Category Archives: Uncategorized

One of the main attractions of bitcoin is its anonymity, which is worth the most to those who are carrying out questionable or illegal transactions. But how much of bitcoin used is tied to illegal activity? Sean Foley, Jonathan R. Karlsen,  and Talis J. Putnin� tackle this question in their January 2018 working paper, “Sex,Continue reading “Bitcoin and Illegal Activity”

“[T]he way we design, produce, and use clothes has drawbacks that are becoming increasingly clear. The textiles system operates in an almost completely linear way: large amounts of non-renewable resources are extracted to produce clothes that are often used for only a short time, after which the materials are mostly sent to landfill or incinerated. MoreContinue reading “Textiles: Your Clothes are Pollutants”

The theoretical case for patents is clear enough: if you want people and companies to have an incentive for investing money and time in seeking innovations, you need to offer them some assurance that others won’t immediately copy any successful discoveries.  But with the power of patents comes the risk of gaming the patent systemContinue reading “The Problem of Questionable Patents”

I first ran into the idea of zombie firms–and the need to kill them–back in the late 1980s, when the US savings and loan industry was melting down. Here’s an explanation from that time from  Edward Kane (“The High Cost of Incompletely Funding the FSLIC Shortage of Explicit Capital.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1989, 3:4, 31-47).Continue reading “Kill the Zombie Firms”

The euro was officially adopted in 1999, although it took a few more years to be phased in for everyday use. Over the years, my feelings about the new currency have see-sawed from one extreme to the other: wasn’t sure it would be adopted in the first place, wasn’t sure it would work if adopted,Continue reading “Is the Euro Out of Danger?”

In the decades after World War II and up into the 1980s, the US economy experienced regional convergence: that is, the economies and incomes in poorer regions (like the US South) tended to grow more quickly than the economies of richer regions (like the US North). But in the 1980s, this pattern of regional convergenceContinue reading “Why Has US Regional Convergence Declined?”

The US economy has performed well on a wide variety of measures in the year since President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017.  The unemployment rate was 4.8% in January 2017 and 4.1% in December 2017. The unemployment rate among black Americans has fallen to its lowest level in the 45 years that regularContinue reading “Attributing Economic Outcomes to Presidents: Year One of Trump”

I know a few too many examples from my own life of men who retired–and then promptly died. Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Timothy J. Moore provide some systematic evidence on this connection in “The Mortality Effects of Retirement: Evidence from Social Security Eligibility at Age 62,” published in the Journal of Public Economics (January 2018, 157: 12-137). It wasContinue reading “Does Retirement Raise the Risk of Death?”

The digital economy provides a number of services for which the marginal price (given an internet connection) is zero: games like Candy Crush, email, web searches, access to information and entertainment, and many more. Because users are not paying an additional price for using these services, this form of economic output doesn’t seem to beContinue reading “Measuring the "Free" Digital Economy”

Carbon capture and storage technology isn’t likely to be the silver bullet that slays climate change  by itself. But it may well be a necessary and meaningful part of the package of policy responses. Akshat Rathi has written a series of readable articles for Quartz magazine (listed here) that give a useful sense of theContinue reading “The State of Play with Carbon Capture and Storage”