This is my last hogging post of the season. Congratulations to Bill Guerin and the rest of the Pens.

by Prof Neil Buchanan of GWU Just read the whole thing.The 2009 Social Security Trustees’ Report: Good News Behind the Headlines I could not agree more with Prof. Buchanan’s conclusion. While there is some talk of returning to address Social Security’s finances after we fix healthcare costs, it at least appears likely that we will […]

Robert Waldmann Tilman Tacke and I wrote this manuscript looking at income inequality and infant mortality (I’ve discussed it here before). I am going to indulge myself describing the paper I wanted to write but couldn’t because the data didn’t cooperate (gave essentially no empirical support for my pet theory). After the jump, my pet […]

by Linda Beale [also posted on ataxingmatter] Both President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, key players in the health reform debate, have now indicated that one source of funding for health care reform on the table is a possible limitation in the exclusion from income of employer-provided insurance. See, e.g., Connolly, President Pivots on Taxing […]

rdan Linda Beale writes some thoughts on public plans for health care and points us to Ezra Klein and Robert Reich. Update: Singapore is returned to comments. Going to ataxingmatter is worth the time, as Klein and Reich summarize public plans being put out there.

Robert Waldmann I think I should explain a claim I made in the post below. I assert that the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) does not imply the rational expecations hypothesis (REH). The EMH states that asset prices are the same as they would be if everyone had rational expectations. The strong form EMH adds the […]

Robert Waldmann I usually try to be semi polite. I especially don’t usually deliberately write rude things about smart economists. However, here goes. Evidently Tyler Cowen* wrote In a strict rational expectations model, we might expect some people to overtrust others and one view of rational expectations is that investors’ errors will cancel one another […]

Robert Waldmann Casual discussion of macroeconomics suffers from the fact that one can get any result one wants by playing with lags. I’m not saying that I think formal econometrics adds much. However, things could be worse. Discussion of the ups and downs of the stock market is even weirder. Courtney Schlisserman at Bloomberg seriously […]

Robert Waldmann Everyone is commenting on how, according to the New York Times, critics of the health care public option claim that it will provide the same health insuranceas private plans at lower cost to consumers and that this is a problem “unfair competition”. (simple rule when they say “unfair competition” they mean “competition”). As […]