The Feed

What’s the general economic consensus on the impact of student loans on the household finances of those who hold them? Here’s “Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much—Or Not Enough?” (Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, 2012), which argues, “[t]here is little evidence to suggest that the average burden of loan repayment relative to income has increased ...

Neil Irwin at Wonkblog has a new post up:  The Deficit is Falling Fast. Can Washington Accept Victory? He quotes John Makin of the American Enterprise Institute, who says, approvingly, that the U.S. has probably imposed enough austerity “for now.”  Then he shows us the evidence. Read more at New Economic Perspectives

The International Monetary Fund is accustomed to rallies outside their Washington, D.C., headquarters during their annual meetings. What was different this past weekend was that the activists on the outside and several high-profile government and financial industry speakers on the inside were calling for the same thing: a financial transaction tax. Outside, around a thousand ...

In his draft paper on Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change, University of California-Irvine professor Rick Hasen makes a powerful case for the need for out-of-the-box thinking on American political reform. But he also makes a curious omission. Fair voting alternatives to winner-take-all elections do not receive a single mention in the paper, even though they were promoted in ...

The Harvard economists Carmen M Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff ironically titled their much-celebrated book on financial instability and economic growth “This Time Is Different,” asserting that the last crisis was not unique. Rather, they contend it was the most recent manifestation of an age-old tendency for both governments and private investors to delude themselves about ...

Earlier this week, the United States Senate failed to approve an amendment calling for stricter background checks on gun purchases. Much has been made of the fact that close to 90 percent of the country supports some form of increased background checks, as well as the fact that Senate rules required 60 votes for the measure to pass, as opposed to ...

Most of us accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is impressive since we can look up in the sky and see the sun going around the earth. We believe the opposite because we have been told about the research of astronomers over the centuries showing that what we can see with our ...

Reinhart/Rogoff-gate isn’t the first time that incorrect data have been a thorn in the side of those seeking austerity and deficit reduction. It’s been a remarkable feature of attempts to “pivot” away from dealing with mass unemployment that they’ve relied in large part on government data to make their points — data that usually turn out to ...

Kudos to UMass economists for exposing the flaws in R&R’s empirical work. The conclusion that there is some magic debt ratio beyond which growth slows was never substantiated by R&R’s data–they fudged and flubbed the empirical work. True enough. However, the whole “research” method as well as the “theory” behind it was bunk anyway, as ...

Shareholder Value and its Disappointments By the end of the 20th century, a broad consensus had emerged in the Anglo-American business world that corporations should be governed according to the philosophy often called shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy theory taught that corporations were owned by their shareholders; that directors and executives should do what the company’s owners/shareholders ...