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'The man who broke the Bank of England'
My previous post on short-selling reminded me of another famous case study of this trading practice - the one that actually happened in the real world on a massive scale - the story of how George...
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Graph of the week: gender gap in the labour market
In the recovering US labour market, it seems that women have overtaken the men in terms of job gains in the past few years. This trend was noticed in the last month's job report where the men gained...
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The real problem with minimum wages
This week, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal (left-wing) US think tank, has released an open letter to the US President Barack Obama and the leaders of Congress in which they urge the government...
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The week links
I've decided to start a weekly overview of some of the decent articles on the web, not always having the time to comment on each of them in detail, but still would like to share some of their ideas to...
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Corporate profits in the US: finance vs non-finance
I was looking for some data in the Economic Report of the President and I stumbled upon table B-91: Corporate profits by industry, 1964-2012.Here's a graph I got from the data, comparing corporate...
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The week links (2)
Continuing with the weekly overview of the "best of the rest", here's a couple of good ones you shouldn't miss: 1. A few great posts on social mobility from at the Marginal Revoultion blog:Cowen citing...
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Inequality in democracies: interest groups & redistribution
Acemoglu and Robinson have another excellent post at their Why Nations Fail blog. This time the topic is "Democracy vs. inequality".We are by now more or less aware that income inequality in the US and...
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Graph of the week: EU cross-country corruption
"Corruption in the EU is breathtaking!" the EU Commission reports. It is estimated to cost Europe at least 120bn euros annually. It's probably even bigger than that. This is the first time the...
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Week links (3)
An overview of the best of the rest in the economic blogosphere and beyond (and some news as well).1. The US unemployment rate is down to 6.6% (BLS)"Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 113,000 in...
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Emerging market troubles
There has been a series of posts on emerging market troubles in the past few weeks. Dani Rodrik, Nouriel Roubini, Kenneth Rogoff, Tyler Cowen and the FT's Beyondbrics have all pondered on the great...
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Graph of the week: Wine consumption and academic performance
One of the most important lessons of economics is that correlation does not imply causation. Just because we see a pattern in the data, or we observe one event following another, does not mean one...
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Another edition of the best from the rest in the blogosphere and beyond:1. Ryan Avent, "Labour markets: A theory of troubles", The Economist, Free Exchange blog - a great article on the productivity...
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What happened to our dream of democracy? Part 1: Ukrainian revolution
Ukraine has been the center of worldwide attention in the past weeks (and still is), following a long run of anti-government protests. The protests started as a peaceful rally back in November 2013 to...
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What happened to our dream of democracy? Part 2: Democracy's critics
In the first part of the series of texts on democracy I focused on the problem of democratic consolidation as one of the major criticisms directed at democracy as a system. Many suffer under the...
View ArticleWhat happened to our dream of democracy? Part 3: Why democracy will...
In the third part of the series of essays on democracy, I continue upon the conclusions of the second text in evaluating the weaknesses and strengths of democracies.Alternatives to democracy The...
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Graph of the week: When will the Fed raise interest rates?
New Fed Chairwomen Janet Yellen held her first FOMC meeting this week where the committee members (7 members of the board plus 5 out of 12 Reserve bank presidents) gave their usual predictions on when...
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Week links (5)
After a short break, the week links are back.1. Cowen: "Modeling Vladimir Putin", Marginal Revolution blog - of all the texts analyzing Putin's reaction of the Crimea situation, I find this one to be...
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Measuring crony capitalism?
Well, it seems this too has become possible. The Economist decided to introduce an index of crony capitalism, where the index depicts billionaire wealth as % of GDP, however adjusted for sectors that...
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Graph of the week: Who did better than their parents?
From the NPR blog (HT: ASI) comes a very interesting graph as an answer to an unusual question: who had richer parents, doctors or artists? Or to be more precise they were trying to figure out the link...
View ArticleWhen states don't perform
One of the essential roles of the modern state is to solve market failures, i.e. provide goods on the market for which the demand is high, but the supply is inadequate. Or in other words provide goods...
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