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Two economies of young firms
In a previous post, I looked at data on job creation by startups and showed that, in any given year, startups create more jobs on net than all other firms combined. The result that startups are key to...
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Job flows, industry composition, and the changing US economy
Net job numbers hide a lot of underlying "churning" or reallocation. It would be interesting to divide this reallocation into (a) the part that is necessary for, or aligned with, net job numbers and...
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Housing is a durable asset
Edward Leamer wrote this no later than 2009, probably before: The worst way to enter a recession is with a heavy debt load premised on overly optimistic ideas about future growth of sales and earnings....
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And this is "wonkery"
Here's a tweet from Ezra Klein: So now you're thinking: Klein must be linking to a representative survey of economists in which a large majority endorse the minimum wage without reservation! Or maybe...
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How to think like Nick Rowe
Yes, if the central bank raises or lowers interest rates, this will affect financial markets. But I thought we had gone beyond thinking of monetary policy in terms of raising or lowering interest...
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Two economies of young firms, contd.: Tracking cohorts
In a previous post, I explored some data on job creation and destruction by firm age classes. Those data suggested that after creating lots of jobs in their initial year, cohorts of startups diverge:...
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I don't know what "the fiscal multiplier" is (and related observations)
Image sourceI'll borrow a quip from John Rust here. In Lewis Carroll's famous tale. Alice reacts to hearing the poem Jabberwocky:Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know...
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We're getting old and fat!
Or, at least, our firms are. Figure 1 plots the share of employment accounted for by "old" firms--6 years or older and 11 years or older (click for larger image). These data are from the BDS, which...
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Put your money on Harvard
A few years ago my friend Tim Layton filled out a March Madness bracket using economics department rankings. He hasn't done it for this year, so I decided to rip off the idea. I follow Tim in using the...
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Monetary union with capital controls
Image source Tim Duy writes: Is this how the Eurozone experiment will end? Not with a formal "exit," but with a return to banking dominated by national boundaries and enforced by capital controls? No...
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Implications of a collateral recovery
I wrote about the observed relationship between housing and startups here, where I suggested that "it is likely that housing plays an important collateral role for many entrepreneurs." A paper by...
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A timid defense of DSGE models
An economic model (see here)Image source This post is for economists and/or econ bloggers and/or people with opinions about this issue of mathematical modeling in macroeconomics. So that might be one...
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Why do Bitcoins have market value?
This is not a "Bitcoin is a bubble" post, nor is it a "Bitcoin is not a bubble" post. Why does currency have value? The main reason seems to be that money solves the “double coincidence of wants”...
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The housing crisis was regional
I think a lot of people sometimes think of housing as a national market. It is, in some ways. But different regions experienced substantially different house price dynamics prior to and during the...
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Reinhart/Rogoff and policy outcomes: Let's be careful about drawing causal...
By now everyone knows about the Great Reinhart and Rogoff Implosion of 2013. If you don't, read this. What has most amused me is that many journalists seem to think that the R&R 90% threshold had a...
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Inside the GDP sausage factory
Image source It's useful to be aware of the difficulty of measuring the US economy. Those interested in today's advance GDP report might do well to look through this, a handbook about the concepts and...
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How to think like Eric Falkenstein
I've become less enamored with trying to change opinions, because ideas need a zeitgeist, and if that's not fertile nothing you say will matter. . . . I don't see lot of value to being an advocate,...
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Employment services and misclassification
Lately there has been some talk about temporary help services (see here and here). This industry, and the industry of employment services more generally, is interesting not only for its potential...
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Crazy prices on Deep Space Nine
Image source I broadly agree with Matthew Yglesias about Star Trek. But his post reminded me of a complicated aspect of the series: its economy. Particularly when watching Deep Space Nine, it can be...
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More on housing and startups
Image source People are starting to notice the epic collapse of startup activity of recent years. Via Arnold Kling, see this great note by Glenn Reynolds and a reader suggesting that the decline in...
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