Last week, I noted that former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun enrolled 160,000 students in an online computer science class. That inspired him to set up a new company, Udacity, to pursue online education. A new article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek adds some additional color to the story. Barrett Sheridan and Brendan Greeley answer a question many folks [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Auto’
Online Education and Self-Driving Cars
Posted in Internet, Teaching, Technology, tagged Auto, Education, Google, Teaching, Technology, Wired on January 30, 2012 | 7 Comments »
How Do Consumers Spend Engine Efficiency Advances? On Bigger, Faster Cars
Posted in Energy, Microeconomics, tagged Auto, Energy, Incentives, Gasoline, Offsetting Behavior on January 5, 2012 | 4 Comments »
Auto companies have made great strides in improving engine efficiency in recent decades. But those improvements haven’t done much to improve the fuel economy of America’s passenger car fleet. Instead, consumers have “spent” most of those efficiency improvements on bigger, faster cars. MIT economist Christopher Knittel has carefully quantified these tradeoffs in a recent paper in the American Economic [...]
A Second Thought on the Cost of TARP
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged AIG, Auto, Banks, Budget, CBO, Finance, TARP on December 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Two commenters (Jack B. and John L.) raise an important point about the $25 billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office recently placed on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Their concern is that the $25 billion figure includes some impacts that should rightfully be attributed to other government actions, not to TARP itself. To illustrate, suppose that [...]
How Much Did TARP Cost? $25 Billion
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged AIG, Auto, Banks, Budget, CBO, Finance, TARP on November 29, 2010 | 15 Comments »
The much-maligned TARP program will cost taxpayers only $25 billion according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s substantially less than the $66 billion CBO estimated back in August or the $113 billion that the Office of Management and Budget estimated in October. The good news, budget-wise, is that the government is [...]
The Chevy Volt Premium
Posted in Microeconomics, tagged Auto, Electric Car, GM, Microeconomics, Pricing on August 5, 2010 | 4 Comments »
The other day I noted that Amazon has been tussling with book publishers over the pricing of electronic books. Amazon would prefer a wholesale pricing model, in which it sets retail prices, rather than an agency pricing model, in which the publishers set the prices. One reason that Amazon would prefer the wholesale model is because it [...]
How Much Did Cash-for-Clunkers Boost Auto Sales?
Posted in Budget, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged Auto, Economy, Macroeconomics, Recession, Stimulus on September 10, 2009 | 10 Comments »
The busy folks at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a quartet of studies today, covering the economic impacts of: The stimulus act. The state assistance in the stimulus act. Stimulus efforts in other countries. The Cash-for-Clunkers program. I suspect that other bloggers (not to mention the regular media) will have lots to say [...]
Standing Firm on Auto Dealers
Posted in Budget, Politics, Regulation, tagged Auto, Budget, Chrysler, Defense, GM, Politics on July 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Over the past year, the U.S. government has acquired an unprecedented investment portfolio, including a majority stake in GM and a large ownership stake in Chrysler. These investments have raised a plethora of difficult policy challenges. One of the most important is the ongoing risk that private business decisions may get transformed into public policy [...]
The Subsidies in TARP
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged Auto, Bank of America, Budget, CBO, Chrysler, Citigroup, Finance, GM, Housing, TARP, Warrants on June 26, 2009 | 3 Comments »
How much is TARP costing American taxpayers? We know that Congress originally authorized up to $700 billion in TARP investments. And we know that $439 billion has been committed to various programs. But how much of that money are taxpayers likely to see again? And to what extent will they be compensated for making those [...]


