Clik here to view.
Macroeconomists and "skin in the game"
Noah Smith has reviewed Big Ideas in Macroeconomics. My review is here. An interesting argument from Smith: Athreya also fails to deal with another reason for outside criticism - the need for "skin in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Amazon, Hachette, and the holdup problem
If you haven't been paying attention, Amazon and book publisher Hachette are in an ongoing dispute about the distribution of surplus. I wrote about this here, but I underestimated how complicated the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trend reversal: A new fact about public firms
About a decade ago, people were looking at Compustat data (which provide financial statement information for public firms) and noticing that various measures of employment and sales volatility appeared...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What's up with those post-2000 IPOs?
Timothy B. Lee has a new interview with Marc Andreessen (h/t Tyler Cowen) about "the death of the IPO." An excerpt: There's been an absolutely dramatic change. What you say is exactly right. Twenty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Most firms are small, but most people work at large firms
Click for larger image Note: Firm size bins are not uniform in scope The chart above shows that it can sometimes be misleading to say that "X% of US businesses have characteristic Y" (an example)....
View ArticleClik here to view.
I use Fortran; it may be right for you, too (or not)
I don't know who would care to read this post. Maybe econ grad students. Aruoba and Fernández-Villaverde have a nice paper comparing programming languages for solving a standard DSGE model. They have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Excess water demand in California
Image source WSJ reports: About 60 California cities and agencies have imposed mandatory water-use cutbacks, some as high as 50%. In many cases, the rules are enforced by charging higher fees for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Productivity and reallocation
A few weeks back, Robin Harding wrote a nice FT piece on the "productivity puzzle." Yesterday Ryan Avent wrote a really nice note about the notion that productivity growth is very unpredictable. This...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Housing, finance, and the macroeconomy
That is the title of a new NBER working paper by Morris A. Davis and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and I think it is going to be a chapter in something--the Macro Annual, or a handbook, or something. In my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"An important need to restructure"
It is clear that in an economy with an important need to restructure and hire workers in new sectors, unemployment is the result of the positive match surpluses that result from appropriability. . . ....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Money is green
Image source When I was a kid I collected aluminum cans from my neighbors, crushed them, and took them to a local scrapyard where I sold them for $0.40 per pound. I can still remember being all sticky...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Exceptional industries
Six-digit NAICS (2002) codes that include the word "except" in their titles, with the warning that industry code humor is subtle and beyond the reach of most:111120 Oilseed (except soybean)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BED: 7.3 million jobs created, 6.5 million destroyed in Q4 2013
From the BLS: From September 2013 to December 2013, gross job gains from opening and expanding private sector establishments were 7.3 million, an increase of 290,000 jobs from the previous quarter. . ....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The role of entrepreneurship in US job creation and economic dynamism
That is the title of my first quarter-of-a-publication, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The issue includes symposia on entrepreneurship, development, and academic production, as well as some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Economic dynamism and productivity growth"
Dietz Vollrath has a nice response to our work on dynamism. Basically his argument is that the decline in dynamism doesn't seem to be affecting aggregate productivity. Yesterday I posted a comment at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entrepreneurial decline: Mom-n-pop or high-growth?
A lot of people respond to data on declining rates of entrepreneurship by suggesting that this is about the decline of mom-n-pop shops associated with retail sector consolidation. From a recent paper:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comment on Cowen
My comment on this post by Tyler Cowen (it never made it through moderation): - I have been amazed at how many econ journalists and economist bloggers were not already aware of these trends. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Great Unskewing
One way to think about the dynamics of jobs and firms is to examine the distribution of firm growth rates. The high pace of job reallocation we observe implies that firms vary considerably in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rognlie on productivity and employment
Matt Rognlie is one of those people who really knows how to reason from a model, and he can do so quantitatively by using compelling rules of thumb and back-of-the-envelope reasoning. Google around for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Millennials and finances
From Deseret News: Millennials may have their elders beat on the computer, but they have a few things to learn about finances.Some data on those elders: In the 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey...
View Article