The John Lewis economy - a belated comment
In my last book review I summarized a very interesting book called The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In it the authors propose a solution that would not only lower inequality and...
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2016 Nobel prize awarded to Hart and Holmstrom for contract theory
It's that time of the year again - Nobel prize awards! After being awarded to a single recipient two years in a row (Deaton in 2015, Tirole in 2014), this year the Nobel in economics is shared by two...
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What I've been reading (vol. 11): Atkinson & Stiglitz
Atkinson, Anthony (2015) Inequality. What Can Be Done? Harvard University Press&Atkinson, Anthony (2008) The Changing Distribution of Earnings in OECD Countries. Oxford University PressThe first...
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The trade-off between equality and efficiency reexamined
After having read and reviewed Stiglitz's book earlier this week, and after having written the following paragraph..."I too have long considered the relationship between equality and efficiency to be...
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Predicting the 2016 US Presidential election
Is it possible to have a more accurate prediction by asking people how confident they are that their preferred choice will win?One consequence of this hectic election season has been that people have...
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New Scientist: "As US election looms, time is ripe for a new science of polling"
My article got published today at the New Scientist! One of the biggest science magazines in the world.See the text here (there is no paywall, you just register and read it for free). It was even on...
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We called it! How we predicted a Trump victory with amazing precision
First of all apologies to my regular readers for not presenting our results here sooner. It's been overwhelming in the past two days - first with the prediction, then with the results, and then with...
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Explaining our current stagnation
Ever since the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and its subsequent (slow and modest) recovery many have claimed the world has entered into a state of prolonged stagnation. In addition to economic growth...
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Is technological progress at the heart of stagnation?
In the previous text I presented several economic hypotheses explaining why the developed world has entered what could possibly be a prolonged period of economic stagnation. In today's text (note: long...
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2016: a bad year for predictions
Talk about Black Swans, 2016 was full of them! From elections to markets, from hacking to terrorist attacks, it was one unexpected event after another. Each a complete shocker in its own way....
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This Trumpian neomercantilism is ridiculous!
Protectionism never helped anyone. Particularly among the developed nations. I have yet to encounter a case of a rich country becoming even richer after imposing tariffs and trade restrictions. Even...
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Vote buying with intergovernmental grants (my paper published in Public Choice)
When I started working in the academia a few years back, my friend and co-author Josip Glaurdić asked me which journal would I like to be published in the most? Without hesitation I said: Public...
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Is economics getting better? Yes. It is.
I attended two great conferences last week. The first one was an econ conference I co-organized with my friends and colleagues Dr Dejan Kovac and Dr Boris Podobnik, which featured three world-class...
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2017 Nobel prize in Economics goes to Richard Thaler
A well-deserved Nobel prize for a man that helped establish a new field of behavioral economics, disrupted the academic milieu in the rigid field of finance, and successfully started implementing his...
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Making causal inferences in economics: Do better grades lead to higher salaries?
In a previous post I discussed the changing nature of the economics profession and the importance of achieving the experimental ideal in social science research. I briefly discussed the logic and even...
View ArticleWelcome to The Political Economist
It's been almost three years since I last wrote anything on my once very active blog. I stopped producing regular content by mid 2014, dropped down to 2 posts per month in 2015 (down from over 10 posts...
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Riding on a high: why is the market hitting records in a recession?
The US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the official tracker of the US business cycle, declared that the recession in the country started in February 2020. According to NBER February was...
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Monetary and fiscal bubbles after COVID
In the previous blog I analyzed the stunning divergence between the markets and the real economy. I emphasized three particular reasons for why this is happening: (1) huge monetary and fiscal stimuli...
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The corporate debt bubble: CLOs and company bankruptcies
In addition to monetary and fiscal bubbles, another potential issue that could be exacerbated by a prolonged period of low interest rates are rising corporate debt levels of publicly listed...
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Again no inflation? Velocity of money and the E-P ratio reexamined
A lot of investors are wondering when exactly can we expect inflation to hit our economies? An economist's answer - only in the long run. This bad joke is turning out to be true. Despite the huge,...
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The GameStop conundrum
This week we saw a huge play come to its climax. For a while the retail investor community at r/wallstreetbets (WSB) on Reddit has been pumping several stocks that have been targeted by short sellers...
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The bond market is showing no signs of recession. Yet.
This article was first published on Seeking Alpha on July 15th 2021. This article contains updated graphs for the subsequent month and a half (a new version will look at the situation again in...
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Nobel prize for causal inference: why it matters
This year's Nobel prize in economics was awarded to three brilliant economists, David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens for revolutionizing the way economists (and social scientists) do empirical...
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The politics of bailouts: How political connections of banks conditioned...
My new paper (open access; meaning free to read) is out in the new edition of Public Choice (published online first in February this year). This was my second PhD paper at Oxford, and one I am...
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Introducing: the ambition-to-competence ratio in kleptocracies
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has inspired me to come up with an interesting theoretical concept. I'll lay it out first, and then try to explain the reasoning behind it and how it can be used to explain...
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