-
3 votes
-
Exit, voice, or loyalty… what should we do when things go wrong?
6 votes -
All the world’s wealth in one visual
12 votes -
The economic effects of automation aren’t what you think they are
13 votes -
Mark Blyth - So can we have it all?
4 votes -
Iceland's tourism revolution
4 votes -
Free market or socialism: Have economists really anything to say?
7 votes -
The monopolization of the American market and how it happened
8 votes -
The economy of Sweden
7 votes -
The modern economy of Russia
6 votes -
Four reasons why millennials don't have any money with Robert Reich
9 votes -
How valuing productivity, not profession, could reduce US inequality
5 votes -
How elite professions create inequality
5 votes -
The $250 trillion burden weighing on the global economy in 2020
9 votes -
Prosperous Universe - This deep simulation of space economics is surprisingly compelling
7 votes -
The economics of poverty
5 votes -
Sweden in global spotlight with interest rate move – Riksbank has ended a period of negative rates but will other central banks around the world now follow suit?
3 votes -
For the eleventh year in a row, Iceland is the country ranking first in the World Economic Forum's Geneva Equality List
7 votes -
For the first time in US history, a decade will pass without the country falling into a recession
13 votes -
Jobs, jobs everywhere, but most of them kind of suck
23 votes -
Why America's one-percenters are richer than Europe's
10 votes -
Finland braced for strikes seen shaving $220 million off economy
4 votes -
Iceland's prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has urged governments to adopt green and family-friendly priorities, instead of just focusing on economic growth figures
11 votes -
General equilibrium effects of cash transfers: experimental evidence from Kenya
14 votes -
The Real Class War
18 votes -
New research results: How do cash transfers impact the people who don’t receive them?
From GiveDirectly's blog: In 2014, GiveDirectly partnered with academic researchers to launch our largest study ever in Kenya. The ultimate goal: find out how cash transfers affect local...
From GiveDirectly's blog:
In 2014, GiveDirectly partnered with academic researchers to launch our largest study ever in Kenya. The ultimate goal: find out how cash transfers affect local economies, including nearby non-recipients, enterprises, and markets. Now, in 2019, the results of this research have been released.
Abstract of the paper:
How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied fiscal shock was 15 percent of local GDP. We find large impacts on consumption and assets for recipients. Importantly, we document large positive spillovers on non-recipient households and firms, and minimal price inflation. We estimate a local fiscal multiplier of 2.6. We interpret welfare implications through the lens of a simple household optimization framework.
Some interesting tidbits from the paper:
Interestingly, sales increased without noticeable changes in firm investment behavior (beyond a modest increase in inventories), and sales do not increase differentially for firms owned by cash recipient households relative to nonrecipients. Both patterns suggest a demand-led rather than an investment-led expansion in economic activity.
[...]
We next examine how these changes affect untreated households. Despite not receiving transfers, they too exhibit large consumption expenditure gains: their annualized consumption expenditure is higher by 13% eighteen months after transfers began, an increase roughly comparable to the gains contemporaneously experienced by the treated households themselves.
(Emphasis added.)
[...]
Average price inflation is 0.1%, and even during periods with the largest transfers, estimated price effects are less than 1% and precisely estimated across all categories of goods.
[...]
Real output increased, and yet there is at most limited evidence of increases in the employment of land (which is in fixed supply), labor, or capital. One plausible, albeit speculative, possibility is that the utilization of these factors was “slack” in at least some enterprises (Lewis 1954). This seems plausible because in the retail and manufacturing sectors, where output responses were concentrated, the typical firm has a single employee (i.e. the proprietor), suggesting that integer constraints may often bind. In addition, many enterprises operate “on demand” in the sense that they produce only when they have customers, and the average non-agricultural enterprise sees just 1.7 customers per hour. In addition to retail, much manufacturing in this setting is “on demand;” for example, a mill owner waits for customers to bring grain and then grinds it for them. The existence of slack may help account for the large multiplier we document, as has also recently been argued in US data, especially in poorer US regions (Michaillat and Saez 2015; Murphy 2017).
9 votes -
The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
9 votes -
Australia's labour market is sick
4 votes -
Sweden's central bank sells off bonds from Canadian province of Alberta and parts of Australia over climate concerns
7 votes -
Against economics
8 votes -
Starlink is a very big deal
10 votes -
Most billionaires are people who run very important tollbooths in the economy
12 votes -
Atlantic Council has published an update to their 2016 Global Risks 2035 report, analyzing geopolitical and technological trends and their potential impacts on the future
7 votes -
Financial incentives are weaker than social incentives but very important anyway
5 votes -
Rock climbing and the economics of innovation
8 votes -
Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization
15 votes -
The value of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, grew to a record ten trillion Norwegian crowns ($1.09 trillion) on Friday
7 votes -
Nobel winning economists experiment upon the poor, but their research doesn't solve poverty
4 votes -
What randomization can and cannot do: The 2019 Nobel Prize
4 votes -
What the health care debate still gets wrong
10 votes -
The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer
8 votes -
Even Greece is getting paid to borrow money in debt markets
7 votes -
Stockton's basic income trial: Early results show how money is spent
6 votes -
Hypothetics: let's say it takes 1/100 of the current fuel to take a spacecraft out of Earth's atmosphere. What happens?
This is obviously a thought-experiment, but maybe an interesting one. Let's say we get a super-efficient, eco-friendly alternative fuel that can do whatever rocket fuel does now with 1/100 of the...
This is obviously a thought-experiment, but maybe an interesting one. Let's say we get a super-efficient, eco-friendly alternative fuel that can do whatever rocket fuel does now with 1/100 of the cost, 1/100 of volume and 100% more efficiency. What does it change in the short term?
10 votes -
Blame economists for the mess we’re in: Why did America listen to the people who thought we needed “more millionaires and more bankrupts?”
19 votes -
Decoupling debunked : Green growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability, researchers find
5 votes -
WeWTF : A look into WeWork S1 filing and business model
18 votes -
Norway delivers rate hike that most economists weren't expecting
6 votes -
Why rigged capitalism is damaging liberal democracy
5 votes -
Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons have launched Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund to invest in reshaping the economics of the web
19 votes