate pace; their spending grew at a 2.7% rate, thus adding [...]
Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two
Posted in Macroeconomics, tagged Humor, Macroeconomics on April 28, 2011 | 1 Comment »
And here’s Round One, the Keynes vs. Hayek Rap.
A $5,000 Bill on the Sidewalk
Posted in Microeconomics, Politics, tagged Humor, Intrade on April 27, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Someone is offering a free $5,000 bill tonight over at Intrade.com: That’s right. You can sell 9,999 shares of The Donald (not me, the other one) at $0.52 a piece. In just that one trade, you can pocket almost $5,200 of free money. Unless, of course, you believe that Donald Trump could actually be elected [...]
Fiscal Policy Highlights Around the Net
Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged Budget, Debt, Deficit, Taxes on April 22, 2011 | 3 Comments »
1. Over at Third Way, Bill Rapp used my data on debt limit votes to make a great graphic showing that those votes are about politics, not principle. 2. Over at the Tax Policy Center, Eric Toder pushes back against the idea that tax expenditures — spending in the tax code — are loopholes and [...]
Defense Spending Deserves Close Scrutiny Too
Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged Budget, Debt, Defense, Deficit on April 19, 2011 | 4 Comments »
My latest column at the Christian Science Monitor makes the case that defense spending deserves close scrutiny as America evaluates its fiscal priorities. Excerpt: This year the US will spend about $110 billion in Afghanistan and $44 billion in Iraq. Regular defense spending is even larger, at about $550 billion. Military spending will total more [...]
Yahoo’s Self-Inflicted Winner’s Curse
Posted in Auctions, Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged Auctions, Microeconomics, Yahoo on April 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Over at Managerial Econ, Luke Froeb highlights a nice example of the winner’s curse. Like Google, Yahoo uses automated auctions to sell ads. One wrinkle is that some advertisers prefer to pay for impressions, some prefer to pay for clicks, and some prefer to pay only for resulting sales. Yahoo thus needs some mechanism to [...]
Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy
Posted in History, International, tagged Economic Development on April 12, 2011 | 1 Comment »
To what extent do natural environments explain political development? A lot, according to a recent paper by Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo. They find that rainfall and democracy go together like porridge and Goldilocks – to get democracy to flourish, it shouldn’t be too wet or too dry: Why are some societies characterized by enduring [...]
The Cost of Sunshine: The Downside of Disclosing Campaign Donors
Posted in Politics, tagged Politics on April 11, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Campaign finance rules emphasize sunlight. For example, all campaign donations above a modest amount (e.g., $200) must be publicly disclosed. That allows everyone to see who is providing financial support to which candidates. That sounds good if you are worried about campaign contributions buying undue access to our elected leaders. As I noted last year, however, that [...]
Taxi Medallions in DC: Who Would Win and Lose?
Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, tagged Microeconomics, Regulation, Taxi on April 10, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Today’s lesson in political economy: the looming battle over Washington’s cab market. Three members of DC’s City Council (Marion Barry, Harry Thomas, Jr., and Michael Brown) want to require every taxi to have a medallion. The number of medallions would be much smaller than the number of cabs on the streets today. As I noted [...]
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