We’ve written a lot previously about cigarette taxes as a precommitment device that can increase welfare. However, while those models fit the stylised facts, it’s hard to know for sure if people are better off. For that you’d need to make a prediction about their increase in subjective wellbeing and test it. Now a couple […]
Cory Doctorow has written a thoughtful and interesting article for the Guardian, which argues that pricing externalities will inhibit the creation of public value. …the infectious idea of internalising externalities turns its victims into grasping, would-be rentiers. You translate a document because you need it in two languages. I come along and use those translations […]
Working from home massively increases productivity: Over 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there is widespread skepticism over its impact and worries about “shirking from home”. We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000 employee NASDAQ-listed Chinese multinational. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were […]
Simon Nixon has a provocative article in the WSJ where he argues that the current generation of New Keynesian models are useless because of their poor forecast performance. He proposes looking solely at the rate of debt reduction when forecasting economic performance: [The] dismal science’s [forecasting] record suggests is that there is something profoundly wrong […]
There are plenty of interesting papers from the ASSA conference that we’ll be mentioning here. The first shows the importance of the old boys’ network for men in finance. Interestingly, women don’t seem to benefit from it and must instead demonstrate their competence in order to gain recognition. Abstract: Connection is associated with more accurate […]
Martin Weitzman has a new paper out that introduces the concept of a ‘free driver’ externality in the context of climate change responses: Climate change is a global “free rider” problem because significant abatement of greenhouse gases is an expensive public good requiring international cooperation to apportion compliance among states. But it is also a […]