Lynne Kiesling Recently Walmart announced that they would begin operating small-format stores called Walmart Express, the first two of which opened in June in Arkansas. If you look at the portfolio of earlier Walmart stores, they range in size from the 185,000 square foot Supercenter (the big kahuna) to the 42,000 square foot Market (with …
Walmart Express, Market Definition, and Local Politics Read More »
Michael Giberson Antitrust regulators at the FTC have taken adverse interest in Google’s activities. At Regulation2point0, Robert Hahn and Peter Passel comment (links in original, highlighting added): … perhaps the FTC probe may prove to be just another minor bump on the road to riches. But there are reasons to believe that it will prove to …
Antitrust As the Enemy of Innovation, and Therefore the Enemy of Consumers Read More »
Michael Giberson State and federal policy provides substantial subsidies to renewable power producers, but just because the subsidies go to renewable power producers in the first instance doesn’t mean they receive the full net subsidy. Figuring out the exact distribution of the subsidy requires extensive additional analysis. For example, local governments are exercising their authority …
Lynne Kiesling Some ideas catching my attention and worth sharing: 1. Another demonstrated benefit of vitamin D: immune response. I am a data point on this study reported in Science Daily — I really cranked up my vitamin D supplementation over the winter (1600 IU/day), and did not have a single cold. This study focuses …
Michael Giberson Sam Kazman, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, opines on the loss of spare tires in some new car models: Fewer tires, higher taxes. That may be what’s in store for drivers under the federal government’s spiraling fuel economy mandates (known as CAFE, for Corporate Average Fuel Economy). The Department of Transportation is floating …
Lynne Kiesling I find two things especially intriguing about environmental economics. One is the pervasiveness of ill-defined property rights as causes of environmental issues, and how it opens up one’s thinking to look at environmental issues as challenges of ill-defined property rights. Another is the tension between the anthropocentric nature of environmental economics (and economics …
Valuing Ecosystem Services is Difficult and Controversial Read More »
Michael Giberson Art Carden, in his Economic Imagination blog at Forbes.com, explains “Price Gouging Laws Hurt Storm Victims.” How many people see natural disasters like the tornadoes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Joplin, Missouri and say “we should be working to impede the recovery and make life harder for storm victims?” Probably no one. How many …
Lynne Kiesling A happy amendment to my excoriation of the Senate yesterday for their procedural crankiness in failing to pass the elimination of ethanol subsidies … today the proposal made like a phoenix and was put on the floor again (WSJ, sub reqd), this time passing 73-27. The author of the WSJ article is not …
Michael Giberson From the Harvard Electricity Policy Group meeting in February 2011. By convention the meetings are off-the-record, so the speaker’s name is not identified in the summary: I think the most important distinction between the fields of climate science and economics for me is the question of evidence. Science is characterized by a subtle …
Economics of Power Market Design Compared Unfavorably to Climate Science Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Although the federal government is actually in a budget crisis and our elected so-called representatives claim to be dealing with it, they are acting rather like they are in denial, or still embroiled in such petty partisan bickering that they refuse to make difficult choices with short-run costs and long-run benefits. Take ethanol …
They Can’t Even Pull off the Ethanol Subsidy Repeal … Read More »
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