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Robert “Bob” Rossana died back in February of this year. I was inadvertently left off of the university announcement email and did not hear about it until much later. Bob was my dissertation advisor. He meant a lot to me and so I want to share some thoughts. In graduate school, there were four macroeconomics…
Economic theory is important. Theory provides discipline. Economists write down a set of assumptions and follow those assumptions to their logical conclusions. The validity of a particular theory is then tested against observed data. Modern economic theory is often mathematical, but theory comes in a variety of forms. Sometimes theory is used to develop and…
Some time ago, I was listening to NPR and the hosts were discussing the Jones Act. For those who are unaware, the Jones Act requires that any shipping done from one U.S. port to another U.S. port must be carried by a U.S.-flagged ship with a U.S. crew that was built in the U.S. The…
Yesterday's post on exhaustive resources has drawn a lot of ire from critics. Some have argued that I didn't address the problem of economic growth. In short, the argument is that there are two sources of economic growth. The first is that increased efficiency of resources allows us to produce more stuff with the same…
I recently recorded an episode of The Economics Detective podcast with Garrett Petersen. The subject of the podcast is my paper, "U.S. Maritime Policy and Economic Efficiency." A link to the paper is here. A link to a blog post I recently wrote about the paper is here.
Yesterday, George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that the survival of capitalism relies on persistent economic growth and persistent economic growth is impossible in the long-run because there are finite resources in the world. In response, I made the following popular, but sarcastic tweet. https://twitter.com/RebelEconProf/status/1176133086557245441 The tweet was meant to be funny. The format itself…
(The post is also going to be cross-posted at Lars Christensen's Market Monetarist blog.) As the coronavirus spreads across the world, there is growing concern about the economic implications of the virus and what, if any, policy action is required of governments. Some have proposed traditional stimulus measures to counteract the virus while others have…
A couple of links to things I have been working on... My paper entitled, "The Riksbank, Emergency Finance, Policy Experimentation, and Sweden's Reversal of Fortune" is now forthcoming at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. The paper includes a lot of background on Swedish governance and fiscal capacity, as well as information about the…
Imagine you are in your high school algebra class and you are presented with the following two equations: $latex x + y = 20$ $latex 2x + 10y = 100$ Two linear equations with 2 unknowns. This is a simple problem to solve. Now suppose that your teacher gives you the following three equations: $latex…