Monthly Archives: July 2015
Ottawa as Robin Hood
As the eurozone bumps along from major crisis to minor crisis to existential crisis, the point is often made that a key feature of successful monetary unions that is missing in the eurozone is a system of transfers. These transfers act a sort of compensation for renouncing the option of pursuing an independent monetary policy.
Open borders vs forced emigration
Let's start simple. There are two physically identical islands, Alpha and Beta. There are two agents, A and B. Initially, A lives on Alpha, and B lives on Beta. Under "Open Borders", each agent has the right to move to either island, if he wishes to. Under "Forced Emigration", each agent has the obligation to […]
Maybe profs should haggle over textbook prices?
Mark Perry shows that textbook prices have been increasing, a lot. I don't know why that is. But maybe there's something that profs could do about it. The publisher's rep drops by your office. She asks which book you will be adopting for your course. She really wants the sale. You say:
Greece’s Plan B
Very interesting. But was it also stupid? [Update: Here's Hugo Dixon's "snap analysis". (He also deserves a HT.)] Leave aside the political/legal aspects. How would it work? In theory, at least. (Did I really need to add that?) Here are some very quick thoughts:
Thoughts on reading Silvio Gesell on money
I hadn't read Silvio Gesell. I only knew about him from Chapter 23 of Keynes' General Theory, from Miles Kimball's post on Gesell's plan for negative interest rates on money, and from the Wikipedia entry. But I'm halfway through writing a paper on Keynes vs Gesell, so I thought I should probably actually read him. […]
Are all Eurozone GDP data “fake”?
The title is more inflammatory than I want it to be, but I can't think of a simple way to ask the question properly. And it is a genuine question, because I don't know how they construct GDP data for Eurozone countries. And I know there's no chance I will be able to figure out […]
Proxies for monetary disequilibrium
Perhaps we should think about monetary policy this way. If all prices were perfectly flexible, monetary policy wouldn't matter much. Monetary policy matters because not all prices are perfectly flexible, which means that bad monetary policy causes monetary disequilibrium, which is what happens when prices want to change but don't change. Recessions and booms are […]
Panglossian expectations and the Phillips Curve
[This post is unfinished. I was writing it yesterday, thinking it would work out, then I realised there was a problem. I slept on it, but can't see any obvious resolution. But sometimes we learn from seeing that things don't work out the way we thought they would. So I'm posting it anyway. I will […]
Individual and aggregate, marginal and total, incentives to cut prices in a recession
The purpose of this post is to lay out the intuition behind my discussion/argument with Steve Randy Waldman. (I'm not sure whether this post will help or hinder my discussion with Steve. But students of New Keynesian macro might find it useful regardless.) We need to distinguish between the individual and aggregate incentives of cutting […]
Coordination problems and discontinuities
Just a quickie. This is for Steve Randy Waldman, who says "Downward price stickiness is a coordination problem, plain and simple." It is a coordination problem (I think), but it's a bit more than just a coordination problem. There must be something else too, like a discontinuity, or something, to get that coordination problem. Let […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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