Economic Logic

Last week , I suggested that democracy is not as good as many people think. I want to add on this that democracy should not be the first ite...

The papers about sovereign debt I come across always assume that the debt is held by some social planner who implicitly is acting on the beh...

You have heard the complaint before: public sector employees enjoy job security, large benefits and on top of that they are better paid than...

Greed has been put forward a one the main reasons for the current crisis, yet there is plenty of evidence for altruistic behavior around us....

On a regular basis, my employer offers workshops and sign-up drive for long-term care insurance. I have never bothered with it, and I do not...

The equity premium puzzle is probably one of the most controversial puzzle in economics. For one, it is rather difficult to measure properly...

The empirical evidence on the economic impact of democracy is really mixed. While the literature tends to show that democratization is good ...

Risk sharing contracts are good contracts, and they can have an important welfare benefit. However, it is not quite clear that these contrac...

On average (but not now), unemployment rates in most European countries are higher than in the United States. This has been blamed on more g...

The official story is that copyright encourages creators by giving them temporary monopoly rights. The unofficial story is that copyright pr...

Britain and Ireland currently go through much soul searching on how to reform the financing of higher education. As for health care, educati...

A large, but shrinking, proportion of models in macroeconomics assume the existence of a representative agent. While there is clear evidence...

Females are now more numerous than males in most levels of education, and they perform better in school. Why is that? One hypothesis is that...

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...