Via Naked Capitalism, Yves writes: If you are in Boston and not leaving town on Friday, please consider seeing some or all of this full-day program at Harvard Law School: Institutional Corruption and the Capital Markets, sponsored by the Safra Center on Ethics. How often do you hear Serious People talking about systematic corruption, and […]
by Peter Dorman (re-posted with author’s permission from Econospeak) Regression Analysis and the Tyranny of Average Effects What follows is a summary of a mini-lecture I gave to my statistics students this morning. (I apologize for the unwillingness of Blogger to give me subscripts.) You may feel a gnawing discomfort with the way economists use […]
by Joseph Joyce China’s Trilemma Maneuvers China’s exchange rate, which had been appreciating against the dollar since 2005, has fallen in value since February. U.S. officials, worried about the impact of the weaker renminbi upon U.S.-China trade flows, have expressed their concern. But the new exchange rate policy most likely reflects an attempt by the […]
by Peter Dormand The Two Inequalities In the wake of Piketty, “inequality” is in. But it comes marinated in confusion. The problem is that there are two inequalities with relatively little in common. The one we had been arguing about for several decades is wage inequality. Most pay has stagnated in the US, while a […]
by Sandwichman Microfoundations of Inequality and Sabotage “In sum, these models [efficiency wage] provide a new, consistent, and plausible microfoundation for a Keynesian model of the cycle.” — Janet Yellen (1984). Inequality and Sabotage, explored the relationship between Thomas Piketty’s “r > g” inequality and speculated, based on Veblen (1921) and Kalecki (1943), that businesses […]
by Sandwichman The Sticky Wages of Sin “Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of these apologists.” — Karl Marx, Capital. “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it is just the reverse.” — Polish joke (cited by J. K. Galbraith in Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, 1958). David Spencer (2002) and Aaron Pacitti […]
by Sandwichman Canny Ca’canny Under imperfect competition, according to a 1960s Samuelson textbook, “The canny seller contrives an artificial scarcity of his product so as not to spoil the price he can get on the earlier pre-marginal unit.” The obvious corollary to this rule is that the canny employer of labor who has some monopsony […]