Narayana Kocherlakota, the Minneapolis Fed President, gave a speech on August 17th in which he said: But over the long run, money is, as we economists like to say, neutral…. [I]f the FOMC maintains the fed funds rate at its current level of 0-25 basis points for too long, both anticipated and actual inflation have [...]
On Time magazine’s Curious Capitalist blog, the blogger decides to solicit behavioral economists for their opinion on a higher tax rate for the super-rich. That is, specifically, what should the tax rate be? Read on: My basic assumption was that behavioral economists would see the question of how people react to tax rates as a [...]
Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, along with William White, former head of the Bank for International Settlements’ monetary and economic department, are arguing for an increase in interest rates. Interest rates near zero risk fanning asset bubbles or propping up inefficient companies, say Rajan and William White, former head of the Bank for International Settlements’ [...]
Sales of newly-built homes declined in July, as did the sales of existing homes. See the graph below from Calculated Risk: The gap started to widen starting in 2006 (around the time the housing bubble burst), and continues to widen. The gap will close if: Newly built homes start to sell faster. Existing homes stop [...]
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Since we’re talking about movies and documentaries today, this post from Marginal Revolution rounds out the trifecta pretty well: I’ve lately found a new empirical paper on why popcorn is so expensive in the movie theater. The authors are Ricard Gil and Wesley Hartmann. Here is the abstract: Prices for goods such as blades for razors, ink [...]
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Tagged movies
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This is tragicomic: Enrollment rates are far higher than completion rates. Many college students drop out before completing their degree. Less than 60 percent of first-time full-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree at four-year institutions in 2000-1 completed that goal at that institution within six years (it’s difficult to track students who transfer to other [...]
And not one of those cheap chains either. Walgreen’s buys Duane Reade. Here’s The Curious Capitalist on the issue: Duane Reade was a ratty little downtown cut-price operation until management decided that the key to drug retailing isn’t service—theirs was awful — but location. In the great space race of the last decade Duane Reades [...]
Don’t pay your mortgage, that is. On purpose. That’s right. Just walk away from it. Roger Lowenstein in yesterday’s NYT: …voluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing [...]
Looks like the deficit in Q1 of FY 2010 was about $56 billion more than the same time last year. Although spending went down, revenues went down even more. Here’s what CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had to say on his blog: The federal budget deficit was about $390 billion in the first quarter of fiscal [...]
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Brad DeLong gives us the real unemployment rate: The real unemployment rate–the share of Americans who say that they are actively looking for work and don’t have jobs–has been drifting down since late spring–from 9.7% in June to 9.4% in November. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate over that same period has risen from 9.5% to 10.0%, [...]
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