Do you fear crime? Do you fear terrorism? Do you feel safe? It turns out that the government is much more afraid of immigrant groundskeepers and farm workers than terrorists or violent criminals: Congress… has elected to spend more than…
Yearly Archives: 2018
Rising dominance of fewer corporate behemoths.
The number of publically traded corporations used to grow with the US population as you might expect. More people means more customers and more workers which creates opportunities for more corporations. But the number of public corporations peaked in 1996…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Info technology has made land use data fun
Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby wrote a wonderful article at Bloomberg with a set of maps showing land use in the USA. They did a great job of taking public datasets and displaying the information in a fun way that…
Posted in Public Finance
Data proves July is the best month to buy apparel online!
Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow compared overall inflation (red line) with inflation for goods that are sold online. They controlled for the fact that many goods like housing and fresh produce cannot be easily delivered by online vendors by matching…
Posted in Managerial Micro
If there were a collapse of civilization, could people go back to hunting for survival?
I talk about some of history’s horrible famines in my economic development classes and the difficulty of getting enough food in Malthusian societies. Sometimes, some of my students ask why people starved rather than going out to hunt for food.…
Posted in Development
The economics of residential density
Most Americans are used to low-density towns and suburbs and like them a lot. Many Americans have experienced unpleasant high-population-density places in America. In fact most of the high-density urban areas in the US were relatively unpleasant in recent US…
Posted in Public Finance, Real Estate
88 years of unemployment data
Unfortunately FRED has four different somewhat-overlapping data series that must be combined to get the full, long-run picture of the unemployment rate from 1929 to the present. The first data series in light green is undoubtably the least accurate of…
Medianism 