Mark Carney appeared at the Treasury Select Committee today for interrogation before being confirmed as the next Governor of the Bank of England. The big question everybody wanted answered is whether he favoured a move from inflation targeting to NGDP level targeting. The answer is ‘no’, but the reasons are interesting. Carney is a known […]
Romer and Romer think monetary policy could do more if only central bankers believed in themselves. Scott Sumner might agree these days. Our thesis in this paper is that overly pessimistic views about the power of monetary policy have been a more important source of these errors than have overly optimistic views. There is little […]
Why shop online? Avoid the embarrassment of mispronouncing foreign words or being viewed as a giant fattie! Nom nom nom nom… Abstract: We show that social interaction reduces the diversity of products purchased by consumers in two retail settings. First, we consider a field experiment conducted by Sweden’s monopoly alcohol retailer and find that moving […]
Interesting that movie downloads haven’t had a significant impact on video rentals. That will probably change as video streaming services like Netflix become more common. Abstract: The music industry has struggled during the past decade due to file sharing and movie business executives fear the same fate. This paper seeks to provide measurements of the […]
Another study where the main question is whether you believe in their identification strategy. Abstract: Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country […]
The Guardian reports that Some academy schools have been accused of manipulating admissions to improve results and using covert selection methods… A number of academy chains are seemingly more focused on expanding their empires than improving their existing schools. Should we be surprised, and is it a major problem? On the first question, no, it […]