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Anne Krueger has a remarkable resume, including Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1982-86 (where she is widely credited with substantially upgrading the quality of published research) and First Deputy Managing Director of IMF from 2001-2007. She converses with Shruti Rajagopalan for about an hour about a wide array of topics in “Anne Krueger … Continue reading A Conversation with Anne Krueger: Rent-Seeking and Other Topics
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There’s no gain-saying that a substantial share of politicians and the public believe international trade is harmful to the US economy, and accordingly, also believe that enacting high tariffs or other barriers to trade will benefit the US economy. The argument has been ongoing for centuries, and I have no illusions of resolving it here. … Continue reading Trade Wars Are Easy to Win, and Income Tax is Easy to Eliminate
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The “Great Resignation” refers to a rise in the rate at which people were quitting their jobs starting in late 2021. It may look like much on a graph. This graph shows the monthly rate at which workers quit jobs voluntarily (thus, not counting retirements, health issues, or being laid off). You can see the … Continue reading Three Theories of the “Great Resignation”
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US federal debt (that is, the accumulation of annual budget deficits) has been rising sharply. Here, I’ll sidestep the big-picture arguments about how this contributes to a slowdown in US growth rates and the risks of sustained inflation, and raises the longer-term risk of more dire financial crises. Instead, let’s just spell out some facts. … Continue reading Who Has Been Holding the Rising Federal Debt: Some Snapshots
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Back in 1628, Ambrose Acroyd published a book called Tables of Leasses and Interest. Acroyd was an administrator at Trinity College from 1615-1625, including a role as senior bursar–the modern equivalent might be “chief financial officer”–for several years. The first table of his book focused on a specific situation: Acroyd's unusual Table i envisions a … Continue reading Net Present Value Solves a Landlord-Tenant Bargaining Problem, 400 Years Ago
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If you are someone from a high-income country, or even just a high-income city, and you travel to other places, you are familiar with finding that, at least sometimes, many items are considerably cheaper in the low-income country: food and meals, entertainment and even health care. As a result, $100 of buying power in the … Continue reading International Comparisons with a PPP Metric
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Evidence supports the belief that if people had better access to jobs and income, they would be less likely to commit crimes. But there is a caveat. The reduction occurs in property crime–which, to be clear are more than 80% of all crimes–but not in violent crimes. Jens Ludwig and Kevin Schnepel describe the pattern … Continue reading Why Jobs and Income Don’t Reduce Violent Crime
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You will be astonished, gentle reader, to learn that the question of whether worker pay has kept up with productivity growth turns out to depend on 1) how you measure worker pay; and 2) how you measure productivity growth. Scott Winship considers the alternatives and issues in “Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past … Continue reading Has Worker Pay Kept Up with Productivity Growth?
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I have pointed out a few times over the years that the US has for many years relied on voluntary donations for blood, but on paid donations for blood plasma (for example, see here, here, and here). One result of these divergent incentives is that while I receive information about the need for blood donations … Continue reading Selling Plasma and Personal Finances
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In a world with lots of problems and even more proposed policies to address each of these problems, it makes sense to study the possibilities–and then to prioritize policies with highest estimated ratio of benefits to costs. The Copenhagen Consensus think tank carried out this exercise and came up with 12 policies. A special issue … Continue reading Development Policies with the Best Benefit-Cost Ratios
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It sometimes feels to me as if issues about energy are all being condensed down into climate change issues. But energy policy debates should have three sides. Michael Greenstone delivered the AEA Distinguished Lecture on “The Economics of the Global Energy Challenge” in San Antonio in January. It’s now published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings … Continue reading All Three Sides of the Global Energy Challenge
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The Columbia University campus, along with many other college campuses, has been convulsed in the last few months by slogan-chanting, banner-waving protests. Thus, I was struck when I ran across an address delivered by Frank Fackenthal, then the president of Columbia, on September 26, 1946, on the occasion of the start of a new academic … Continue reading “Check Your Banners and Your Membership Cards at the College Gate”
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Last week, I posted about the attempt by the Minneapolis City Council to set higher pay for Uber and Lyft drivers, and the threat by the rideshare companies to withdraw from Minneapolis or from Minnesota as a whole if the law was enacted. The dispute seems settled, at least for now, and I thought some … Continue reading Uber/Lyft vs. the Minneapolis City Council: Denouement
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The “labor share” refers to the share of income in an economy paid to labor. Back in the dark ages of the late 1970s and early 1980s when I first started studying economics, it was often assumed that the labor share was more-or-less a constant term over decades. But in the last to decades, the … Continue reading Declining Labor Share: Measurement and Causes
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Back in January, I posted about an article that was getting some attention in my world. Megan T. Stevenson is an active researcher in the criminal-justice-and-economics literature. She argues that when you look at the published studies that use randomized control trial methods to evaluate ways of reducing crime, most of the studies don't show a … Continue reading Pushback on Pessimism About Randomized Controlled Trials
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