Gimme shelter: the real cost of renting vs. homeownership What is the real cost of shelter? Over the last decade there has been lots of discussion of housing prices in isolation. Sometimes that discussion includes an inflation adjustment — which is problematic, since housing constitutes nearly 40% of the entire consumer price index, so in […]
Everything Is Going Great, So Let’s Change It Well, the actual headline on the front page of the Washington Post below the fold today reads, “Economy shows strong growth, could provide GOP momentum.” The strong growth is the 3.0% annual growth rate of GDP in the third quarter (supported by a strong stock market), with […]
A Serious Misreading of Coase Corey Robin is very insightful about a lot of things. I think his take on conservatism, that the thread running through it is opposition to attempts to demolish pre-existing hierarchies, explains ideological twists and turns that would otherwise remain mysterious. Don’t take this post as an expression of anti-Robinism. But […]
Marxism-Leninism In China Update The once-every five years Chinese Communist Party conference is now over. It appears that Xi Jinping has not identified an heir to himself as his two predecessors did at the time of this equivalent meeting during their presidencies. Furthermore, unlike either of them, Xi has joined Mao and Deng Xiaoping in […]
Top marginal taxation and economic growth by Santo Milasi and Robert Waldmann has (finally) been published here in Applied Economics ABSTRACT The article explores the relationship between top marginal tax rates on personal income and economic growth. Using a data set of consistently measured top marginal tax rates for a panel of 18 OECD countries […]
I jump at a rare chance to disagree with Paul Krugman and as a bonus also with my very good friend Brad DeLong, because Krugman just tweeted that Brad is right Brad is right here: Mankiw et al have clearly made a math error https://t.co/HpyVdoyRCT 1/ — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 24, 2017 update: Krugman […]
Corporate Profit Tax Cuts and Wages: the UK Experience Kimberly Clausing and Edward Kleinbard have each written some interesting papers on transfer pricing. Here they team up on a different topic: The President’s Council of Economic Advisers claims that slashing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent would boost the average American’s wages by $4,000 […]
Remembering Black Monday The largest single one day decline in percentage terms of the Dow-Jones average (22.6%) happened 30 years ago today, on October 19, 1987. It was a Monday, hence “Black Monday.” Although unlike after the second largest such one day decline in percentage terms (12.8%) on October 28, 1929, the US economy did […]
Hurricane Relief: Interesting developments going on in the Senate. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) is taking to task administration officials and conservative movement leaders by holding up the confirmation of Russ Vought as the right hand man to Mick Mulvaney’s at the Office of Management and Budget. Wonder why he would do this? Apparently Senator Coryn […]
Now Amazon wants to break the bank On Thursday (October 19), the first stage of the Amazon sweepstakes for a second headquarters, dubbed “HQ2,” was completed as cities submitted their bids to the Internet giant. With a possible $5 billion investment and eventually 50,000 jobs at salaries over $100,000, this is one of the very […]