Lynne Kiesling Hal Varian makes a persuasive argument and does us all a great service with his Economic Scene column in today’s New York Times (registration required). He focuses on two specific aspects of the workings of oil and gasoline markets: storage arbitrage and the role of speculators. Storage arbitrage explains why, even if you …
Lynne Kiesling One of the most important, and least understood, economic relationships is tax incidence. Policymakers often hold the mistaken belief that when they impose a tax on a particular type of income, the people who create and earn that income are the ones who pay the tax. What they fail to understand is that …
Tax Incidence: Who Bears the Burden of Tax Increases? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling One of the ways to talk about using experimental economics to test-bed policy changes is to use the metaphor of the wind tunnel. Either as a metaphor or as an actual engineering tool, the wind tunnel can be extremely valuable. It’s also true for cycling, as seen in this article from Bicycling magazine …
Wind Tunnel Testing: Engineering For Structures and For Cycling Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Run, don’t walk, to Randall Parker’s place and read his excellent and thorough post on the science, economics, and politics of ethanol in Brazil and the US. Chock full of outstanding and informative links. I also had not thought about what he mentions in his parting comment about ethanol from biomass: But my …
Lynne Kiesling This AP story on today’s oil market gives a nice overview of the roilings in the market over the past month. Thus far today markets are calm in anticipation of Iran’s response to the UN about its uranium enrichment.
Lynne Kiesling … as Tyler Cowen was yesterday, today we hear news that in the year ended June 30, New Zealand’s wine exports hit a record high. The grape harvest grew 11 percent and the value of wine exports grew 18 percent. NZ winemakers expect this trend to continue. Also interesting is the shift in …
New Zealand Wine: Speaking of International Trade … Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Virginia Postrel’s Forbes column from the September 4 issue uses Adam Smith to great effect in analyzing how people complain that there’s economic stagnation, even though the evidence of growth and prosperity is obvious. We see the same phenomenon today. Nowadays, candid and intelligent people–not to mention partisans–tell us that the average American’s …
Measuring Economic Growth: Does the Swiffer Count? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Greg Mankiw has a great example of how to use Bayes Theorem, applied to nomination and election markets for the 2008 Presidential race at Tradesports. Perhaps if we followed Chris Dillow’s advice and taught gambling at school, we would have a more numerate and probabilistically literate population, so people would be more intelligent …
Lynne Kiesling The boom in natural gas prices has led to revived interest in drilling in Oklahoma and Texas: A flurry of home building, packed hotels, the new cars and trucks cruising the red dirt oil patch along the Texas border 110 miles west of Oklahoma City announce a natural gas boom that hasn’t been …
Lynne Kiesling Sounds like it; Robert McDowell, the most recent FCC appointee, appears to believe that free and responsible people are capable of making their own decisions in the telecommunications realm: McDowell, 43, also signaled that he won’t necessarily follow the wishes of FCC Chairman and fellow Republican Kevin Martin. That may make it harder …
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