Tag Archives: Economics

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. It’s a puzzle why more people don’t use long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs or hormone shots. Berk Ozler reports on qualitative findings from Cameroon about why adolescent girls don’t seem interested in them. A new working paper suggests that how refugees fare economically in the U.S. is heavily dependent on at what age they arrive, perhaps because learning English is easier if they come earlier. The authors estimate...

By James Kwak A lot has been written recently about the direction of the Democratic Party. This is what I think. I have been a Democrat my entire life. Today, the Democratic Party matters more than ever because it is the only organization currently capable, at least theoretically, of preventing the Republicans from turning the United States into a fully-fledged banana republic, ruled by and for a handful of billionaire families and corporate chieftains, with a stagnant economy and...

By James Kwak A lot has been written recently about the direction of the Democratic Party. This is what I think. I have been a Democrat my entire life. Today, the Democratic Party matters more than ever because it is the only organization currently capable, at least theoretically, of preventing the Republicans from turning the United States into a fully-fledged banana republic, ruled by and for a handful of billionaire families and corporate chieftains, with a stagnant economy and...

So in what sense is this “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” model firmly grounded in the principles of economic theory? I do not want to be misunderstood. Friends have reminded me that much of the effort of “modern macro” goes into the incorporation of important deviations from the Panglossian assumptions that underlie the simplistic application of the Ramsey model to positive macroeconomics. Research focuses on the implications of wage and price stickiness, gaps and...

The Rule of 72 A fast way of finding an approximative answer to what time it takes for e.g. a country’s income to double when the income grows at x percent per year. [embedded content] div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

Harvard economist and George Bush advisor Greg Mankiw is one of many mainstream economists who has been appealing to the education variable to explain the rising inequality we have seen for the last 30 years in both the US and elsewhere in Western societies. Writes Mankiw: Even if the income gains are in the top 1 percent, why does that imply that the right story is not about education?… If indeed a year of schooling guaranteed you precisely a 10 percent increase in earnings,...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I know this week for many of us it’s been hard to pay attention to what else has been going on in the world, what with the release of Stata 15 and all, but I’ll try to help with some stuff you may have missed: The World Bank’s Hedy Sladovich &Emanuela Galasso put together several very accessibly written one-paragraph summaries of recent findings on what works in early childhood development. It pairs nicely with this (mostly...

Economics textbooks transmogrifying truth — wages and unemployment A couple of weeks ago yours truly was sent a copy of the new edition of Chad Jones intermediate textbook Macroeconomics (4th ed, W W Norton, 2018). There’s much in the book I like, e. g. Jones’  combining of more traditional short-run macroeconomic analysis with an accessible coverage of the Romer model — the foundation of modern growth theory — and DSGE business cycle models. Unfortunately...

Labour’s manifesto — not continued austerity — is what the UK needs On 8 June, voters will go to the polls for perhaps the most important UK general election since 1945. The importance arises in great part from profound differences in economic policy, reflecting different views of the nature and health of the British economy. The Conservative manifesto calls for continued austerity, which will tend to slow the economy at a crucial juncture, against the...

‘Cauchy logic’ in economics What is 0.999 …, really? Is it 1? Or is it some number infinitesimally less than 1? The right answer is to unmask the question. What is 0.999 …, really? It appears to refer to a kind of sum: .9 + + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + … But what does that mean? That pesky ellipsis is the real problem. There can be no controversy about what it means to add up two, or three, or a hundred numbers. But infinitely many? That’s a different story....