Results for “daniel klein”

117 found

The link is here, the table of contents is described as follows: 

Economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college, at least among the 4835 Americans who completed a Zogby International online survey. Economic enlightenment is highest among those self-identifying “conservative” and “libertarian,” and descends through “moderate,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” Other variables include party affiliation, religious participation, union membership, NASCAR fandom, and Wal-Mart patronage. Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel Klein report.

When the White House changes party, do economists change their tune on budget deficits? Brett Barkley does a systematic investigation. Six economists are found to change their tune – Paul Krugman in a significant way, Alan Blinder in a moderate way, and Martin Feldstein, Murray Weidenbaum, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Solow in a minor way – while eleven are found to be fairly consistent.

44 economists answer the questionnaire about a market-failure rationale for pre-market approval of drugs and devices:

The questionnaire posed reform questions and tested responses. The 44 interviews provide a rich set of discourse that help one decide: Is there a sensible market-failure rationale?

Supporters of pre-market approval include Kenneth Arrow, John E. Brazier, William Comanor, Randall P. Ellis, John Hutton, Naoki Ikegami, Jonathan Karnon, Gérard de Pouvourville, F.M. Scherer, and 14 others.

The supporters of liberalization are James F. Burgess, Jr., Noel Campbell, J. Jaime Caro, Thomas DeLeire, David Dranove, Dale Gieringer, Paul Grootendorst, David Henderson, Randall Holcombe, Charles Hooper, Sam Peltzman, Paul Rubin, Shirley Svorny, Robert Tollison, and Michael R. Ward.

The Euro symposium response: Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea respond to commentators on their study of what US economists were saying about the prospect of the euro, and comment on recent events and debates.

Econometric errors in an Applied Economics article. Dimitris Hatzinikolaou reports on the article and his efforts to get his critique heard.

A 1903 letter against protectionism in Britain endorsed by 16 economists including Bastable, Bowley, Cannan, Edgeworth, Marshall, Pigou, Scott, and Smart.

The first one is sure to cause some controversy and I view it in part as an attempt to revise the portrait of the elites put forward by Bryan Caplan; I await his response.  My own view is that "who in the general public understands economics best" is very sensitive to which questions we ask.  Libertarian-leaning voters have a better understanding of government failure, but left-leaning voters are more likely to understand adverse selection or aggregate demand management.  Which is a more important topic?  That may depend on the researcher's own point of view.  What's the closest we can come to a value-neutral test of whether elites or the "common man" understand economic reasoning better?  In the meantime, Bram Cohen understands economics pretty well.

Great apprehensions,
prolonged Depression. Writing in 2008 in the American Economic
Review, Gauti Eggertsson claims that Hoover instantiated three
policy dogmas, and that, by overcoming Hoover’s dogmas, Roosevelt
shifted expectations and brought recovery by the end of his first term.
A thoroughgoing critique is offered here by Steven Horwitz. (Professor
Eggertsson is invited to reply in a future issue.) 

The policy views of
American Economic Association members. Robert Whaples shares the
results of a new survey that includes many new policy-opinion questions. 

Economic Notes from
Underground. Four confessions:

• Bruce Benson tells his
  troubled story—afflicted for 25 years with economic dissociative
  identity disorder—but it ends happily.
• David Hakes tells how he
  complicated the math to get a paper published.
• Stephen Kinsella tells of
  having to teach what you don’t believe in.
• William P. Leonard tells
  how he teaches one thing in economics courses but, as college
  administrator, practices unconscionably to the contrary.

Not always.  Here is the abstract from a new paper:

We develop a theoretical model to study the effects of libertarian
paternalism on knowledge acquisition and social learning. Individuals
in our model are permitted to appreciate and use the information
content in the default options set by the government. We show that in
some settings libertarian paternalism may decrease welfare because
default options slow information aggregation in the market. We also
analyze what happens when the government acquires imprecise information
about individuals, and characterize its incentives to avoid full
disclosure of its information to the market, even when it has perfect
information. Finally, we consider a market in which individuals can
sell their information to others and show that the presence of default
options causes the quality of advice to decrease, which may lower
social welfare.

I do not yet see an ungated version.  Of course anyone interested in this topic should also pursue the papers of Mario Rizzo, Glen Whitman, and Daniel Klein.

Daniel Klein has a new project:

The prospective symposium will consist of confessional essays by economists about their existence as economists. Only genuine narrative and sincere reflection are welcome. However, essays may be anonymous.

The impetus of the symposium is to provide an outlet for exploring preference falsification and other forms of moral or intellectual compromise within the economics profession. Authors are encouraged to be introspective and personal, and yet impartial. The purpose of each essay should be to share experiences that speak to situations to which many can relate. We seek biographical essays that will help others understand widely shared problems.

In his or her essay, the author should clarify the kind of preference falsification in which he or she has engaged.

He is cited for trade theory and, appropriately, location theory and economic geography.  He could have been cited for his work on currency crises as well.  Here are the most basic links on Paul, it is hard to know where to start.  I have to say I did not expect him to win until Bush left office, as I thought the Swedes wanted the resulting discussion to focus on Paul’s academic work rather than on issues of politics.  So I am surprised by the timing but not by the choice.

Here’s Krugman’s NYT column from today; there is so so much on him and by him.  Here is his blog.  Here is a short post-prize interview.  He has been influential in pushing the United States toward a bank recapitalization plan.  Here is Krugman on video, from just the other day, talking about the crisis and how bad it might get.  Krugman, of course, also called the housing bubble in advance.

Krugman is very well known for his work on strategic trade theory, as it is now called.  Building on ideas from Dixit, Helpman, and others, he showed how increasing returns could imply a possible role for welfare-improving protectionism.  Krugman, however, insisted that he did not in practice favor protectionism; it is difficult for policymakers to fine tune the relevant variables.  Boeing vs. Airbus is perhaps a simple example of the argument.  If a government can subsidize the home firm to be a market leader, the subsidizing country can come out ahead through the mechanism of capturing the gains from increasing returns to scale.  Here are some very useful slides on the theory.  Here is Dixit’s excellent summary of Krugman on trade.  Krugman himself has admitted that parts of the theory may be less relevant for rich-poor countries trade (America and China) rather than rich-rich trade, such as America and Japan.

I am most fond of Krugman’s pieces on economic geography, in particular on cities and the economic rationales for clustering.  He almost single-handedly resurrected the importance of "location theory," an all-important but previously neglected branch of economics.  Here is the best summary piece of Krugman’s work in this area.  I believe this work will continue to rise in influence.

I have my own favorite pieces by Krugman.  This include his short critique of Austrian trade cycle theory and his short piece on why the British had such bad food.

He is also, by the way, a loyal MR reader but he is not the first reader to win the prize.

Krugman’s books:

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal.  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction.  Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism.  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen.  Pop Internationalism is also the work of Krugman’s most likely to be popular with market-oriented economists.  Here is a collection of Krugman’s earlier writings.  The Great Unraveling — circa 2004 — is for me too under-argued.  His book Currencies and Crises is in my view his most underrated work; it provides a very readable introduction to some of his ideas on financial crises and it has a nice use of the concept of option value.  Development, Geography, and Economic Theory is a very good and very readable introduction to his work on economic geography.  That and the currency book are my two favorites by Krugman.  Geography and Trade is useful plus here is a more technical collection on the spatial economy.

Krugman has a widely used Principles text, co-authored with his wife Robin Wells.  He also has a leading text in international economics co-authored with Maurice Obstfeld.

Here are profiles and bio pieces, none very recent.  Here is Krugman on how he works — very personal and insightful.  Some of Krugman’s thinking on the liquidity trap — a key issue today for the crisis — can be found here.

Krugman of course is a controversial figure in the blogosphere and in politics but I believe for today it is best to set those issues aside.  His Wikipedia page has lots on the critics plus some bio as well.  Daniel Klein for instance argued that Krugman should do more to speak out for freer markets in various settings.

Krugman’s early columns for Slate.com were an important model for shaping what the econ blogosphere later became.  They are models of clarity and rigor which we all would do well to emulate.  His exposition of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is remarkably good and it is one of the best pieces of popular economics writing I know.

Award analysis: This was definitely a "real world" pick and a nod in the direction of economists who are engaged in policy analysis and writing for the broader public.  Krugman is a solo winner and solo winners are becoming increasingly rare.  That is the real statement here, namely that Krugman deserves his own prize, all to himself.  This could easily have been a joint prize, given to other trade figures as well, but in handing it out solo I believe the committee is a) stressing Krugman’s work in economic geography, and b) stressing the importance of relevance for economics.  Daniel Davies also sees it as a career-based award. 

Who are the big losers?  Avinash Dixit and Elhanan Helpman and Maurice Obstfeld have to feel their chances for the prize went down significantly.

Addendum: Here is Bryan Caplan on "Paul Krugman, Guilty Pleasure."

Table of Contents with links to articles (pdf)

• Crossfire Over Shall-Issue: Writing in the Stanford Law Review
  in 2003, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue found the balance pointing
  toward "more guns, more crime." Making a number of upgrades, Carlisle
  Moody and Thomas Marvell redo it and find the balance pointing the
  other way.
  (Professors Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue have been
  invited to reply to this article, and their analysis will appear in the
  January 2009 issue of the journal.)
• Economists on Sports Subsidies: Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys call the rout.
• Colleagues, Where Is the Market Failure?: Daniel Klein dissects the judgment and rhetoric of economists on the FDA.
• The Curtailment of Critical Commentary: A report from Down Under.
• The State of Economics Science—82 Years Ago: A reprint from Social Forces, 1926.
• Endeavor in “We”: Daniel Klein invites a discussion about building an identity for [Placeholder] economics.
• Salute to Stiglitz on Iraq: Fred Foldvary reviews The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
• Where There’s Smoke: All funding is agenda-laden, says a correspondent.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Monday that some internal controls at Societe Generale failed or were ignored before the banking giant announced massive losses attributed to a single trader.

Here is one version of the story.  It’s gotten plenty of news coverage.  It’s gotten relatively little pundit coverage.  It neither fits the pro-market narrative of one side, nor the "blame it on the Bush administration and deregulation and bad U.S. corporate governance" narrative of the other.  By noting the story, and pondering its broader implications ("your favorite hobby horse matters less than you think"), I would like to do my small amount to counteract the silence of the pundits.  By the way, I owe this concept to Daniel Klein.

Find it here, lots of goodies as always.  Here is a section called Sounds of Silence: "individuals who probably should have replied to the critique but didn’t."  Other topics include whether casinos cause crime, the Earned Income Tax Credit, suburbanization, usury, and Paul Krugman, all edited by my colleague Daniel Klein.

Elsewhere on the web, here is a long podcast with Austan Goolsbee.