Economics Roundtable

Zubin Jelveh reports:

If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of ...

The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again.  A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation.  I am concerned that the benefits of off-label prescribing are not fully appreciated.  Dan Klein and I wrote a letter to ...

You'll find his contrarian take in The New York Times this morning.  It's a second best, public choice argument: according to Bryan we are usually too nasty to energy companies in bad times, so sending them some excess profits is a bit of needed TLC.  McCain's plan of course ...

Yet economists talk much more about trade than they do about health care policy, because they think they know something about it in a way the laity don’t...don’t let economist’s tendency to overemphasize their areas of expertise distort your view.

I don't agree with every claim in this ...

The great P.J. O'Rourke:

All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs ...

Hillary Clinton's proposal is particularly stupid, in my humble opinion, because it tries to get the money back from the oil companies with a windfall profits tax. Tax incidence is tax incidence: if the oil companies can make consumers pay most of the excise tax, then probably consumers can stick them with your windfall ...

It is here, and I'll cover the contents once I've had a chance to read them.  Here is a symposium on why so few women in economics?

Angry at the Margin asks in the comments:

I'm curious to know what you think of these authors, beyond the fact that they achieved mainstream success, given that the Economics that came out of the Cowles Comission is more or less the exact opposite of the Economics coming out of GMU.

Here goes:

1.

You know, like BerkShares, the local "currency" in Massachusetts.  Tim Harford is skeptical:

True, community currencies may very gently encourage trade with locals rather than strangers. But the gains from more trade with locals are more than offset by the losses from less trade with strangers.

See the full post for much ...

On Intrade.com, the probability of a formal recession (two successive quarters of negative growth) in 2008 has fallen from the 70 percent range to the 30 percent range.

Some time ago I had proposed "the N word" economic indicator, namely that things would be really bad if lots of people ...