The Grumpy Economist

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...

The Fama Portfolio , is a new book from the University of Chicago Press. This is a collection of Gene Fama's papers, edited by Toby Mo...

A short oped for the Wall Street Journal here   on stock buybacks. As usual, they ask me not to post the whole thing for 30 days though you ...

An oped on tariffs, for  Fox news here . That tariffs are bad is rather obvious to readers of this blog, but perhaps marshaling and digestin...

Once per decade or so it is worth revisiting the famous 1930 economists' letter on Tariffs . (The link, at econjournalwatch.org, has a c...

A debt crisis does not come slowly and predictably. This year's short term bond holders, a very risk averse lot, are mostly interested i...

On Friday, I went to the NBER EFG (Economic Fluctuations and Growth) meeting at the SF Fed. Program and papers here .  The papers were great...