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from Lars Syll Source As we’ve noticed, again and again, correlation is not the same as causation … If you want to get the prize in economics — and want to be on the sure side — yours truly would suggest you complement  your intake of chocolate with a move to Chicago. Out of the 78 laureates that have been awarded “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” 28 have been affiliated to The University of Chicago — that is 36%. The world is really a small...

Going nowhere, and with mortgage lending decelerating not much hope this will add to growth vs last year: Highlights Housing has been sliding which adds importance to May’s very solid 1.1 percent rebound in existing home sales to a higher-than-expected 5.620 million annualized rate. Today’s report is mostly solid throughout and includes gains for single-family homes, up 1.0 percent to a 4.980 million rate, and also condos, up 1.6 percent to a 640,000 rate. The sales gains...

NYT has an interesting article that might provide readers with the details of not only immigration but labor, food supply, agriculture in a mixed reaction to such issues.  I also wonder if planting went smoothly, for instance, as the details of lives get lost in the simplicities of bumper sticker, all or none politics.  This is of course only one small sector of of an economy affected by immigration but sometimes a story offers much insight if I ask the right...

Here is a working paper by Leonie Gerhards and Michael Kosfeld entitled I (Don’t) Like You! But Who Cares? Gender Differences in Same Sex and Mixed Sex Teams. The abstract reads as follows: We study the effect of likability on female and male team behavior in a lab experiment. Extending a two-player public goods game and a minimum effort game by an additional pre-play stage that informs team members about their mutual likability we find that female teams...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economists and politicians have answers for everything. Lose your job? Well, that’s just globalization and technology at work. Not much that can be done about that. And if you still want a job? Then just move to where the jobs are—and make sure your children go to college in order to prepare themselves for the jobs that will be available in the future. The fact is, they’re not particularly good answers. And people know it. That’s why working-class voters are...

High powered money in Greece. The EU is re-financing 8,5 billion of Greek debt. About 7 billion of this is just trading in one kind of government bonds for another kind of government bonds. Much ado about less than nothing. There is some welcome softening of the terms – but not enough. However: About 1,6 billion has to be used to pay overdue bills which have to be paid by the government. This exchanging private debt for government bonds and will lead to an injection of highly powered...

from Dean Baker In their desperation to provide $600 billion in tax cuts to their rich campaign contributors, the Republicans have decided to abandon all the standard rules by which Congress has governed itself. The actions might seem extraordinary, but we know how desperately the richest people in the country need tax cuts, so who can complain if the normal procedures are not being followed? Unfortunately the debate over the “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare is being confused with a...

from Lars Syll Much of current academic teaching and research has been criticized for its lack of relevance, that is, of immediate practical impact … I submit that the consistently indifferent performance in practical applications is in fact a symptom of a fundamental imbalance in the present state of our discipline. The weak and all too slowly growing empirical foundation clearly cannot support the proliferating superstructure of pure, or should I say, speculative economic theory …...

AEI-Brookings recently issued a report on paid medical leave. I found one of the figures in the paper to be especially interesting: Click to embiggen or to show the entire graph.  (You should see four columns in the graph.)