As the price of energy rises in the U.S., however, I would bet that we will be substituting away from ordinary cookers and toward energy-saving pressure cookers. It’s a nice illustration of how choice of technology depends on prices.
Indeed, Texas is one of six states that have repealed mandatory helmet laws since 1994. The consequences remind me of an old Faye Kellerman novel, Prayers for the Dead, about a transplant surgeon who is active in a motorcycle club because he wants to discourage helmet use in order to increase the supply of transplantable organs (motor vehicle deaths being a major source of organs). A recent unpublished study links changes in state laws on mandatory helmet laws to the supply of transplantable organs, showing that where and when helmet wearing was no longer required, the supply of organs for transplants in the state increased.
The Hebrew calendar is lunar, so that a leap-month has to be inserted every once in a while to keep the seasons and holidays at appropriate times. But when to insert the month, and what group should decide?
Economists spend immense amounts of time ranking journals, partly to decide on monetary and non-monetary professional rewards, partly as pure gossip. There is some imperfect agreement on rankings.
Given that agreement, how should we credit coauthored publications (the overwhelming majority of papers)?
While no longer relevant today, one might think that raising the price of marriage licenses could have the beneficial effect of deterring spur-of-the-moment marriages. Of course, like so many restrictions, it might also have a negative unintended consequence: it might increase the number of out-of-wedlock births.
The efficiency gains from marriage are well known. It’s also true that for most couples they grow over time.
In the delightfully sophomoric movie Clerks 2, Randal tells Dante, “Odds are there’s someone out there who’s a better match for you than the girl you are about to marry.” Even if Dante engaged in the most thorough possible search for a wife (which he certainly didn’t in the movie), Randal’s statement is correct.
One of the better-known biblical passages, Leviticus 27:1-7, lists the value of pledges of silver to the temple based on the value of a person: 50 shekels for a man between the ages of 20 and 60, 30 shekels for a woman of the same age, 15 shekels for a man over 60, and 10 shekels for a woman over 60. Once we ignore differences in labor-force participation, the earnings ratios today are not that far from what was expected 3,000 years ago.
The city of College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, will be marketing a section of its cemetery for A&M graduates. Although other schools have them, this is the first university-related cemetery in Texas.
I played Life with some grandkids today, a much revised game from what we played with our kids. The paychecks you receive as you move along the board are taxed at a constant marginal tax rate of 50 percent, with an exemption of $10,000 of income.
Texas raises most of its tax revenue from the sales tax. We are one of only seven states without a personal income tax. Even with the exclusion of groceries from the sales tax, it is likely that the tax is regressive. Our legislators (who fortunately only convene for four months every two years) are now proposing that state-supported universities be . . .
We need a prize for the most self-serving proposal. A lawyer with large student loans has assembled a large group of friends on Facebook with the proposal “Cancel Student Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” Ignoring the fact that this might reduce rather than increase the fiscal stimulus, it would reduce the burden on people who, if they attended public universities, . . .
A technical change can raise well-being yet lower G.D.P. I realized this when I spent time watching and re-watching the Saturday Night Live take-off on the recording session of “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” For some reason I find this Will Ferrell/Christopher Walken spoof hilarious; and I’ve also “wasted” time watching some of the Mastercard “Priceless” spoofs and other such nonsense . . .
I’ve never twittered and never sold or bought on eBay. To me the technology and the hassle of the latter are daunting. I came across a franchise chain, iSold It, which solves the fact that I’m eBay-challenged. Drop off your item at an iSold It store and they handle auctioning it on eBay and sending it to the lucky buyer. . . .
A story on NPR’s All Things Considered this week dealt with St. Lucie County, Florida, whose government is trying to counter high local unemployment by requiring that 75 percent of government contracts be reserved for local firms and that the firms employ local workers. This is true for both local tax revenues and federal stimulus package funds. Even ignoring the . . .
A 60 Minutes segment on Sunday presented sad stories about people in their 50’s and early 60’s who had counted on their 401K plans to provide a comfortable retirement income by age 65 or even earlier, but who have had their dreams destroyed by the stock market bust. Anyone born in the 1940’s or 1950’s who planned on retiring by . . .
Library of Congress In his recent New York Times article on scientific studies of baseball, Alan Schwarz discusses a study showing that sacrifice bunts benefited the 2008 Mets, who bunted a lot, but would have hurt the 2005 Red Sox, who sacrifice bunted very rarely. This seems to me to be a mundane illustration of what we call the Roy . . .
Economists talk loosely about substitutes and complements as if each pair of goods can always be characterized as one or the other. That’s incorrect: their substitutability can depend on the situation, particularly the time and the individual’s circumstances, even for the same person. An acquaintance of mine reported the perhaps-apocryphal story that a major discount store is offering any customer . . .
Photo: Library of Congress There is a review of Kat Long‘s The Forbidden Apple in last Sunday’s New York Times. The review describes a number of incidents where efforts to ban or restrict transactions in one market spilled over with negative consequences into a related market. To eliminate drinking on Sundays, New York City restricted it to hotels. In response, . . .
The new tax hike on tobacco products went into effect yesterday. There are few better examples for Econ 1, and the players involved clearly understand the issues. For cigars, my smoke of choice, the tax on good domestically produced cigars rises from 5 to 40 cents. “Many of our rollers are worried,” Hector Ventura, operations manager for El Credito, told . . .
I fell for a stupid article and turned off my home PC last night. The article says that Americans who leave computers on overnight are wasting $2.8 billion on energy costs per year. It ignores the cost of turning computers off — and having to turn them on again the next morning. Let’s say that process takes five minutes per . . .
My 9-year-old granddaughter announced, “I feel very sorry for my friend Olivia.” “Why?” her father asked her. “Because I will be away and won’t be able to attend her birthday party,” she replied. This struck me as a typical child’s self-centered behavior. But another way of looking at it is that it’s the epitome of altruism. Most young kids view . . .
Like many other journals in economics and other disciplines, the Economic Journal, the main scholarly organ of the Royal Economic Society, has paid referees (judges of submitted scholarly papers) for prompt reports (e.g., the American Economic Review offers $100 for a prompt report). The purpose of this is to provide an incentive to get the job done quickly. I have . . .
he Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas boasts the Moorea Club, which it advertises as offering a European-style beach, with entry limited to ages 21 and over.
It does not advertise that the price of day use is $50 for male customers and $10 for female customers. While examples of price discrimination are ubiquitous, this is one of the purest examples of demand-based price discrimination. The service the club offers is the same to men and women: a place in the sun, which is equally costly to the club, regardless of the patron’s gender.
I spent 40 minutes waiting to begin diagnostic tests preparatory to seeing my ophthalmologist. What a waste of my valuable time! And my calculations from data from the American Time Use Survey suggest that this is a standard problem: the average adult American spends four hours per year waiting for medical or dental care, with each wait averaging around 45 . . .
I asked my ophthalmologist on Friday how his business was doing in the recession, and he said it was stable. He noted, however, that his colleagues who specialize in Lasik surgery had seen a 60 percent drop in business. Clearly, Lasik, which is not reimbursed by most insurance plans, is postponable in times when incomes drop; at least in the . . .
Prices of used cars are rising, and the reason is substitution: in tough times, people substitute away from new cars and toward used cars. The two markets are closely related, so a decrease in demand in the new-car market causes an increase in demand in the used-car market. I’m sorely tempted to trade in my gorgeous 1999 Honda Civic SI, . . .
Between 1990 and 2005, the wage gap between the 95th and 90th percentiles of the earnings distribution rose as rapidly as between the 90th and the 50th. The rise between the 98th and the 95th was also very large (and data limitations prevent going much beyond the 98th). Thus I applauded President Obama‘s campaign promise, and budget proposal, to raise . . .
I took the plunge and bought a Blu-ray player Monday, on sale at $300 instead of the $600 list. Since $300 was my reservation price, I derived no consumer surplus. But its absence was made up for when I logged onto Netflix to receive Blu-ray instead of DVD disks in the mail. For only $1 extra per month, I get . . .
A seatmate on a flight I took described her interesting business to me. She organizes seminars where she speaks to groups of professionals in her field.
She rents a meeting room in a hotel (her fixed cost) and incurs the variable costs of her time and travel. I asked her about her business during the recession, since I assume that the demand for her seminars has decreased. Doesn’t she have a lot of empty seats? Isn’t she losing money?
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