What happens when politicians see that their monster stimuli have not delivered? They bring the next rabbit out of a hat. They need a new name and a new magic solution to make citizens believe in the magic of demand-side policies despite the constant failure of those same plans.
Those with medium-term memories will remember that a scandal erupted around LIBOR in 2010. But you may not know that as a result, LIBOR is probably going to disappear in the next few years to be replaced by SOFR. Since several hundred trillion dollars of financial contracts will be different as a result, it's useful to have at least some sense of what the change means.
The Aspen Institute Economic Study Group has published a collection of 12 papers on the theme Expanding Economic Opportunity for More Americans Bipartisan Policies to Increase Work, Wages, and Skills, edited by Melissa S. Kearney and Amy Ganz (February 2019). I'll list the complete Table of Contents for the volume below. Here, I'll just focus on four of the proposals that struck me as especially thought-provoking: caught.
Economists sometimes talk of the "law of one price," which basically says that when consumers are bargain-hunting between competing firms, the same price will tend to prevail everywhere. After all, any provider who tries to charge more would lose sales.
The overall growth of a country's GDP can be divided into five categories: growth of population, change in employment rate, change in hours worked, "capital deepening" (change in capital per worker), and growth of productivity (here measured by total factor productivity or GDP). Antonin Bergeaud, Gilbert Cette, and Rémy Lecat use this framework to review "Total Factor Productivity in Advanced Countries: A Long-termPerspective," in the Spring 2017 issue of International Productivity Monitor (vol. 32, pp. 6-24).
The idea of a pay-what-you-can restaurant raises obvious questions. Could it sustain itself? Or would those paying more than face value be swamped by those paying less? Are there ways of running such a venture that might be more sustainable than others?
Eric Wallach offers "An Interview with Deidre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, UIC" in The Politic, Yale's undergraduate journal of politics and culture (February 10, 2019). McCloskey is characteristically thought-provoking and quotable. Here are a few comments of her many comments that caught my eye: