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So far we have discussed Kiwisaver and national savings in fairly loose terms. We know that (part of) the purpose of Kiwisaver was to increase national savings and that our interest in national savings stems from the fact that we want New Zealand to have more productive capital. So before we can discuss the myriad […]
I’ve talked a lot before about hyperbolic discounting, time inconsistency and smoking. Reading a paper by Gruber and Koszegi on the topic yesterday, I came across an interesting little aside. They point out that, for an addict, smoking in different periods is complementary. That means that taxes to overcome time inconsistency problems are substitutes: if […]
I went to a debate about climate change a few days ago and, uncharacteristically, decided to take notes of my thoughts throughout the talk. In order that they not be wasted I’ve decided to do a series of posts on some of the interesting points that came up in the course of the seminar. Today’s […]
More research out of Massey has recommended increasing government regulation. In this case, researchers found that the display case for cigarettes makes them too tempting for those trying to quit and for rebellious teenagers. As it is election year, politicians are interested in this ‘issue’ and are thinking about tightening the regulation surrounding these cigarette […]
What do the Reserve Bank and eateries have in common? Both implement rule based policies instead of discretionary policies and both suffer criticism from their clientèle for doing so even though it is in the clients ultimate interest. I noticed this today when I went to get some food for lunch. A man in front […]
Matt and I recently discussed whether we thought the government should intervene to correct intra-personal externalities that arise from time inconsistency in peoples’ behaviour. We particularly talked about smoking: models of smoking which incorporate hyperbolic discounting predict that people will want to quit in the future but will never be able to quit when the […]