Previously, I reviewed the Currency Unions and Trade Literature here, and then shared some of my students’ referee reports of a recent Glick and Rose (2016) paper here. My undergraduates [ … ]

We need to encourage honesty above optimism. Once we can speak honestly, there is a foundation for optimism. Psychoanalysis teaches that one cause of depression is repressed anger. The rising [ … ]

In today’s irreligious and indeed antireligious climate the fashion is to dismiss Christianity as crude superstition, and to babble wisely about the separation of church and state. This is unfortunate, [ … ]

A VAT (value added tax) with no other tax — no income, corporate, estate, etc. etc. etc. — is pretty much the economists’ ideal. But how do you make it [ … ]

These are comments I gave on “Inflating away the public debt? An empirical assessment” by Jens Hilscher, Alon Aviv, and Ricardo Reis at the Becker-Friedman Institute Government Debt: Constraints and [ … ]

In a recent paper, Glick and Rose (2016) suggest that the Euro led to a staggering 50% increase in trade. To me, this sounded a bit dubious, particularly given my [ … ]

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently took exception to current US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s views on artificial intelligence (AI) and related topics. The difference between the two seems [ … ]

Time-travel thriller about a man living in 2013 tweeting desperate warnings to his 2017 self who has become President

Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor wrote a provocative What has bank capital ever done for us? at VoxEu, advertising the underlying paper Bank Capital Redux  (NBER, CEPR link here, [ … ]

…BUT if you watch this commercial + give us your email we’ll give you 7 more days of light. Then darkness again