Friday, October 31, 2014

Job vacancy rate is back to pre-crisis level

Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Latest from Merle Hazard

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

National Economists Club

If you are in the DC area, you can hear me speak on November 13.  Click here for more information.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Profile of an Ec 10 Student

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Charles Murray on Ayn Rand

A great and balanced essay.  Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for the pointer.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Head Section Leader in Ec 10

Love teaching introductory economics?  Want to live in the Boston area?  Well, then, I have a job for you.

Mean Comments

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Inequality and Parenting

Click on graphic to enlarge. Source.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Congrats!

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2014 Economist Educators Best in Class Teaching Award. These three were chosen by the Board of the National Economics Teaching Association (NETA) from numerous submissions. Prizes are provided by Cengage Learning.

1st Place       Michael Enz, Roanoke College 

                Self Grading

 2nd Place       Sherri Wall, University of Alaska-Fairbanks

                Team Based Learning (TBL) - Econ Style!

3rd Place       Amy Cramer, Pima Community College

                Voices on the Economy, or VOTE.
 
Winners will receive a cash award for themselves and for their departments as well as a trip to the 10th Annual Economics Teaching Conference next month in San Diego.

You can see their submissions HERE.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Where danger lurks

A nice essay by Olivier Blanchard on the lessons we should learn from the financial crisis and Great Recession.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

On Textbook Prices

NPR takes a look.  Generally, a good and balanced treatment. But they play a bit too fast and loose with the difference between high and rising.  Some of the hypotheses they suggest can explain high prices but not rising prices.

Sunday, October 05, 2014

A VoxEU Course Companion

Teachers of intermediate macroeconomics will find this new book of interest:
This Vox EU Course Companion, the first in the series, is a collection of carefully selected Vox columns designed to supplement Mankiw’s Macroeconomics textbook. Vox Course Companions provide relevant examples of economic theory in action and offer thought-provoking perspectives on arguments that come up time and again in exam-style questions. They bring together analyses of economic phenomena by leading economists as they happened, while applying and comparing the suitability of competing economic theories.

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

The IMF on Infrastructure

The IMF endorses the free-lunch view of infrastructure spending. That is, an IMF study suggests that the expansionary effects are sufficiently large that debt-financed infrastructure spending could reduce the debt-GDP ratio over time. 

Certainly this outcome is theoretically possible (just like self-financing tax cuts), but you can count me as skeptical about how often it will occur in practice (just like self-financing tax cuts).  The human tendency for wishful thinking and the desire to avoid hard tradeoffs are so common that it is dangerous for a prominent institution like the IMF to encourage free-lunch thinking.