NYT: On Tuesday night at the London Games, some of the world’s best badminton players hit some of the sport’s worst shots. Sad serves into the net. Returns that sailed far wide. …On Wednesday, four women’s doubles teams — two from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia — were disqualified. …The eight […]
Stephen Gordon applies the Lucas critique to behavioural economics and nudges: A key insight of behavioural economics is that people don’t always and everywhere re-optimise whenever their environments change. Instead, they will often – or even usually – make use of various rules of thumb and/or passively accept the default option. …This the idea behind […]
Noahpinion: …it’s really hard to make a DSGE model in which government policy plays a useful role in stabilizing the business cycle. By contrast, it’s pretty easy to make a DSGE model in which government plays no useful role, and can only mess things up. So what ends up happening? You guessed it: a macro […]
Niclas Berggren: This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymakers who are going to implement paternalist policies. The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and […]
Levine and Zheng review the evidence: The relationship between economic theory and experimental evidence is controversial. One could easily get the impression from reading the experimental literature that economic theory has little or no significance for explaining experimental results. The point of this essay is that this is a tremendously misleading impression. Economic theory makes […]
Plenty has been written on the inadequacy of GDP as a measure of welfare and numerous alternative measures have been constructed. Given the proliferation of alternatives, we might wish to know what additional informational content they have over and above GDP. Grimes et al presented a paper at this year’s NZAE conference that investigates the […]