Saturday, October 02, 2010

Favorite Line of the Week (h/t Bob Van Order)

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The difference between a theorem and a tautology is how fast you think.
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The William Cohan fallacy

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William Cohan the other day complained that Elizabeth Warren fallaciously claimed borrowers did not know what they were getting themselves i...
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Lisa Schweitzer on Transportation funding

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She bring nuance to an issue that is often argued about with slogans (go to her post for graphs). One of the common arguments I hear is ...
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Hannah Green blogs from an NGO School in India

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She writes : On Tuesday afternoon, we could either take a nap or go to the Pragnya School, a K-10 NGO school in the village. I said that ...
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Thursday, September 30, 2010

Bill Gross says don't expect double-digit returns anymore

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He could very well be rig ht. Part of returns come from inflation, which is currently running at an annual pace of 1.2 percent. If "n...
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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A modest step toward untangling housing markets

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One of the impediments to housing transactions is appraisals. If appraisals (which are backward looking) don't support the offer price ...
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Sunday, September 26, 2010

At what point will short sales become meaningful to restarting the housing market?

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The Washington Post today forecasts 400,000 short sales this year. Lawrence Yun says there will be 2.5 million foreclosures in 2010 . So w...
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Don't get too excited

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Nick Timiraos retweets Brad Hunter: Census numbers: Single family starts up 4.3% (+/- 12.4%) Plus or minus 12.4%!! It's in the fine prin...
Sunday, September 19, 2010

To my macroeconomist friends: if you are going to do urban economics, please read the urban economics literature first.

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I saw a paper from a famous macroeconomist a week or so ago that proposed that cities with high incomes relative to house prices produce mor...
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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

While Arrow showed the impossibility of a well defined ordering of social preferences...

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...we tend to act as if there is one anyway. That is, we place a lot of focus on GDP per capita when evaluating economic success. By this ...
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Saturday, September 11, 2010

When assumptions drive the result

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I have spent the past few days at the Wisconsin-St Louis Fed conference on Housing, Urban, Labor and Macroeconomics; it is a third in a seri...
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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Is it housing or is it Boston?

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David Leonhardt's excellent piece on house prices in the New York Times this morning asks a fundamental question about how to think abo...
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Monday, September 06, 2010

LA commutes? Not so bad.

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The average one-way LA commute is 29 minutes . This compares with 45 minutes for the UK (the whole country, not just urban areas) and 38 mi...
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Ryan Avent of The Economist gets it right (h/t to Mark Thoma)

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He writes : "...it's simply not true that the administration has rolled out every programme it can think of. Economists with whic...
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Sunday, September 05, 2010

A downpayment factoid

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Canada allows 95 percent LTV loans. Borrowers must get mortgage insurance, either from the government or the private sector, if the LTV exc...
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Friday, September 03, 2010

My favorite Art Goldberger quote

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I saw a paper today on heritability and savings. It made me think of my econometrics teacher, Art Goldberger, who once wrote: Professor H...
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Thursday, September 02, 2010

Do low rates make house prices more volatile?

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Over at the FT blog, Cardiff Garcia has a nice summary of three papers that attempt to explain the run-up in house prices before 2007. It ...
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The wonders of academia

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I became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. Among the responsibilities of full professors are (1) to evaluate...
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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Did Californians break their contract?

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Mark Thoma , whom I admire, approvingly posts Michael O'Hare's letter to his students. Professor O'Hare says something that re...
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Friday, August 27, 2010

Maybe we are more like Homer Simpson than Spock

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I saw Juan Carrillo of the USC economics department present a very nice paper testing auction theory using experimental data . The only prob...