Half the internet seems to be talking about the US Presidential primaries at the moment, so Jeremy Burke’s work on media bias seems particularly pertinent. I might talk about his other papers another time but the one that’s captured my attention today addresses the myth that balanced media coverage is equivalent to fair coverage. It […]
Perhaps it is apropos to start the new year’s blogging with a look back at history. A working paper reported at Vox examines Stalin’s gulags from an economic, rather than political, viewpoint. In Western capitalist economies it is the threat of losing one’s job that motivates effort in employment. If you shirk and are caught […]
We’ve previously blogged about the potential for patent protections to restrict innovation when inventions are sequential. However, Sudipto Bhattacharya and Sergei Guriev suggest on VoxEU that the research we cited by Bessen and Maskin might be misleading. In particular they point out that there is a ‘third way’ that knowledge can be treated. Rather than […]
Most debate surrounding climate change focuses on the best method of suppressing demand for carbon intensive technologies. However, as Hans-Werner Sinn points out at VoxEU, reductions in demand for carbon could result in perverse incentives on the supply side. In particular, the suppliers of oil, coal and other non-renewable, carbon rich resources could face an […]
This is why I don’t believe people who claim that overcoming one’s biases isn’t important. David Romer gives a football coach solid evidence that he could win more games by running or passing on fourth down and what happens? “It used to be that going for it on fourth down was the macho thing to […]
Cato’s Regulation magazine has a fairly detailed comparison of cap-and-trade and carbon tax systems in their latest issue. A couple of commentators have interpreted the article as supporting their preference for a cap-and-trade system. They say that the two greatest benefits of taxes are revenue recycling and price stability but claim that the money could […]