Sunday, May 30, 2010

Why most economic forecasts are useless

›
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative writes: Suppose instead that the model has a consistent one period lag, so Y(t)=R(X(t-1)). And suppose tha...
2 comments:
Friday, May 28, 2010

Scariest thing I have learned over the past 48 hours.

›
Sometime within the next five years, half of LA's city budget will go to pensions.
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Ugly University Buildings I have Known

›
I have spent a fair amount of time at six universities as a student or faculty member.  Five have astonishingly ugly buildings. We begin ...
7 comments:
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Housing Inventories

›
The bad news for the US housing market: despite strong resales in April, the country had about 8.2  months of inventory. For real house pric...
3 comments:
Monday, May 24, 2010

Sarah Ritchie reminds me that today the Brooklyn Bridge is 127 years old.

›
Every time I visit New York, I am stunned at what a remarkable human accomplishment it is. I think there is a pretty good chance that among...
1 comment:

Annoying anti-car headline of the day

›
From Richard Florida's twitter feed, I get: One Hour Spent Driving = 20 Minutes Lost Life Expectancy: So let us think what this means...
1 comment:
Sunday, May 23, 2010

David Barker comments on the growth path of GDP

›
He writes: I just did a quick Chow test to see if there is a structural break in per capita GDP growth between 1935 and 2009 and there is ...
10 comments:
Friday, May 21, 2010

Peter Wallison: Opinions without Data

›
He writes in his screed against financial regulation: In the rapturous days after Barack Obama's victory and the Democratic congressio...
23 comments:
Thursday, May 20, 2010

USC: The Spirit of Transformation

›
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The frustrations of Academic Life

›
Was about to ship a paper off for journal consideration and discovered a mistake. I am just hoping it turns out not to be material.
2 comments:
Monday, May 17, 2010

A little experiment in house price indexes

›
Among my favorite web site's is Morris Davis' . One feature of the site is a page of data that Morris and his colleagues have devel...
2 comments:
Friday, May 14, 2010

Stunning Overbuilding Fact of the Day

›
I am listening to a presentation at the Homer Hoyt meetings on the condo meltdown in South Florida. Developers planned on building 95,000 u...
3 comments:
Wednesday, May 12, 2010

How do you produce a 63 day winning streak?

›
Here is how I have been trying to figure this out. Suppose we wanted to figure out what a daily winning percentage had to be in order to ob...
11 comments:
Monday, May 10, 2010

Virginia AG Cuccinelli is not only trying to kill Academic Freedom, he is trying to kill America's economic advantage

›
Mark Thoma sends me to Barkley Rosser : This is in today's daily links, but I think it deserves a bit more notice: Virginia AG Cucci...
2 comments:
Saturday, May 08, 2010

Two items in this morning's LA Times bring out my inner conservatism (small though it may be)

›
(1) The LA City Council is considering forbidding landlords of rent stabilized property from raising rents at all . I am certainly not a Fr...
3 comments:
Friday, May 07, 2010

Yet another reason why real estate is so interesting

›
I was listening to the BBC last night on the general election in the UK. One commentator stated that the reason coalition government wouldn...
4 comments:
Sunday, May 02, 2010

What Milton Friedman got wrong

›
Friedman had two fundamental problems with business regulation. His first is that the business would capture the regulator, and therefore u...
15 comments:

Could we finally get a Pigou Tax on gasoline now?

›
Lisa Margonelli in this morning's New York Times . The Deepwater Horizon spill illustrates that every gallon of gas is a gallon of ris...
20 comments:
Thursday, April 29, 2010

Path Dependence?

›
I am currently in Minneapolis. It is, to me, a great city. My feelings may reflect that it was the large city nearest to me when I was gro...
6 comments:
Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Did Arizona just help California's Housing Market?

›
My colleague Dowell Myers points out that for the housing market in the US to remain healthy, we must "cultivate new immigrant resident...
6 comments: