Economic Logic

Amidst all the current talk about nationalization, it is worthwhile to think when the provision of private goods by public entities is indic...

Governments across the world have been scratching their head on how to increase employment, or decrease unemployment, and the question appea...

Who decides to become self-employed? This can be an important question if one considers that entrepreurship is a major factor in economic gr...

Is democracy good for an economy? As discussed previously on this blog, there does not seem to be a link between income and democracy. But ...

The analysis of the impact of minimum wages is usually limited to empirical studies of the employment or unemployment elasticity. Theory is ...

If governments need to raise revenue, it is well known that the best thing they can do is through sin taxes, such as for carbon emissions i...

Much has been written and said about some ill-informed decisions that subprime borrowers have taken with respect to the housing market, in p...

Bubbles are very difficult to recognize, by definition: you need prices to depart from fundamentals, and in the case of housing, expectation...

Now we are in a recession, who are those who will reduce their consumption the most? There are two obvious candidates: those who get unemplo...

In the current crisis, some blame has been put on households who took rather strange financial decisions, especially with respect to house p...

Europeans prefer the state to help needy causes, Americans have a preference for charities to take care of this. Are government support and ...

Over the past few days, I finally came around reading Michele Boldrin and David Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly . I had read bits...

RePEc has been providing rankings for the economics profession for several years, but one aspect that was severely undermining their credib...

That institutions matter is well known, empirically from many cross-country growth regressions, as well as from twin countries like North an...

Buyers have several means of payments available: cash, debit cards, credit cards. Merchants are obliged to accept cash, but can choose to ac...