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14 votes
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SoftBank is selling its stake in dog-walking startup Wag back to the company, as Wag cuts 80% of staff
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World inequality report 2018
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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
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Why America's one-percenters are richer than Europe's
10 votes -
Sweden's telecoms giant Ericsson has agreed to pay more than $1bn to resolve allegations of bribery, the US Department of Justice has announced
4 votes -
US SEC rejects NYSE plan to allow companies to raise capital during direct listings
6 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
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Kaiser executive says Hawaii insurer losing money every year
2 votes -
US Trade Representative investigation concludes that France's Digital Services Tax discriminates against US companies, proposes retaliatory tariffs of up to 100% on French products
7 votes -
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Are bankers scared of Corbyn? We asked them
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Downtown Oakland is booming
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Announcing our 2019 top charities
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IKEA's profits have fallen nearly 10% as the world's largest furniture retailer stepped up its spending on renewable energy and its growing online operation
14 votes -
Pre-Thanksgiving Merger Monday sees over $60 billion in announced deals
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Cryptoqueen: How this woman scammed the world, then vanished
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 -
WeWork lays off 2400 employees, about 20% of its workforce
8 votes -
The world's most valuable company: Saudi Aramco's long awaited IPO
8 votes -
Australia's labour market is sick
4 votes -
The ordinary investors aren’t real
5 votes -
Hewlett-Packard board unanimously rejects $33 billion takeover offer from Xerox
11 votes -
What explains strong foreign demand for Japanese government bonds?
6 votes -
PayPal would no longer support payments to Pornhub performers
16 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 -
Banks create money, but also have to borrow it
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Iceland's biggest fisheries company Samherji stands accused of bribing Namibian politicians
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The great American tax haven: Why the super-rich love South Dakota
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SoftBank poured $100 billion into start-ups that use armies of contractors, upending the lives of drivers, hotel operators and real estate agents around the world
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The trillion-dollar lawsuit against Tether - Part 1
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Most billionaires are people who run very important tollbooths in the economy
12 votes -
If Universal Basic Income would be introduced, how would you stop prices from rising uncontrollably?
This question has been going through my head for quite some time. UBI has been talked about quite a bit now, and usually the question is if it should be introduced and if yes, how much should...
This question has been going through my head for quite some time. UBI has been talked about quite a bit now, and usually the question is if it should be introduced and if yes, how much should everyone get?
But how would you stop UBI from inflating the economy? If everyone suddenly gets 1000€/month purely because they exist, how do you stop rent from suddenly going up 1000€/month? How do you stop it from going up gradually?
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It's time to break up Disney: Part one
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Bank of Canada holds at 1.75%, warns economy's resilience to be 'tested'
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H&M is the latest fashion brand to test out the concept of clothing rental
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Why palladium is suddenly a more precious metal
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