The Grumpy Economist

China builds a railway station in 9 hours  (HT Marginal Revolution ). Yes, it's basically a propaganda video, but interesting nonethel...

The tariff and the wall were the big news this week, with some lessons for looming infrastructure. The Tariff 30% on solar cells, 20-50%...

Sometimes it is not good to get to the right answer for the wrong reasons. This thought comes to mind reading to recent WSJ articles, Walmar...

Are you a young economist or other professor, and would you like to spend a year at Stanford with no teaching? The Hoover National Fellows p...

Every now again in writing a blog one puts down an idea that is not only wrong, but pretty obviously wrong if one had stopped to think about...

I think most of the debate misses an important point about the state and local tax deduction -- incentives. Suppose you are in the top, (r...

Thank you and happy new year to all my readers and commenters.

Courtesy Greg Mankiw , the Joint Committee on Taxation distributional analysis of the new tax law. Bottom line: No change. Income cate...

Best sentence award: "It will not escape notice that New York buys subway construction the way all of America buys health care."...

I ran across a video by my former Chicago Booth colleague Austan Goolsbee that prompts some reflection on the role of economists as public i...

Greg Mankiw wrote a New York Times column December 24 criticizing the university endowment tax. I disagree, not so much with the wisdom of ...

Steve Williamson has an interesting new post on corporate taxes and investment, in which he claims that taxing corporate profits has no eff...

"Stepping on a Rake: the Fiscal Theory of Monetary Policy" is new paper, just published in the European Economic Review. This link...

Many commenters on the tax bill repeat the worry that companies will just use tax savings to pay dividends or buy back shares rather than ma...

Bigfoot's To-Do list Animatic from Lydia Fama on Vimeo . Vimeo channel , Youtube , website .

The High Cost of Good Intentions  is a superb new book by my Hoover colleague John Cogan. It is a political and budgetary history of U.S. ...

Hoover has just announced the 2018 Summer Boot Camp  August 19-25 2018 The Hoover Institution’s Summer Policy Boot Camp (HISPBC) is a...

How can you cut taxes but raise (distorting, marginal) rates at the same time? Add a deduction, but phase it out with income. Then people be...

The recent tax bill discussion revealed many ways that universities benefit from lots of obscure tax subsidies like everyone else in contemp...

The public and media discussion of "net neutrality" seems to have degenerated to "we want stuff for free." In the end, i...