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November 2003
A Monthly Archive (25 entries)
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November 30, 2003
Price Controls
Arnold Kling
Edward Lotterman tells fellow Minnesotans a parable to try to help them understand drug re-importation. The incomes of U.S. surgeons are substantially higher than those in any other country in the world. U.S. hospitals could save consumers tons of money... MORE
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Business Week runs a long, balanced article on India's economy and its relationship to the United States. For all its R&D labs, India remains visibly Third World. IT service exports employ less than 1% of the workforce. Per-capita income is... MORE
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
Today's New York Times has two opinion pieces on the labor market. Pessimist Steve Roach does not believe that the productivity growth that we are seeing is real or lasting. we are woefully underestimating the time actually spent on the... MORE
November 24, 2003
Regulation and Subsidies
Arnold Kling
Is housing more expensive in Manhattan because land is more valuable there? Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks argue that housing is more expensive because of regulation. In twelve out of the twenty-one markets that we examine, on... MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
Michael Lewis writes, The millions of dollars that mutual funds have, in effect, stolen from their small customers are dwarfed by the billions they have wasted for them. In his just-published book, ``A Random Walk Guide to Investing,'' Burton Malkiel... MORE
November 21, 2003
Economics of Health Care
Arnold Kling
I have not been following the prescription drug benefit bill closely enough to be able to provide a sound economic analysis. According to the Washington Post, I am not alone. This is an extremely expensive, 1,100-page bill that will have... MORE
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Who is setting trade policy in the Bush Administration? Certainly not Bruce Bartlett, who writes, one of the new trade restrictions applies to brassieres. Yet there is no domestic manufacturer of this product... The Bush administration has shown incredibly poor... MORE
November 20, 2003
Price Controls
Arnold Kling
Some economists published a petition against drug price controls. Drug-price controls are more difficult to remove than other price controls. Controls on oil and other products often tend to be limited or short-lived, as voters eventually object to the resulting... MORE
November 19, 2003
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Lynne Kiesling, who believes that rent-seekers should be prosecuted, is in an accusatory frame of mind concerning the latest energy legislation. She writes, choosing to expand ethanol mandates as a renewable energy initiative is a big mistake. Using more ethanol... MORE
November 18, 2003
International Macroeconomics: Exchange Rates, International Debt, etc.
Arnold Kling
I argue that our trade deficit is really a savings deficit. Increasing exports relative to imports is not a matter of beating up on China to live up to its commitments in the World Trade Organization. It is not a... MORE
November 13, 2003
Regulation and Subsidies
Arnold Kling
Lynne Kiesling sketched an interesting idea for antitrust enforcement. prosecutions based on the use of lobbying, regulation, and political relationships (i.e., rent seeking) to deter entry. Economists traditionally have evaluated monopoly power using measures such as the Herfindahl index of... MORE
Regulation and Subsidies
Arnold Kling
Both Michael Lind and Ronald Bailey note a population decline in the old prairie states. However, they come to opposite conclusions. Lind wrote, Imagine a federal program that would help poor and working-class Americans to move not from crowded cities... MORE
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Arnold Kling
In this essay, I argue that we should not fear losing our technology edge. In doing the cost-benefit analysis on government funding of scientific research, one factor that should not be given weight is national competitiveness. I can see worrying... MORE
November 11, 2003
Microeconomics
Arnold Kling
Alex Tabarrok asks, If we graphed use of price discrimination against profits would we find a positive slope across the economy as a whole? I doubt it, yet this is what the theory would seem to predict. Send me your... MORE
Austrian Economics
Arnold Kling
After taking a quiz on Austrian Economics, I wrote about my agreements and disagreements with that school. Much of what I believe about economics is based on the concept of imperfect knowledge. Imperfect knowledge implies that as we gain knowledge,... MORE
November 10, 2003
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
One of the more irritating tropes in economic journalism is the "knife-edge" metaphor. A reporter will write a news-analysis piece that breathlessly explains that the Federal Reserve is on a knife edge, with recession on one side and inflation on... MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Lynne Kiesling and Vernon Smith explain peak-load pricing to the new governor of California. current policy unfairly forces consumers to pay rates based on the average hourly cost of energy and industry capital investment. As a result, peak utility cost... MORE
Microeconomics
Arnold Kling
Water is generally viewed as a resource that requires centralized government management. However, Jacob Sullum shows that government does not necessarily allocate water rationally. Since cotton is a water-intensive crop, the middle of a desert seemed a strange place to... MORE
November 7, 2003
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm look at the data on gross flows in the labor market. New Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering the past decade show that job losses seem as common as sport utility vehicles on the... MORE
Econlog Administrative Issues
Arnold Kling
We've had a couple of reports of pages not loading properly. If you experience difficulty getting to a page, please email webmaster@econlib.org to describe your problem. Also, commenters please put your email address in your comment forms. We do not... MORE
November 6, 2003
Institutional Economics
Arnold Kling
A just-concluded conference in honor of Milton and Rose Friedman produced some interesting papers. For example, James D. Gwartney and Robert A. Lawson find that an index of economic freedom helps to account for the failure of the standard of... MORE
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
Federal Reserve Board Governor Ben S. Bernanke offers his views on current issues in macroeconomics. He points to research which suggests that the household survey of employment, which shows a stronger labor market than the payroll survey, may be misleading.... MORE
November 5, 2003
International Trade
Arnold Kling
A reader forwarded a proposal made by Warren Buffet in Fortune. We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call Import Certificates (ICs) to all U.S. exporters in an amount equal to the dollar value of their exports.... MORE
November 4, 2003
Behavioral Economics and Rationality
Arnold Kling
Will Baude brings up the St. Petersburg Paradox, in which a bet with an infinite expected payoff is rejected by the typical individual. Baude points out the problem with trying to resolve the paradox by invoking diminishing marginal utility. here's... MORE
November 3, 2003
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Is the case for free trade weaker when the traded good is high tech labor? Julian Sanchez says no. [Protectionists] might fondly wish that highly educated professionals in Asia would be kind enough to lobotomize themselves and go back to... MORE
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