Avik Roy wrote an extremely misleading article on Obamacare in California. It seems that Roy is the latest R-team player to be sacked.   Basically Roy compared Obamacare exchange rates (without subsidies) to the teaser rate from a web site which has received many extremely unamusing negative reviews for baiting and switching. R. Unger totally […]

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wrote an angry open letter about how Krugman has been uncivil to them.  Krugman’s reply strikes me as being convincing even devastating. Update: My full fisking here. I want to focus on one sentence in the R&R letter   “politicians may float a citation to an academic paper if it […]

Just click the link and read it.  This is solid experimental evidence that if you just give her some money she will learn how to fish on her own so stop being so paternalistic.

After hinting at it for months, I can finally post the abstract of and a link to “Top Marginal Taxation and Economic Growth” by my student Santo Milasi The paper explores the relationship between statutory top marginal tax rates on personal income and long-run economic growth. While theoretical models of endogenous growth explicitly allow for […]

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Shorter Niall Ferguson. Keynes was so  totally gay that he would never write about Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. update: Ferguson has apologized very fully,  firmly denouncing his comment on Keynes, sexuality, and time horizons. I’m sure that Ferguson will retract, in the long run, all he’s said.

This is unusual. I find myself disagreeing with both Noah Smith and Mark Thoma. Further they argue something which I have thought myself. To be frank, I think the cause of my disagreement is Noah Smith’s provocatively strong language. It’s best to click the link and read the whole post The reason macroeconomics doesn’t work […]

The latest estimates of the cost of bailing out Fannie Mae are dramatically lower than previously reported estimates. Because of accounting rules, Fannie and Freddie would be forced to recognize the increase in value as profit — and turn it over to taxpayers. Fannie has suggested that might occur this spring — and said it […]

I’m going to try to make this post brief and comprehensible.  It contains no information not in an earlier post but I delete a whole lot of distracting data. The question is does the Reinhart Rogoff (hence R-R) data set on public debt and real GDP in 20 rich countries post WWII contain evidence that a […]

Here is a bit more analysis of the data set used by Reinhart and Rogoff (R-R) and by Herndon Ash and Pollin (HAP) in their critique, and in particular the stata data set RR-processed.dta with data on public debt to GDP ratios and real GDP growth in 20 developed countries since 1946.  This post is […]