The Grumpy Economist

I think I finally have figured out why California is mandating solar panels on top of houses. ( WSJ story here .) As energy, environmental...

I arrived at the DMV yesterday at 9 AM. My number came up at 5:45 -- you have to wait anxiously all day as you have 10 seconds to respond to...

From Alejandro Rodriguez, my correspondent from t he last post We are ***! People are withdrawing funds from fixed income mututal funds (w...

My friend and colleague Alejandro Rodriguez, director of the Department of Economics at CEMA in Buenos Aires, wrote me a few emails that Arg...

"A coming debt crisis in the US?" warns a Deutsche Bank report * by Quinn Brody and Torsten Slok. Source: DB This graph is g...

Quotas. This morning's Wall Street Journal  "Trump postpones steel tariff decision.." starts optimistic President Donald T...

My Hoover colleague Richard Epstein posted a revealing essay on the nature of environmental regulation last week, with environmental regula...

The Fama-Miller Center at Chicago Booth jointly with EDHEC and the Review of Financial Studies will host a conference on September 27–28,...

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have to solve two and a half important problems if they are to become currencies: 1) Unstable values 2) High t...

This lovely graph comes from " Learning and the Improving Relationship Between Investment and q " by Daniel Andrei, William M...

Two more points occur to me regarding share  buybacks . 1)When buybacks increase share prices, and management makes money on that, it's ...

Teaching a PhD class and preparing a few talks led me to a very simple example of an idea, which I'm calling the "fiscal theory ...

The China trade argument has boiled down to intellectual property and trade. Roughly it has gone like this: "We need to stop China fr...

Reaction to the Washington Post oped ( blog post , pdf ) on debt  has been sure and swift. We suspected we might get criticized by Republic...

Economists delight in unravelings -- behavioral responses that undo bright ideas. A subsidy for skunks produces cats with white stripes. Two...

Now that 30 days have passed I can post the full oped on buybacks at the Wall Street Journal . As the Republican tax reform has gained pop...

An oped on debt in the Washington Post . Growing debt and deficits are a danger. If interest rates rise, debt service will rise, and can pro...

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman's  The Role of Monetary Policy , one of the most influential essays in e...

Unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies, unexpected behavioral changes in response to ignored incentives, unusual supply (or de...

Justin Baer and Ryan Tracy have an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal  commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Bear Stearns bai...