Lynne Kiesling Greg Mankiw beat me to it yesterday by linking to and excerpting Michael Salinger’s commentary on price gouging in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Salinger, who is currently at the FTC (on leave from BU), draws his commentary from a recent FTC report on “price gouging” (I haven’t read it yet, maybe …
Lynne Kieslingj Ghana has beaten USA and advanced in the World Cup. In addition to the satisfaction of well-played football and national pride, can there be economic incentives motivating the players? Yes. The 23 members of the Ghana squad get bonus pay for each victory, and that bonus pay doubles in the round of 16: …
Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Chicago Tribune published an editorial about electricity policy in Illinois (registration required). We’ve got a lot of electricity policy issues on the table right now. Nine years ago, the political bargain struck to allow wholesale market competition in electric power was a ten-year retail rate freeze, at a discounted rate …
Chicago Tribune: Enable Free Markets in Electricity in Illinois Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Many of you probably already know that Wyoming was the first state in the US to extend voting to women, which they did as a Territory to ensure sufficient votes for statehood. More along those lines from Wikipedia’s entry on Wyoming: In 1869, Wyoming extended much suffrage to women, at least partially in …
Michael Giberson Greg Mankiw explains why the increase in Fed watching could be a bad sign: Perhaps increased Fed watching is inevitable whenever we have a new Fed chairman, but it is nonetheless troubling. Fundamentally, Fed watching is a symptom of ambiguity in monetary policymaking. Fed insiders do not have significantly more data on the …
The Ideal Fed Chairman Would Give Boring Speeches Read More »
Michael Giberson Gunnar Birgisson, at Bracewell & Guiliani’s Energy Legal Blog, writes that customers “aren’t happy with the high and rising operating costs of organized electric markets, including Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators.” Birgisson points out two developments – one at PJM and the other at ISO-New England – illustrating the current state …
The Surprisingly High Cost of Regulated Monopoly Power Markets Read More »
Michael Giberson The Independent Institute has released it’s Open Letter on Immigration. The press release explains: As the House and Senate struggle toward compromise on an immigration bill, tensions and rhetoric are rising. The signers of the Open Letter on Immigration believe that this emotional debate taking place in Washington, D.C. and around the country …
Lynne Kiesling I am in Jackson, Wyoming, attending the Western Conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. This afternoon and tomorrow morning my colleague Bart Wilson and I are running experimental economics workshops for the commissioners and staffers attending. We got very fortunate yesterday flying in; from the right side of the plane …
Michael Giberson Progress. The Washington Post reports: Pepco Holdings Inc. is planning to install “smart meters” in 2,250 District homes as part of a $2 million pilot project to give Pepco more information about residential electricity usage and give homeowners greater ability to manage power consumption and curb monthly bills…. About half the residences in …
Michael Giberson Apparently, people elsewhere are actually watching this World Cup thing. Problems faced by retailers emerged yesterday in figures from retail analysts Footfall, who measure shopper numbers. These show the numbers visiting department stores last week fell by 24per cent compared to the week before. The figure was 3.2per cent down on the same …
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