Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Good for Greg Mankiw...

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..for supporting marriage equality .
Monday, February 25, 2013

Why is the luxury housing market recovering so well?

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The fashionable thing to say is because of foreign money.  I suspect the actual reason is that the one percent have gotten 122 percent of t...
Saturday, February 23, 2013

The future of efficient transportation

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Might look like this: I heard a lecture from Alain Bertaud on how networked, scheduled transportation is not a good solution for many...
2 comments:
Monday, February 18, 2013

Where's the monopsony?

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President Obama , Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have all been pushing for an increase in the minimum wage.  I want to agree with them, an...
1 comment:
Saturday, February 09, 2013

Should college be subsidized?

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Mark Thoma has a very nice piece today about how Cal State-Chico changed his life.  One of the reasons it changed his life is that he coul...
4 comments:
Friday, February 01, 2013

Will smart phones be the end of built in automobile NAV systems?

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Four years ago, my wife bought me car for my birthday.  She reasoned that as a newly minted Angeleno, I would be spending more time in my c...

Bankers and tail events

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I participated in a panel last note hosted by the German American Business Association.  Overall, I had a nice time. But before the panel...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Does Modigliani-Miller apply to countries?

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If it does, the capital structure of the US is just fine.  Current GDP is 15.8 trillion.  Let's apply a  real discount rate of 4 percen...
7 comments:

Steve Oliner shows that it takes too damn long to build things in California

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The set-up : Recent research, which I conducted with Jonathan Millar of the Federal Reserve Board and Daniel Sichel of Wellesley Colleg...

It's the G.

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After I saw the weak 4th quarter GDP number reported this morning, I went to the National Income and Products Accounts website , where I fo...
Sunday, January 27, 2013

An update of my tinker-toy model of housing starts and GDP

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We had pretty robust growth in housing starts in December: A few months ago, I suggested that we could have second quarter GDP growth ...
Thursday, January 24, 2013

I didn't think Phil Mickelson's Tax Rate Could be > 60 percent

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From the Tax Foundation : Mickelson lives outside of San Diego so he is subject to one of the highest tax rates in the country, but it ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Do higher marginal tax rates lead superstar athletes to play less often?

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Let's think, for a moment, about why people want more money: (1) To buy stuff. (2) To keep score. (3) To accumulate power. Perh...
2 comments:
Saturday, January 19, 2013

Morris Davis gives a talk where he shows that fewer American homeowners think they are underwater than actually are

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Morris --along with Erwan Quintin --calculates median house prices by MSA using the American Community Survey from 2006-2010.  Because the ...
Friday, January 18, 2013

City of New Orleans

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In one of those lovely, serendipitous moments in life, I was flying over the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans while reading Tom Fitzmorris...
Friday, January 11, 2013

There are days when I wish Wordperfect 5.1 was still around

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That is all.
4 comments:
Thursday, January 10, 2013

Economists and the public are both right about free trade

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Noahpinion has a nice post this morning on how the public doesn't trust economists.  Exhibit A: "Free trade" is the on...
7 comments:
Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Why Moneyball and Nate Silver work, but derivatives don't

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I find Nassim Taleb's style annoying, and he often mischaracterizes the views of others.  But when I teach my mortgage backed securiti...
2 comments:
Monday, January 07, 2013

Will we ever learn?

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Is allowing banks to count Mortgage Backed Securities as capital r eally a good idea?
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 02, 2013

The V-shaped nature of the Fiscal Cliff Fix

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Here is a first approximation of the change in effective tax rates [for a single taxpayer] as a result of the deal (the effective rates   a...
7 comments: