Economic Logic

Compared to two centuries ago, today's world is much different, as the standard of living has dramatically increased, along with populat...

Why do people simultaneously hold substantial cash and high interest credit card debt? I previously reported that this could be explained b...

There is a long standing and quite robust result in the literature, originating with Christophe Chamley and Ken Judd , that physical capita...

Today is October 10, 2010, which is the binary equivalent of 42. I was looking forward to this day, as 42 is the " Ultimate Answer to t...

The saving behavior of people is heterogeneous, and what drives it is important for policy. In particular, there is a strong belief that peo...

Economic thought, especially in macroeconomics, goes through episodic changes. These changes are very slow to occur, and historians of econo...

The Big Mac index, created in 1986 by the Economist to estimate the over- or under-evaluation of currencies, is based on the price compariso...

When working with worldwide data, it si often frustrating that data quality and availability is far from uniform across countries. Especiall...

One conventional story about the 2007-2008 financial crisis is that some bright financial bankers created complex financial instruments that...

It is widely documented that women have a much higher tendency to drop out of the labor force than men and that they quit jobs more often. I...

Women live longer, yet paradoxically they can claim pension benefits earlier in many countries, where there is strong resistance to equalizi...

Mediterranean countries have many things in common, one of them is an early retirement age. You certainly read about the uproar when the Ger...

Every pregnant woman past some age is recommended to perform an amniocentesis to check whether her fetus suffers from Down syndrome. The rea...

The current (well, some say it is over now) recession is different from others because it has unusually long unemployment durations, among o...

In many countries, and in particular North America, the state holds a monopoly on the sale of alcoholic products. And in those areas, everyb...