Saturday, July 31, 2010

Chinese Highways

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China now has about 65,000 kilometers of freeway criss-crossing the country. In 1989, the number of kilometers was zero. To get a sense o...
7 comments:
Friday, July 30, 2010

There they go again

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I enjoy David Brooks. From everything I can tell, he is smart and has a good heart. I would guess he is a terrific dinner companion. So I...
1 comment:
Thursday, July 29, 2010

Steve Malpezzi is not happy

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He blogs : When I first heard of HAUP, I was excited, but my excitement quickly turned to disappointment. Among other problems, it require...
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

David Leonhardt writes that Kindergarten matters

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From the encouraging article : On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambri...
1 comment:

The Hidden Leverage of Mortgage Securitization

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Ed Glaeser has a nice piece about the debate over whether securitization should get the blame for the subprime mess. But it doesn't ad...
1 comment:
Friday, July 23, 2010

Raphael Bostic on housing tenure policy

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From Newsweek : Another senior HUD official was more direct in an interview with the Washington Post recently: "In previous eras, we...
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Thursday, July 22, 2010

No people with memory loss in my back yard

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In the midst of doing research on how NIMBYs fight facility for housing the elderly, I came across this story from last March in the Minneap...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 20, 2010

As I read the Washington Post "Top Secret America" series...

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...I can't help but wonder how much deadweight loss this is all creating. The theatrics one encounters in airports also seems like it c...
1 comment:
Saturday, July 17, 2010

How Economics is better than Nassim Taleb says it is

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The Black Swan is a great book, and deserves the hype it has received. It also features lots of nasty comments about economics, most of whi...
7 comments:
Friday, July 09, 2010

Yves Smith on the Default of the Rich

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She writes about this morning's story in the New York Times : Another message here is that high income borrowers aren’t taking the F...
8 comments:
Thursday, July 08, 2010

Two more thoughts about The Big Short

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(1) One of Hayek's most compelling arguments for the virtues of markets over government is that markets (via prices) reflect the consta...
3 comments:
Friday, July 02, 2010

Steve Malpezzi's Reading for Life

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It is on the Wisconsin Real Estate blog : 13. Ahamed, Liaquat. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. Penguin Press, 2009. ...
5 comments:

Ken Rogoff thinks the BP spill might produce a groundswell for a carbon tax...

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...but Mark Thoma is not so sure [Rogoff's take is here ]. I am actually more inclined to agree with Rogoff on this one. When enviro...
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Thursday, July 01, 2010

I am putting Michael Lewis' The Big Short on my FBE 589 reading list for this fall

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So many great lines. Perhaps my favorite (from pp 151-152): The only interested parties missing from the conference were the ultimate bor...
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I don't blame Goldman Sachs for taking 100 cents on the dollar of its Credit Default Swaps from AIG....

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....I blame the government for offering it. I understand that there was a need to keep Goldman stable, but jeez.
1 comment:
Monday, June 28, 2010

Justice

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On Wed, I am having the screening procedure that Katie Couric so vividly demonstrated some years ago. Basically the story is that if you ha...
1 comment:

One more take on Kartik Athreya's critique of economics bloggers

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Athreya is arguing that the blogosphere's various critiques of modern macro are being made by insufficiently expert bloggers using insuf...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 24, 2010

Hard to believe

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I was on the radio the other day, discussing the future of Fannie and Freddie, when another guest said that all we had to do was fully priva...
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Jack Guttentag found that mortgage rates in the 1940s were in the low fours.

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Here is the link . [update: of course these were typically 20 year loans, so the comparison is not perfect].
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Lisa Schweitzer on time-service quality trade-offs for transit and autos

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She writes : . ..People tend to like to separate travel time and service quality based on the arguments, like Litman uses, that the time i...
5 comments: