Economic Logic

Most countries by now have some sort of consumption tax. In the United States, this is a state-level tax collected at the retailing point, a...

With the technology available today, we would be ready to switch to a cashless economy. While having every transaction recorded in some way ...

There is a large variety of institutions and cultures around the world, and I find it fascinating to understand how they originated. The lit...

The flexible margin in a household's labor supply is usually the wife. As long as the husband has a decent income, the decision to work ...

In this age of austerity measures, every public expense is subject to higher scrutiny than usual. Statistical offices are under particular p...

There a few things that infuriate me about the pharmaceutical industry: the obscene returns on investment it gets, how it games the patent s...

Whether raising the minimum wage decreases employment has always been controversial, foremost because some studies could not find such an ef...

As the 2012 Summer Olympics draw to a close, people get all upset about how the medal count does not truly reflect which country is the best...

Are prices flexible or not? There is no doubt that there is some rigidity. But does it actually matter? This debate in the macroeconomic lit...

The role of labor unions is to counteract the market power of oligopolistic employers. That is certainly beneficial, but by their very natur...

"Religion is the opium of the people," as Karl Marx said. If religion becomes less important, does national sentiment take over? I...

I think dental checkups are the best deal in terms of dental health. They cost relatively little, allow to detect dental problems early and ...

Suppose you have some illness and can choose two treatments. With the first, pain gradually increases. With the second, pain is at its peak ...

The new electoral ballot for the American Economics Association officers is out, and it is as usual from the old boys network: For Preside...

Quality of life indexes are popular in the press. But they are not that easy to compute. While one can easily measure how much one has to wo...