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Where do YOU think Ukraine is?
From Washington Post comes a very disturbing piece of information (HT: Business Insider). A couple of political scientists from Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton did a survey of 2066 Americans (sampled...
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Graph of the week: beware of stock market charts
Observe the following two graphs (HT: Business Insider):Source: Business InsiderThe first one depicts the S&P 500 index over the past 17 years where it seems to show remarkable patterns of...
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Assessing Abenomics
Japan has been such a perplexing country in terms of its economy for the past two decades. A country riven by a slow, government-driven recovery has tried everything: from massive monetary stimuli...
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Graph(s) of the week: Companies' cash holdings
According to numerous reports, it seems that the biggest world companies are sitting on record levels of cash holdings. If this is true, the question is why aren't they spending it?According to...
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Week links (6)
Another edition of some of the finest texts in the blogosphere for the past week or so:1. "Australian PM makes pitch for budget cuts", Wall Street Journal. Finally a Prime Minister with some...
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Why no inflation?
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon."Thus spoke Milton Friedman.In the long run expansive monetary policy (measured via changes in money growth) can only deliver higher prices...
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In memoriam: Gary Becker
One of the world's most influential economists, Nobel laureate Gary Becker has passed away this week at the age of 84. Becker was a professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Economics and...
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Graph of the week: Correlation doesn't imply causality vol. 2
Or Which is more important in competitive sports, money or talent?The Economist once again paired an interesting relationship which could be suspect to the most obvious mistake in social sciences -...
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Cash for review: improving journal referee performance
Here's a paper that will raise a few eyebrows among academic economists - how to improve performance of journal referees. HT: MargRev.Any self-respecting member of the economics profession (and the...
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Graph of the week: "Academic" salaries
Well this is interesting:SourceIt seems the best job you can get at a University is that of a football coach. Not only do you massively outperform the tenured professors, but you also outperform the...
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Week links (7)
The best from the rest:1. The news bomb of the week in economics actually came on Friday: Chris Giles from the Financial Timesfound serious errors in Piketty's argument on inequality:"The data...
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Democracy and the causal growth link
Is democracy good for growth? The ultimate question of political economy of growth to which we'll hardly get a clear answer. A lot of academics would emphasize that empirically higher level of...
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EU elections comment: Marginal parties do well in marginal elections
The success of extremist parties in the latest vote for the EU Parliament shouldn’t come as a surprise, even though it is a slight reason for concern. The agendas and activities of some of these...
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Week links (8)
Another edition of the best from the rest in commentary, op-eds and blogs: (1) Beaudry, Galizia & Portier: "Reconciling Hayek's and Keynes' views of recessions", VoxEU. Can this be done? Apparently...
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Political economy of debts and deficits (1): Introduction
In a series of texts I will touch upon some of the theoretical and empirical factors explaining the expansion of debts and deficits in many of the World's economies in the past 40 years. This has been...
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Graph of the week: World Cup fever
The football World Cup is at our doorsteps and the fever is certainly there, at least in the nations which have qualified. So I think it's only appropriate to follow this up with a quick post - don't...
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"The Course of Empire": How long do Empires last?
Having finally finished Niall Ferguson's "Civilization", I got very amused with his portrayal of the life cycle of an Empire. After writing very interesting and engaging books on the rise and fall of...
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"Capitalism for the people"
This week I was in London where I attended the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty (follow the Twitter feed on #Liberty2014) organized by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) (here's a link to some...
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Political economy of debts and deficits (2): Theoretical overview
After a brief intermission it's time to continue with the PE of debts and deficits. In today's post I will present a theoretical overview focusing on the common-pool problem and political...
View ArticlePolitical economy of debts and deficits (3): Hypotheses explaining debt...
Continuing with the overview of the politics behind debt and deficits, in this post I present the dominant hypotheses aimed at explaining the vast debt accumulation on the past 40 years in many...
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