Death-bet insurance involves a person taking out life insurance, and then turning around and selling the policy to a stranger – a hedge fund, for example, via intermediaries – who pays the premiums and collects after the insured’s death. Growing in popularity as a system of side-bets on the insurance markets, it has also been […]
Archive | Economy
Death of a Deregulatory Democrat
Economist Alfred Kahn died this week at 93. Kahn had a remakrable career as an academic, administrator, and government official. A noted regulatory scholar, he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell and Chairman of the New York Public Service Commission. In 1977, President Carter tapped Kahn to chair the […]
Picture Books for Teaching Economics Concepts to Young Children
Greg Mankiw’s blog points us to a discussion about picture books that teach basic economic concepts to very young children, by Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, including recommendations offive picture books for children ages pre-school to age 8 or 10. She is an international economist mostly addressing women’s labor market issues, but with young children […]
Trickle Up Economics, An Xtranormal Cartoon
Here is an Xtranormal cartoon about trickle-up and trickle-down economics. Glenn Reynolds is mentioned about a half minute into it. “Trickle Up Economics” UPDATE: Here is the San Francisco Fed’s study, suggesting about a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate because of extending benefits for up to a total of 99 weeks. It also documents […]
The Political Economy of the Euro Crisis
Chris Caldwell, of the Weekly Standard and the Financial Times, took up Western Europe as his journalist beat at a time, in the 1990s, when all the cool kids were off doing Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans. Coverage of Continental Western Europe by newspapers like the Times meant a cushy assignment […]
Closed End Funds Regress to the Mean
Back in October 2008, I wrote my first of several posts on closed-end funds: Closed-end mutual funds, which have a fixed number of shares and are traded on stock markets, have been absolutely clobbered by the turmoil in the financial markets. Not only have their underlying net asset values gone done, but many of them […]
Cancun and Copenhagen, and Carbon as Pure Regulatory Object
By Kenneth Anderson on November 29, 2010 11:05 am in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, Economy, Environment, International Law
Co-Conspirator Jonathan has already remarked below on the seeming collapse of the media-academic-NGO-international organization-et al. global warming coalition in-between last year’s Copenhagen meeting and this year’s much-subdued Cancun event. I broadly agree with Jonathan, and with Margaret Wente, on whom he comments, on the policy merits. I also think the right approach to climate change […]
Microfinance as Subprime
Having done a fair amount of work in microfinance and closely related areas (development finance involving business clients with larger-than-microfinance loans) in the developing world, I am overall a big fan. As many people are. The question that has long loomed, however, is whether it can or should scale upwards to become a full-fledged part […]
The NYT’s Room for Debate Blog on Investing/Lending to Finance Lawsuits
The often very interesting Room for Debate blog at the New York Times has a new discussion on the question of whether it is good policy to allow outsiders to invest in someone else’s lawsuit. Here’s the opening to how the question is framed: With litigation costs rising, many plaintiffs and their lawyers do not […]
“New Stimulus Plan Without Congressional Approval”
Jack Balkin provides the details in an excellent post on the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it will buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds. As Balkin puts it, “Last Tuesday, the people made clear: no more big bailouts to banks, no second stimulus, no runaway federal spending.” Yet the Federal Reserve is doing all three. Balkin […]
Commerce in the Commerce Clause: A Response to Jack Balkin
By David Kopel on November 4, 2010 6:39 pm in Commerce Clause, Constitutional History, Economy, Originalism
A recent issue of the Michigan Law Review features Jack Balkin’s article Commerce. (109 Mich. L. Rev. 1 [2010].) The article argues that in the original meaning of the Constitution, “commerce” was understood to include a broad variety of social relationships, including relationships that had nothing to do with economic activity. Accordingly, writes Balkin, the original meaning […]
Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides Win Economics Nobel
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, Christopher A. Pissarides for their work on “search markets,” and labor markets in particular. The press release announcing the choice reads: Why are so many people unemployed at the same time that there are a large number of job […]
The Secret Committee to Save the Euro
The weekend WSJ has a fascinating, lengthy piece of extended investigative financial journalism – “On the Secret Committee to Save the Euro, a Dangerous Divide.” Congratulations to WSJ reporters Marcus Walker, Charles Forelle, and Brian Blackstone for outstanding research and writing. Here’s a bit from the opening; if you have access to the Journal, and […]
Clunk (Again)
A new study confirms what many had concluded about the “cash for clunkers” program: It failed. Here’s the abstract: A key rationale for fiscal stimulus is to boost consumption when aggregate demand is perceived to be inefficiently low. We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 […]
An Optimistic Scenario for the Stock Market and the Economy
Predicting the stock market is either impossible or extraordinarily difficult, so I generally refrain from doing so — in print. Even apparently successful investors who trade daily or weekly are wrong nearly as often as they are right. So with the caveat that the chances of my being right are at best not appreciably better […]