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Adios Chavismo y Kirchnerismo
Over the past month we witnessed two major political changes in the South American continent. Venezuela and Argentina have ousted their long-lasting socialist parties and have turned center-right. The...
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Graph of the year: The Fed increases interest rates!
It has happened. The Fed has raised short-term interest rates for the first time since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. And immediately they've doubled it! The rate went up from 0.25% to...
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Hits and misses: Evaluating last year's predictions
This is becoming a sort of a post-Christmas tradition on the blog - each year in the weak after Christmas I offer a wrap up of the year by evaluating my last year's predictions. Once again, I have to...
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2016 predictions: Women in charge, reversal of fortunes, and Brexit?
After summing up the successes and failures of my last years' predictions in the previous post, it's time to make new ones. Each year the same; I look ahead and try to anticipate the most important...
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How to forecast elections? (and be good at it too)
Back in October and November I was a part of a three man academic team with a job to do some forecasting for the general election in Croatia that was held in November 2015. We were hired by the largest...
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The Swiss are encouraged to DELAY paying their taxes!?
Last week the FT brought the story that a certain Swiss canton, Zug, is asking its taxpayers to delay paying their taxes and their bills. Surely to anyone this piece of news sounds astonishing. The...
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What I've been reading (vol. 1)
I decided to have this type of a regular book review column on the blog where I intend to present brief reviews of some of the (nonfiction) books I will be reading throughout the year. One of my new...
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Graphs of the week: Tax evasion and votes for Syriza
Over the past year many commentators on the Greek political situation have claimed that Syriza, the radical left party that surprisingly won the Greek elections in 2015 (twice!), drew much of its...
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What I've been reading (vol. 2)
The second volume of what I've been reading is all about, as I mentioned last time, the brilliant philosophy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and a large part of his Incerto, a four volume "philosophical and...
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What I've been reading (vol. 3)
The third volume of "What I've been reading" is centered around bubbles, animal spirits, crises, and its predictors (real and self-proclaimed). I'll start chronologically:Shiller, Robert (2005)...
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Separated by a border (2): electoral divisions
In my first Separated by a border blog (that was three years ago, but it garnered significant attention apparently) I drew institutional implications of how some countries on the same geographical area...
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Explaining regression to the mean in football
I'm a football fan (European football of course). In addition to my family, my work, my interests in economics, politics, cooking, and a host of other stuff, I enjoy football. Watching, playing and...
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Behavioral economics; or What I've been reading (vol. 4)
Today's book review is all about behavioral economics. This relatively new branch of economics (originated in the 70s, reached prominence in the past few decades), has been a complete eye-opener for...
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The war on science: How the Internet exposed the failure of our education...
In this blog post I will make a brief digression from my usual economics topics. A year has passed since National Geographic published an issue with the following disturbing cover, featuring a couple...
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What I've been reading (vol. 5)
I'm running behind with the reviews (still keeping track with the book readings though), so I'll publish the next two in space of only a week. Today it will be Gladwell's three books: Outliers, Tipping...
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Graph of the week: Immigration: perception vs reality
An interesting chart from the Economist about the perception and reality on the total number of Muslims in European countries. It's striking how big the overestimation gap is in the selected countries...
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What I've been reading (vol. 6)
Alvin Roth (2015) Who Gets What - and Why? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt The Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth summarizes what are basically his Nobel Prize...
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Graph of the week: Race and money affect school performance
The New York Times brings the following interactive graphic (I encourage you to click on the link and try it out; you can track direct comparisons in performance by race and wealth - it's...
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Predicting the Brexit referendum
I'm proud to announce that last month I became an entrepreneur! Together with two of my friends and colleges, physicist Dejan Vinkovic and computer scientist Mile Sikic, we started a company called...
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Ourprediction method (announced in the previous text) rests primarily upon our Facebook survey, where we use a variety of Bayesian updating methodologies to filter out internal biases in order to offer...
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