The Angry Bear

Robert Waldmann | January 25, 2017 6:46 am First note strong evidence that the rate of wage inflation is mean reverting. This is a pooled regression with data from the Old EU 15 from 1960 through 2015. Indicator variables for countries are included but the coefficients aren’t reported. dw is the percent rate of wage inflation. ddw is the...

Paul Ryan and other House Republicans voted along party lines “Adopting rules for the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress.” The vote was 234 Yeas to 193 Nays. Three Republicans voted with Democrats to block the new rules for the 115th Congress. No big deal, right? and the New Rules passed. As many of you probably know, I have been writing about the PPACA/ACA/Obamacare since 2008; answering questions, presenting information, and rebutting the stories, outright lies,...

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Recently I put up a few graphs showing that the income of immigrants is correlated with the income of the country from which they hailed, and that this relationship is especially true for immigrants who have been in the US the longest Garrett Jones has been covering the same ground, and here he provides a bit of a review of the literature: Recently, a small group of economists have found more systematic evidence on how the past predicts the present. Overall, they...

When Barack Obama became President, Republicans in Congress pledged to oppose him tooth and nail. That was a bad idea. It implied that they were hoping the President would fail. This implies one of two things: either they wished ill for the country, or they were completely convinced that Obama was wrong and they were right on every important issue. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, we can assume hubris rather than dislike of country (or worse). But hubris...

Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger of the Institute of Policy Studies released “Tale of Two Retirements”, a study discussing how well CEOs will retire in comparison to the low and middle income citizens who only have 401ks and Social Security to retire on in the US and what President-Elect Trump’s actions will do to CEO retirement. One hundred CEOs have company retirement funds worth approximately $4.7 billion or a sum equal to the entire retirement savings of 41...

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Sandwichman | January 20, 2017 1:18 am Dave Moss: What’s your name?  Blake: Fuck you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? ‘Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. THAT’s my name. Long before Alec Baldwin did his Saturday Night Live impression of Donald J. Trump, Trump appropriated Baldwin’s sadistic...

This continues joint research with Marco Fioramanti. Our aim is to understand something about European natural rates of unemployment and whether the European Commissions estimated levels which they call NAWRU (for non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment) are useful approximations. Here is a brief summary of work to date (prior to this note). Various subsets of us wrote at length here, here, here, here , and here. In this note I look at a panel of...

I was looking for information on how cultures affect growth and stumbled on this 12.5 year old article in The Economist: Diversity and development might seem to sit oddly together. But they are intimately linked, and the report seeks to show that they are not related in the way many people assume. The UNDP’s press release says unambiguously that “there is no evidence that cultural diversity slows development”, and dismisses the idea that there has to be a...