Economics Roundtable

Garth Brazelton thinks so, in an argument I find somewhat persuasive:

My issue is that he keeps saying 'sin taxes' are not Pigovian. I've disagreed on this point, and I disagree continually. A basic definition of a Pigovian tax is: a tax levied on a particular behavior in ...

I am a supporter of the VAT, so I was interested in reading Veronique de Rugy's anti-VAT piece The Wrong Policy at the Wrong Time. I was surprised to find that there were two sentences I was in complete agreement with:

Which suggests a final thought: Focusing on ...

Arnold Kling quotes from a terrific piece by Eric S. Raymond:

We've spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker -- which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn't make sense has crept up and up and up, ...

Five years later, We Will Never Run Out of Oil is still one of my most read articles and the source of the majority of the angry e-mails I get. I wonder how many Prof. Boudreaux will receive for For oil, tap ingenuity. I particularly enjoyed ...

The international trade / public policy course I teach at Ivey is quite Keynesian. Next time I teach the course I will give my students Arnold Kling's How I Think About Keynesian Economics - it is absolutely brilliant. I particularly find this part useful:

Imagine that all ...

Paul Krugman makes an excellent argument based on behavior economics on the benefits of higher inflation:

I would add, however, that there's another case for a higher inflation rate -- an argument made most forcefully by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (pdf). It goes like this: even in the long run, ...

A terrific post at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative -

King at SCSUScholars on the evidence (or non-evidence) that the stimulus package "worked":

Most of what we write about the effects of stimulus are just that, "an attempt to gain knowledge." A bureaucrat writes down some numbers. Reporters and bloggers find flaws. Econometric models estimate the effects, but those models ...

Some terrific links here: We're Not Running Out Of - Or Even Low On - Sources of 'Nonrenewable' Energy.

I am not a geologist, so I am not going to provide any commentary on physical reserves. What I can comment on is the bad economics behind the ...

Tyler Cowen asks: Is there a case for a VAT?

I'm shocked he has to ask this - of course there is! The U.S. federal government has very few options to dig themselves out of their fiscal hole. Their fiscal options are: Significant cuts in spending, which ...