Results for “law literature”
167 found

What I’ve been reading

1. Ice, by Vladimir Sorokin.  A totally lurid, highly sexed, contemporary Russian, pre-apocalyptic mix of science fiction and horror.  I finished it.

2. The Once and Future King, T.H. White.  Oddly absent from Law and Literature syllabi, I’m teaching this in my next class.  This is many people’s favorite book.  It’s written in a simple manner, but it cumulates in an oddly beautiful way.

3. What economists should learn from sociology, not to mention Arnold Kling on me, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.

4. How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, by Patricia Love and Steven Stosny.  The claim: talking about relationship problems is an inherently shameful activity for the man and thus it will fail; the couple should just read this book and do what is best.

5. Econoblog with Ed Glaeser and Daron Acemoglu, on democracy and economic growth.  If Greg Mankiw can debate Jacqueline Passey, Ed can cite Borat as evidence in a dialog with a world-class economist.

6. Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 by Joseph Wheelan.  If you wish to embarrass your friends (and yourself), ask them whether they would in retrospect support the U.S. conquest of territory from Mexico.

Agreeing on unions?

Ezra Klein has an interesting post on union elections, favoring greater unionization; Jane Galt is not persuaded. [Addendum: Mark Thoma has more.] 

I propose a deal.  I’ll agree that unions, in the best natural experiments we have, boost wages by about 10 to 20 percent.  On the other hand, will Ezra (and others) agree that unions are mostly detrimental to the rate of economic growth?

If so, the utilitarian evaluation will boil down to the choice of discount rate, keeping in mind that under the left-wing account the gains follow mostly from redistribution more than from wealth creation.

Admittedly the empirical literature on unions and economic growth is murky.  But it does seem that in non-socialist societies, more unionization lowers the growth rate.  (In socialist societies, it may be that economy-wide unions internalize some poliitical externalities and lead to better policy, a’la Mancur Olson.)  These papers are easy enough to criticize, so I’ll admit I am more convinced by simple theory here than by any empirics.  Unionization raises the cost of many growth-enhancing business decisions, such as layoffs or implementing technical progress.

Union supporters?  Do we have an epistemic deal about how you are willing to lower the growth rate?  And can we pull your true discount rate from the Stern/global warming debates?  (I recall Jane once writing that a zero discount rate would require her to revise everything she believed, but I think the opposite is sooner true.)

Oh, did I mention that the union wage premium, especially for private sector employees, has been declining and may be disappearing altogether?

And no, I will not be moved by sarcastic attempted reductios which pretend that enslaving the workers would raise the growth rate too.  Figure out yourself what is wrong with that.

Addendum: Johan Richter asked for: "Your preferred policy towards unions," so I’m calling this #12 out of 50.  My preferred policy is laissez-faire, noting I have never been a right-wing, union basher, Morgan Reynolds sort of guy.  But I see encouraging unions through the law as a relatively short-sighted solution to the problems of labor and the desire to raise living standards.

Trudie on dating multiple men

Trudie related her answer to me:

The deadly clinker is that "nothing untoward" is going on.  If nothing else, sex in a relationship can serve as the equivalent of an "up or out," (no pun intended) rule, as in the principal-agent literature.  You don’t make partner in a law firm after some number of years, good-bye.  You don’t get academic tenure within six years, good-bye.  It’s not quite "three dates or marriage," but at some point a guy is either better than the available competition
or he is not.  It is not necessary to have sex within a month, but the couple should be on such a path, or at the very least engaged in a puritanical erotic blaze of repression and restraint.  And that must be done monogamously.  If she continues to see three dullards on such distant terms, each of whom has nothing better to do than to date her, we can narrow the options as follows:

a) she is afraid
of rejection, and uses the guys to hold each other at a distance, if
only in her own heart.

b) she is afraid of rejection, and seeks out the worst imaginable dullards.

c) she is the worst imaginable dullard.

These alternatives are not mutually exclusive.

The socially optimal policy is for her to see a fourth and yes indeed a fifth and possibly sixth dullard, if only to soak up their time and stop them from bothering other people in any way whatsoever.

Tyler adds that if he were seeing a woman under those terms, he would prefer that she were in another relationship, if only to rationalize her apparent total lack of interest in him.  The best case scenario is if the guys are assuming she is lying to them, think she is having bizarre sex orgies on the other nights, and believe she is holding them in some sort of frustrating but worthwhile queue.

And this "best case" scenario is not really all that good.

Addendum: If you are new to MR, here is one Trudie post, here is another, here is the first in the series, here are two others.

What I’ve been reading

1. Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, edited by Ed Stringham.  712 pages of debate about libertarian anarchy, just about everything intelligent written on the topic, and then some.  The book has two essays by yours truly on why libertarian anarchy cannot avoid reevolution back to government; you’ll also find them on my home page.

2. Daniel Drezner, All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes.  An underexplored topic in public choice, Dan shows it still all boils down to national politics.  Here is chapter one.

3. Dan Simmons, The Terror.  One of his best books, a thrilling Arctic adventure, well-paced, 769 pp., but ultimately not conceptual.  My decision to stop reading at p.200 or so marks a watershed in my life.

4. Christoph Peters, The Fabric of Life.  A German vacationer witnesses a murder in Istanbul and delves into seamy society to figure out what happened.  It is so hard to get a translation into English published these days that a rule of reading only translated contemporary literature is one of the better filters.  Recommended.

5. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows.  Reader’s feast of subtle and penetrating observations, dysfunctional family, etc.

6. Spence on Schelling, via Greg Mankiw.

7. Maybe I’m Amazed.

What I’ve been reading

1. Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan Bielstein.  Yet another treatment of how copyright has gone too far, this book is full of both information and good humor. 

2. Jonathan Tokeley, Rescuing the Past: The Cultural Heritage Crusade.  A pro-property rights, pro-market (but with regulation) approach to the antiquities trade.  A breath of fresh air in an otherwise poorly framed debate.

3. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy; I blogged this before, but now I am reading it, this book is a major achievement.  Here is an interview with Tooze.  Here is more, and here.

4. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.  This is also for my Law and Literature class next spring; from Pynchon, I enjoy this book and the first half of Gravity’s Rainbow.  You don’t have to love 1960s left-wing semiotics for this one, although it doesn’t hurt.  Over Christmas I might try Pynchon’s V., and for that matter Civilization IV.

5. Lots of opinions about intro economics, from CrookedTimber.

What I’ve been reading

1. Dave Eggers, What is the What.  Despite its preciousness, I quite liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Sadly this quasi-fictional tale of a Sudanese refugee reveals that most contemporary writers are lightweights, pure and simple.

2. Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir.  I loved Palimpset, volume 1, but this follow-up is junk.  Julian is his best book, but overall he has more misses than hits.

3. Othello.  I’ll teach this in my spring Law and Literature class.  I read Shakespeare as despising the Moor for turning his back on his natural Muslim allies and fighting them in Cyprus.  In a strange way Othello deserves some of the bad treatment he receives — why should anyone trust him?

4. The new Stephen Dubner book…I am not reading it yet, but I don’t want to be slow with the news.  Discover the other Dubner.

5. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic.  This is from the guy who brought us Everything Bad is Good for You, except it turns out that cholera isn’t good for you, it is bad for you.  A brisk and readable story of public health issues in Victorian London.

6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Crónica de una muerte anunciada].  I regard One Hundred Years of Solitude as a good but overrated book; this slim volume may well be his most exciting fiction and it is clearly the most humorous.  I’m also fond on his non-fiction book about the kidnapping and volume one of his memoirs, plus of course the short stories; that is what he will be known for.

What I’ve been reading

1. The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love, by Richard Restak.  A good summary of a bunch of results I already knew, but a suitable introduction for most readers.  It doesn’t cover neuroeconomics.

2. Light in August, by William Faulkner.  I am rereading this, wondering whether I should use it for my Law and Literature class in the spring.  My memory was that this is the "easy" classic Faulkner but the text is tricker than I had remembered.  Not quite as good as As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom.

3. Matthew Kahn, Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment.  From Brookings, a good and balanced treatment of the intersection between environmental and urban economics.  Here is Matt’s blog.

4. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.  I’m still at p = .05, if only because I fear such a heavy reliance on the anthropic principle.  This book didn’t sway me one way or the other.  And while I am not religious myself, I am suspicious of anti-religious tracts which do not recognize great profundity in the Bible.  Furthermore, as Dawkins recognizes, civilization requires strong loyalties to abstract principles; I’m still waiting to see a list of the relevant contenders to choose the best.  Here is Dawkins speaking.

5. Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.  I loved Liar’s Poker and Moneyball but this one did not grab me at all.  I stopped.  Perhaps the reader needs to love football.  Here is a radio interview with the author.  Here is his NYT article.

What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?

I did enjoy and indeed finish it.  The book defends the liberal nature of the university but more importantly it has an excellent discussion of "the postmodern novel" (the author’s field, apparently), including a brilliant take on William Dean Howells and a good discussion of The Great Gatsby.  Its portrait of the American university, however flawed, is closer to the truth than what one finds in the right-wing scaremongers.

But reading this book shows me — contrary to the author’s intentions — why so many college students have turned to the so-called "Right."  Michael Bérubé, the author:

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong.  At least libertarians are "quite smart now and then" and yes that is a quotation.

3. Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security "because it works."  By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

5. Argues that "the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery…"

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

If we bundle this all up and put it against the "…the world is a fragile place and liberty is dear.  Let us start with an ethic of individual responsibility, family values, strong national defense, low taxes, and a deep belief in the sacred nature of mankind, and no we cannot elevate every injustice," I know which vision the American people — including their undergraduates — will choose.  (For new MR readers, I should note that those are not exactly my views, it is just one shorthand description of parts of the American right.)

Bérubé, by the way, has a brilliant performance art-worthy fantasy segment on why 50 percent tax rates would not (should not?) deter anyone from working or producing.  Excerpt:  "I find it hard to imagine a Clever Entrepreneur who thinks, "Well, I’ve made ten million this year, but if I make another two million I only get to keep one million of it, so I’m going to stop developing and promoting my product right now."" (p.286).  Ah, if only all taxes fell on pure profit.  It is even sadder to learn that many wealthy people are "hoarding it [their money]," rather than creating jobs with it.

I consider American universities to be a marvel of the modern world.  And yes diversity does mean that not every outcome can be controlled.  I remain grateful for this freedom, while admitting its external costs.

One of my favorite professors edited a book called The Essential Stalin, and yes he was sad he had to cut some pieces from the selection.  He was the guy who introduced me to Melville and Hammett and Lem and Stapledon.  I’ll never forget the last day of class when one mousey, dewey-eyed girl in the back of the room finally raised her hand and said in a mix of shock and exasperation: "But Dr. Franklin, those are all the Communist countries!"

The Cuban guy in the room did not approve, but that’s part of education too.  My rather excellent paper on the labor theory of value received only a B, due to its conceptual errors in characterizing the transformation problem (and not because this was a freshman class in English literature).  But at least with that professor one knew where one stood.

Trudie on time management

First, check out Tyler’s earlier tips on time management.  Read this one too.  That’s right, you.  The one who doesn’t usually click on the links.  Read them.  Don’t tell me you don’t have enough time.

The bigger question is whether time management is something you need to improve.  The "Friends" part of your brain sounds quite fundamental, why tamper with it?  Don’t think all that Bruckner stuff, or for that matter the Journal of Law and Economics, beats a good TV show.  (Even Nigerian movies can be worse than Law and Order, believe it or not!)  Cost-benefit analysis suggests that acceptance will come easier than change.

It sounds as if you are already an expert consumer, and indeed consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.

Being "completely rational" would be a high form of hell.  Tyler tells me that his high levels of cultural consumption are his form of irrationality, not the contrary.  And most of his activities are quite passive; he has never been in a kayak, refuses to go "natural diving," and surely blogging does not compare with building a software company or hunting a boar.  Don’t confuse a restless nature with seizing life by the throat and living it to the fullest (although, of course, some people do both, including Tyler).  In any case the key is to enjoy and indeed cultivate the irrationalities you have (indeed that is all you have), at least provided they do not become destructive vis-a-vis other people.

Trudie again thanks Tim Harford for pioneering the concept of economic advice; Tyler has added Tim’s website to the Interesting People roll on the left hand side of this blog.

What are the top economics journals?

Here is one recent ranking, courtesy of Newmark’s Door.  My view is simple.  The American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy are the two most important journals.  The former will have more pieces with careful testing and design, but the latter has more conceptually important articles.  I find the JPE more enjoyable.  The Quarterly Journal of Economics has brilliant pieces which can tend toward the unsound or have imperfect execution.  Econometrica, while it remains a clear third or fourth in rank, is less important than it used to be, perhaps because pure theory has declined in influence.  For this same reason, the Rand Journal and Review of Economic Studies, while both still very good journals, have lost their previous luster.  Journal of Economic Theory mattered in the 1970s, but it has fallen off a cliff.  After that you have the top field journals, which of course vary by field.  Journal of Economic Perspectives and Journal of Economic Literature serve important functions, and are both fun and instructive to read, but they are rarely venues for presenting new ideas.  They report how new ideas have been interpreted and digested.

Science journals, especially Nature, are starting to become more important for economics.  My favorite field journal is the Journal of Law and EconomicsJournal of Finance is of very high quality, though finance is a world unto itself.  The relative returns to the top few journals have risen greatly in the last fifteen years; many more schools require publications in those journals for tenure than before.

My new teaching assignment

Holmes The Common Law

   Posner Law and Literature

  Dissents by Holmes and Frankfurter

PART I:   THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE

September 8                             Sophocles – Antigone             

                                                

September 15                           Plato  Apology            

September 22                           The Bible – Selections from Exodus, Kings I and II-

Part II:                                    LIBERTY AND LICENSE

September 29                           More Utopia

            

October 6                                Shakespeare Measure for Measure

October 13                              Milton Areopagitica 

                                                Short Paper Due #1 (5 pages)

                                                

Part III:                                  TRIALS AND ORDEALS

October 20                              Twain Pudd’nhead Wilson

October 27                              Melville Billy Budd 

                                    

November 3                             Selection from Dostoievsky The Brothers Karamazov

Kafka, In the Penal Colony from Collected Stories

Part IV:                                   PERFORMANCE AND WITNESS

November 10                           Bertolt Brecht The Caucasian Chalk Circle

(Methuen Student Ed.)

   Susan Glaspell Jury of Her Peers 

November 17                           Rebecca West, A Train of Powder

                                                Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

                                                (selections)

November24 –                         THANKSGIVING

PART V:                                 LITERATURE AND LEGAL CHANGE

December 1                             Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart

The changing value of Shakespeare

Auction values for the publishing rights to Collected Works of William Shakespeare:

1709: "a small fraction of" 200 pounds

1734: "less than" 675 pounds

1741: 1,630 pounds

1765: 3,462 pounds

1774, End of perpetual monopoly copyright: Nil

That is from William St. Clair’s recent The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.  Many books deal with the rise of print culture and the commercial revolution, but in terms of thoroughness and data work, this marvelous work is a clear number one.  Here is more on the book.  I am learning just how much early British copyright law kept the price of literature high, and kept books out of public hands.

Alfonso Lorenzo in The Wall Street Journal

See the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal:

Since his schizophrenia was diagnosed in 1991, Alfonso Lorenzo Santos has divided his time between a psychiatric clinic in Cuernavaca and his tiny lime-green house in this remote mountain village. At home, he often gets so violent his neighbors chain him to a wall.  Yet despite his anger and terrifying delusions, Mr. Lorenzo has become one of Mexico’s most innovative folk painters, piling points upon points of paint on paper, like tiny tiles in a mosaic.

Mr. Lorenzo, now around 54 years old — he was orphaned and doesn’t know his age exactly — is part of a generation of Mexican-Indian artists from the Balsas river region, about 75 miles from Acapulco. These artists started painting in the 1960s for tourist dollars on bark paper, called amate in the Nahuatl language.

One group of amate painters moved to Cuernavaca in the 1970s to live with Edmond Rabkin, a New York expatriate who introduced them to Western literature and music. Those artists, especially Marcial Camilo Ayala, whose work is now displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, often paint romantic visions of village life.

Some Ameyaltepec artists developed a harder edge, especially Mr. Lorenzo, whose figures rarely smile and whose birds have menacing claws. In the 1970s, Mr. Lorenzo moved to Mexico City, where an art dealer promoted him as the descendant of Aztec princes, and where he had his first psychotic episode, says Gobi Stromberg, a Cuernavaca art patron. Complaining to friends that his heart was exploding, he returned to Ameyaltepec around 1980, wandered the arid mountains, cursed at neighbors and flung stones at them. Barely 5 feet tall, but stocky, Mr. Lorenzo became a threatening figure. After villagers decided he had to be restrained, several volunteers wrestled him to the ground and chained him to a wall in his house, where he remained for several years…

"He likes the goriness of Catholicism because it depicts a kind of scary world he lives in," says George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who has written a book on amate paintings.

Here is the story (WSJ password required, so just buy the paper, and note that the above links are mine, not theirs).  I am pleased to have served as translator for much of the work behind this article.  Here is my previous post on Alfonso, and an extensive link to photos.

My Ph.d. Macro reading list

Books: J. Bradford DeLong: Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling in (and Out)

Real Business Cycles

Stadler, George. “Real Business Cycles,” Journal of Economic Literature, December 1994, 1750-1783.

Long, John B. and Plosser, Charles. “Real Business Cycles,” Journal of Political Economy, 1983, 39-69.

Barsky, Robert and Miron, Jeffrey. “The Seasonal Cycle and the Business Cycle,” Journal of Political Economy, 1989, 503-534.

Prescott-Summers debate, Quarterly Review, Minneapolis Fed., “Theory Ahead of Business Cycle Measurement,” “Some Skeptical Observations on Real Business Cycle Theory,” and “Response to a Skeptic.”

Bils, Mark. “The Cyclical Behavior of Marginal Cost and Price,” American Economic Review, 1987, 838-55.

Romer, Christina. “Changes in Business Cycles,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1999, 23-45.

Black, Fischer. “Noise,” Journal of Finance, 1986.

Mehrling, Perry. “Understanding Fischer Black,” you can find this paper at: http://www.econ.barnard.columbia.edu/faculty/mehrling/understanding_fischer_black.pdf

Finance and interest rates

Ross, Stephen. “Finance,” In The New Palgrave, pp.322-336.

Chapters six and seven, “Objects of Choice,” and “Market Equilibrium”.

Jagannathan, Ravi  and McGrattan, Ellen. “The CAPM Debate.” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis,  Fall 1995, 2-17.

Campbell,  John Y. and Vuolteenaho, Tuomo, “Bad Beta, Good Beta,” American Economic Review, December 2004, 1249-1275.

Campbell, John, “Some Lessons for the Yield Curve,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995, 129-152.

Siegel, Jeremy and Thaler, Richard. “The Equity Premium Puzzle,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997, 191-200.

Kocherlakota, Narayana R. “The Equity Premium: It’s Still a Puzzle,” Journal of Economic Literature, March 1996, 42-71.

Lee, Charles, Shleifer, Andrei, and Thaler, Richard. “Anomalies: Closed End Mutual Funds,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990, 153-164.

Keynesian Economics

Cowen, Tyler. “Why Keynesianism Triumphed Or, Could So Many Keynesians Have Been Wrong?”, Critical Review, Summer/Fall 1989, 518-530.

“Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1993, 3-82.

“Is There a Core of Practical Macroeconomics That We Should All Believe?” American Economic Review, symposium, May 1997, 230-246.

Taylor, John. “Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000, 21-36.

Bernheim, B. Douglas. “A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989, 55-72.

Eisner, Robert. “Budget Deficits: Rhetoric and Reality,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. “The Causes and Consequences of the Dependence of Quality on Price.” Journal of Economic Literature, March 1987, 1-48.

Hall, Robert E. “Employment Fluctuations with Equilibrium Wage Stickiness,” American Economic Review, March 2005, 50-65.

Summers, Lawrence. “The Scientific Illusion in Empirical Macroeconomics,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 1991, 129-148.

Monetary Policy

Blinder, Alan. “What Central Bankers Can Learn From Academics – and Vice Versa,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997, 3-20.

Bernanke, Ben and Mishkin, F. “Inflation Targeting,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997, 97-117.

Aiyagari, S. Rao, “Deflating the Case for Zero Inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review, Summer 1990, 2-11.

“Symposium on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995, 3-96.

Roberds, William. “What Hath the Fed Wrought? Interest Rate Smoothing in Theory and Practice,” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Economic Review, January/February 1992.

Shafir, Eldar, Diamond, Peter, and Tversky, Amos. “Money Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1997, 341-374.

Caplin, Andrew and Spulber, Daniel. “Menu Costs and the Neutrality of Money,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1987, 703-725.

Sargent, Thomas and Wallace, Neil. “Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review, 1985, 1-17.

Wallace, Neil. “A Legal Restrictions Theory of the Demand for “Money” and the Role of Monetary Policy,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review, Winter 1983.

Posen, Adam. “Why Central Bank

Independence Does Not Cause Low Inflation: There is No Institutional Fix for Politics,” in Finance and the International Economy, edited by Richard O’Brien, 1993.

Garrison, Roger, “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle,” At  href="http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/a1abc.htm"

Krugman, Paul. “The Hangover Theory,” at http://www.slate.com/id/9593

Cowen, Tyler. Risk and Business Cycles, chapter three.

Savings and social security

Hubbard, R. Glenn and Skinner, Jonathan. “Assessing the Effectiveness of Savings Incentives.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996, 73-90.

Choi, Laibson, Madrian, and Metrick, “Optimal Defaults,” American Economic Review, May 2003, also at ttp://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/laibson/papers/optimaldefaults.pdf

Samwick, Andrew. Voxbaby weblog, read the entries on social security.

International Economics

Current issues: http://www.roubiniglobal.com/archives/2005/05/global_imbalanc.html

“If I Believed in Austrian Business Cycle Theory,” by

Tyler  Cowen, on MarginalRevolution.com.

Brad Setser’s WebLog.

Dornbusch, Rudiger. “Purchasing Power Parity,” in The New Palgrave.

Friedman, Milton. “The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates.” In Essays in Positive Economics, 1953, University Chicago Press.

Mundell-Fleming model, see Brad’s book.

The World

Japan

Krugman, Paul R. “It’s Baaack:

Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1998, 29, 2, 137-87.

Kashyap, Anil K. “Sorting out Japan’s Financial Crisis,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Economic Perspectives, 2002, 26, 4, 42-55.

China

XXXX

Europe

XXXX

Developing Nations

XXXX

History

Bordo, Michael D. “Essays in Exploration: A Survey of the Literature,” Explorations in Economic History, 1986, 339-415.

“Symposium: The Great Depression,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993, 3-102.

Romer, Christina H “What Ended the Great Depression?” Journal of Economic History, 1992, 52, 4, 757-84.

Here is a searchable link to Brad DeLong’s website: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000084.html

Proxying Human Capital

One of the most puzzling results in the literature on economic growth is that it is difficult to show that increases in human capital increase economic growth. In regressions, sometimes human capital shows up positive and significant but sometimes it’s not significant, sometimes it’s null and sometimes it’s negative depending on the precise set of countries and time periods examined. (See Tyler’s earlier post for further skepticism on the link between human capital and growth).

A team of economists at the University of Ottawa, working with Statistics Canada, has concluded that the problem may be one of measurement. They argue that literacy scores (i.e. actual skills) might be a better proxy for human capital than the typical measure, years of schooling, and furthermore, literacy scores are not subject to the usual problems related to the comparability of education systems across countries. Their human capital indicators are based on the results of the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey, as nicely explained by The Economist:

They use the International Adult Literacy Survey, which tested 16-65-year-olds in [1994], to estimate the skills of people in 14 countries entering the workforce at different times between 1960 and 1995. This is achieved by looking at tests of different age cohorts. For example, the literacy levels of people aged [51-59 when tested in 1994] are used to estimate the competencies of 17-25-year-olds in 1960, and hence the human-capital investment that had just been made in the course of that cohort’s education.

The biggest flaw of that study is that the indicators impute levels of literacy to individuals earlier in their lives, without correcting for the adjustement in the quality of human capital that occurs during an individual’s lifetime through learning and human capital depreciation, however, as The Economist notes, “the fact that it finds such a strong correlation between skills and growth gives a significant boost to human-capital theory”. Click here to read the executive summary or click here to read the entire study.