Michael Giberson We’ve mentioned the “natural resource curse” a few times here. Harvard’s Jeffrey Frankel provides a recent and thorough overview of the literature in “The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey” with a helpful focus on what policies resource rich companies can consider to mitigate the curse. Abstract: It is striking how often countries with …
Frankel Surveys the Natural Resource Curse Literature Read More »
Michael Giberson Michael Finney observes that Girl Scout cookies sell at different prices in different locations, and he asks (tongue in cheek), is it “Girl Scout cookie price gouging?” No, actually it is more like “zone pricing“ price discrimination – setting the price to a level that the local market will bear. (EDITED, see comments …
Lynne Kiesling I continue to be thoroughly disgusted by the disingenuousness of the health care policy debate in Washington. From a public choice perspective I understand why the debate continues to focus on what I think are the tangential and ancillary questions, and the attempts to tweak and improvise around the edges … but my …
Health Care: End Third-party Payer, or Stop Wasting My Time and Money Read More »
Michael Giberson A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed a class-action claim filed against four Martha’s Vineyard gasoline retailers. The suit claimed the stations engaged in price fixing over several years and in price gouging after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Fall 2005. Defendants argued that pricing patterns observed by plaintiffs were insufficient to support …
Lynne Kiesling Several years ago Jamie Oliver set out to improve school food for a group of British children. In part he was motivated by wanting to impart a love of good, healthy food in children by sharing his own joy in food, and in part he believed that healthier school meals would lead to …
Jamie Oliver, Children and Food, and Field Experiments Read More »
Michael Giberson Ticket scalping, like price gouging, is a usually pro-social market activity that is stuck with a pejorative name. At Swifter, Higher, sportswriter Kyle Whelliston writes about his experience picking up a cheap ticket into the first hockey game of the Vancouver Olympics. It wasn’t as easy as he hoped, but at a cost …
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a paper that befits the snowy month we’ve had in the U.S. … Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz at Dartmouth find that ski resorts over-report snowfall, and that the proliferation of iPhones has led to more consumer information on accurate snowfall and ski conditions. The paper abstract: Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive …
Michael Giberson Paul Kedrosky gave a short talk at TED 2010 on the Simon/Ehrlich bet on commodities prices, and posts a summary of the content as “Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet.” If the Simon-Ehrlich bet is to be re-litigated, and Kedrosky comment is taken as offering a brief in favor of Ehrlich’s position, what can be …
Michael Giberson Via David Henderson at EconLog, about buying locally.
Michael Giberson No doubt that since Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize last year for, among other things, her work on decentralized approaches to common pool resource issues, a small legion of social science graduate students are looking for new cases of non-governmental management of common pool resources. Here is an example supplied by Fred …
Private Management of the Commons: Parking Spots and Chicago Snow Read More »
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