Economic Logic

Everybody who has ever worked in an academic environment has complained about academic deadwood: tenured professors who do not contribute to...

The recent financial crisis saw bank runs of a new kind. Instead of depositors running banks, banks were running each other. I do not think...

With the enormous quantity of research being published nowadays, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all this information. While Paul Samuelso...

In terms of politics, one of the big fears that the Internet brings is the potential for radicalization of supporters at the extremes of the...

"One man one vote" is not always optimal. I reported a few days ago that technocrats can under some conditions take better decisi...

One nightmare of parents of a girl is that she would get drunk and get into "unanticipated" sexual acts. If you told your daughter...

There is an endless literature that studies whether the minimum wage has positive or negative employment effects, spurred in particular by t...

Why do people volunteer, or why are they altruistic? I have followed the open source movement, and beyond the sense of doing this for the co...

Competition is best, economists often claim. Except when it is not, for example in the case of natural monopolies, where the duplication of ...

There used to be a time, not long ago, where tax rebates were popular. The idea was that putting money in people's pockets would drive t...

It is well known that in Spain and especially Italy, people in their twenties and even thirties stay with their parents until they find a jo...

A policy decision needs to be taken. Do you let technocrats conduct a cost-benefit analysis or do you let people vote on it? Our first intui...

How do you measure guilt? There is no market price for it, and most of the time it has no measurable expression. One would need some rather ...

It is a recognized problem that demographic change is bringing significant problems to pensions systems. People live longer and thus spend a...

We all know that tax are usually bad because they distort, and this distortion goes the wrong way for most taxes. But we need them because t...