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Kulick on Comcast/Time Warner and antitrust issues
In response to arguments about Comcast's monopoly power in the content market, Robert writes: Now consider Comcast’s profit maximization problem. Comcast is already a monopolist so it increases its...
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Are landlords the future global plutocracy?
Karl Smith has two posts about land that I have been reading over and over for weeks. I'll start with this one. In response to recent work by Thomas Piketty, Smith argues that we should carefully...
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Capital
Thanks to a happy accident at Amazon, I received my preorder copy of Thomas Piketty's Capital early. I started reading it yesterday. So far my impressions are mostly good, and I think I will learn a...
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"Poverty" in the 21st century
Piketty's book has a grand title (and some grand "laws"), but its empirical scope is understandably limited to developed countries over the last (not next) 200 years. With that in mind, consider this...
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Pecuniary externalities
Bloomberg reports that Blackstone is reducing its purchases of houses, which peaked at $100 million worth per week last year. From the article: President Barack Obama credited the investors for helping...
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"A good time to be a water attorney in Texas"
Source From the NYT: 66 Texas towns and electric utilities [were] exempted from a [water] cutoff for health and safety reasons, even though hundreds of farmers and others who lost their water held more...
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Capital in partial equilibrium
Image sourceReview: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century Piketty's primary contribution is to provide an impressive array of data on wealth and income, for several countries, beginning...
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The West's command economy
Lake Powell (source) The more one learns about water in the West, the farther one falls into the rabbit hole. While China introduces capitalism into its countryside, the rural western United States...
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A Model of Secular Stagnation
In this paper, we formalize the secular stagnation hypothesis in an overlapping generations model with nominal wage rigidity. We show that, in this setting, any combination of a permanent collateral...
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Drought pricing
From the California WaterBlog: Most water system costs are fixed; those for distribution pipes, treatment plants and labor don't vary with the volume of water delivered. Unless most of the monthly bill...
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How to think like a macroeconomist
Macroeconomists generally interpret the data they see as the unfolding of a Radner equilibrium, often with distortions, such as taxes, and with some incompleteness or dysfunction in the set of IOU...
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Own or rent? Thinking aloud about housing
image sourceNote: I accidentally published this post early, then deleted it, then remade it. This is the correct post, but most RSS readers will also show the original, incomplete post just before...
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"From the right"
Several weeks ago, Matt Yglesias kindly included my Piketty review in a list of commentaries on the book. Oddly, he described my review as "from the right," politically. I liked a lot of things about...
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Modern macro, without the math
Review: Kartik B. Athreya, Big Ideas in Macroeconomics: A Nontechnical ViewAthreya is an economist at the Richmond Fed. The primary contribution of the book is to describe the workhorse analytical...
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Noah Smith on declining dynamism
Should we be worried about [the trend toward large firms]? Many people over the years have bemoaned the death of the mom-and-pop store or the local restaurant, but I'm not sure we should be too...
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Public Service Announcement: There is an inequality literature in macro
Here is a claim by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored distributional issues, grouping all households into a a single “representative agent.” This is misleading (unless...
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"Not mere extrapolations"
From Krusell and Smith: We emphasize, first, that Piketty's predictions are not mere extrapolations from past data but, instead, rest importantly on the use of economic theory. This is important, since...
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The granular economy
Figure 5 in Caliendo, et al. (change is 2002-2007) Click for larger image From a new paper by Caliendo, Parro, Rossi-Hansberg, and Sarte: We develop a quantitative model of the U.S. economy broken down...
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Competition: Amazon is not "unrivaled" edition
A few weeks ago, a friend shared this article with me: Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling industries is unrivaled in the modern era. . . . Amazon has been discouraging customers from...
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Steve Jobs on firm dynamics
From Isaacson's biography of Jobs, which is truly fantastic: I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a...
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