Archive for October 2007
Was Jesus an early applied economist?
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 31, 2007
According to a number of religious people, there is a Jesus economics. Now I don’t agree with their idea of the sort of economics Jesus presented at all, that may be because I’m not a religious academic, or it could be that these people just didn’t understand what economics actually is (for example they complain [...]
Oil shocks
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 30, 2007
Time is tight so I can’t do a real blog post just now. However, I thought I could mention oil shocks and the difference between their impact in the 1970′s and now. Oil prices have gone through the roof in recent times as a result of high world prices. In 2006, New Zealand was also [...]
Income tax and tax incidence
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 25, 2007
There seems to be a significant debate between the left and right wing blogs about whether New Zealand is over-taxed or not. However, there is one thing that both sides agree on, if taxes are cut by $1,000, this gives people $1,000 more to spend. This is the point I’m going to discuss. Households receive [...]
OCR review October 2007
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 25, 2007
The OCR was left unchanged at 8.25%. It seems that the RBNZ took a relatively neutral tone, stating that it was happy that without any external shocks the current rate should be sufficient to keep inflation in the target band of 1-3%. However, looking at the set of external shocks the Bank provided seems to [...]
Acquitted but not necessarily innocent
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 23, 2007
- In: Other
- 5 Comments
We mentioned a while back that the way politicians’ reputations are besmirched by allegations of misconduct coudl be due to the mistaken recollections of their constituents. Of course, there are rational reasons to mistrust politicians who are investigated for misconduct too, as Stuart Armstrong points out: more guilty people get tried and acquitted than the [...]
A Nobel defence of free software
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 22, 2007
You all probably know by now that Eric Maskin was among the recipients of this year’s ‘Nobel prize’ in economics for his work on mechanism design. Browsing a few of his papers I came across one that reminded me of Will’s post on free software. Contrary to the obvious intuition, Bessen and Maskin propose that [...]
Drink driving, experience goods, and video games
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 19, 2007
Some Canadian developers are making a computer game which simulates driving home drunk. They and police think it will be a great educational tool, showing teenagers how dangerous it is to drive while intoxicated. I’m not sure if I completely agree. Assume that this game will realistically represent driving while drunk. As some people do [...]
Anticipating a kiss
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 18, 2007
Matt posted earlier today about someone who gains utility from thinking about buying something even if they never actually buy it. There’s actually quite a lot of work that’s been done on utility gained from anticipation. George Loewenstein’s 1987 paper reports a study in which people were willing to pay more for a kiss they [...]
Utility of the means
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 18, 2007
- In: Methodology
- 1 Comment
Economists will often look at outcomes and associate values to things based on the outcome. Often other disciplines (namely Sociology and Anthropology) criticise our focus on outcomes, stating that we do not pay enough attention on the means of deriving those outcomes. A post over at Stackelberg follower (love that blog name) discusses the utility [...]
OCR review preview
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 18, 2007
The October official cash rate review will be on the 25th October. The main points that will be driving RBNZ policy are: Strong economic growth (including revisions) in the June year. The surprising strength in the export industry, even before the TOT shock has fully eventuated A weak CPI reading, however many of the shocks [...]
Banning fossil fuel plants
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 17, 2007
The government has decided to ban the construction of new fossil fuel plants for the next 10 years, as they believe that they are unnecessary. However, I feel that this policy is unnecessary. I do believe that if we left power generation to the free market, too much CO2 would be produced, and our liability [...]
Too much of a good thing?
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 14, 2007
My attention has been drawn (thanks Paul) to an article which describes how one might find the optimal number of members of parliament in a representative democracy. In a nutshell, a parliament with too few representatives is not “democratic” enough, possibly leading to an unstable political system, in which various undesirable forms of political expression, [...]
Economists tackle ‘the surge’
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 13, 2007
Economists like to claim that their discipline is about providing tools for analysis, not answers to ready-made problems. OK, so they’re hardly alone in that but Dani Rodrik links an interesting paper by Michael Greenstone that walks the walk. Greenstone …shows how data from world financial markets can be used to shed light on the [...]
Risky regulation in the dairy industry
Posted by: rauparaha on: October 11, 2007
An article on Stuff reports that the government is choosing to do nothing about a potentially dangerous protein found in most milk produced by NZ cows. Apparently it would be very damaging to the NZ dairy industry to act on the rather uncertain scientific evidence, so the Food Safety Authority is downplaying the situation. The [...]
The rational Chimpanzee
Posted by: Matt Nolan on: October 10, 2007
So according to a recent study, Chimpanzees play the ultimatum game more ‘rationally’ than humans (hat tip Marginal Revolution). For those who don’t know, the ultimatum game goes like this. There are two players, and a sum of money that can be split between them (say $1). The first player gives decides on how this [...]
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