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10 votes
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Too big to fail
2 votes -
As New Zealand goes into lockdown, government considers a universal basic income to ward off economic peril
7 votes -
Denmark’s idea could help the world avoid a great depression
10 votes -
US Fed ready for unlimited QE and aid for companies, municipalities
5 votes -
Which workers are most vulnerable to the economic costs of COVID-19?
5 votes -
Markets are down for a reason: Also the Fed’s response, capital requirements, opportunistic M&A and securities fraud
7 votes -
Federal Reserve cuts rates to zero and launches massive $700 billion quantitative easing program
22 votes -
What is the inflation rate these days?
3 votes -
Getting serious about the economic response to COVID-19
8 votes -
The global financial markets have been behaving strangely this week, indicating that something could be breaking down in the workings of the financial system
17 votes -
The economy of South Korea
4 votes -
Major bank economist says the coronavirus market reaction ‘boggles the mind’
12 votes -
Norway's sovereign wealth fund made a 19.9% return on investment last year, earning a record 1.69 trillion Norwegian crowns ($180 billion)
15 votes -
Covid-19 could mark the end of affluence politics in the USA, as the possibility of a global pandemic reveals the inability to make and distribute the things people need
21 votes -
Dr. Michael Hudson: Economic lessons (from 2008) for 2020
3 votes -
Now that Sweden has called a halt to its five-year trial with negative interest rates the serious work has begun on looking at whether it worked
7 votes -
Costco capitalism
9 votes -
The world's lowest interest rate may soon be raised in Denmark – new forecasts were triggered by the exchange rate
4 votes -
The great affordability crisis breaking America
5 votes -
Field experiments and the practice of policy - Esther Duflo's Nobel Lecture (2019)
4 votes -
Why Swexit is unthinkable – trade ties make Sweden's European Union departure unthinkable
5 votes -
Fitch downgrades Finland's outlook, raising doubts about return to AAA rating
4 votes -
How capitalism broke young adulthood
16 votes -
The economy of Stalinist Russia
5 votes -
War by other means: Syria’s economic struggle
4 votes -
International Money Fund World Economic Outlook update - January 2020
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 -
Iceland's tourism revolution
4 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 -
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 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 -
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 -
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