People with concealed weapon licenses would be allowed to carry guns inside the buildings and classrooms of Wisconsin’s public universities and colleges under a bill introduced Monday by two state legislators.
Guest Contribution: “TPP Critics’ Nighttime Fears Fade by Light of Day”
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and former Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1997-99. A shorter version appeared at Project Syndicate.
How do consumers respond to lower gasoline prices?
U.S. gasoline prices averaged $3.31 a gallon over December 2013 to February 2014 but only $2.31 a gallon over December 2014 to February 2015. How did consumers respond to this windfall in their spending power? A new study by the JP Morgan Chase Institute has come up with some interesting answers.
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Outsourced Monetary Tightening
From Zeng and Wei in the Wall Street Journal today:
Central banks around the world are selling U.S. government bonds at the fastest pace on record, the most dramatic shift in the $12.8 trillion Treasury market since the financial crisis.
Debt, Devaluation, Trade, and More
Those were some of the topics covered at the West Coast Workshop on International Finance and Open Economy Macroeconomics, held last Friday on the beautiful UC-Santa Cruz campus, co-organized by Helen Popper (Santa Clara University), Michael Hutchison (UC Santa Cruz), and Carl Walsh (UC Santa Cruz).
What’s a Debt Limit?
From Marketplace, an interview with Ben Carson:
Supply, demand and the price of oil
Could the price of oil be a value such that the current quantity produced exceeds the current quantity consumed? The answer is yes, and indeed that has been the case for much of the past year.
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Reflections on Ten Years: Deficits, the Financial Crisis, Textbook Economics and Data Paranoia
Last Saturday marked ten years I’ve had the honor of contributing to Econbrowser, at the generous invitation of Jim Hamilton (here are his thoughts on ten years of Econbrowser). What follows are some thoughts on what I’ve learned during that time.
Record Year-to-Date Acres Burned
Acres burned already exceeds the comparable figure for 2006, the previous record year.
Figure 1: Acres burned to August 22 (blue bar), from August 22 to September 25 (red bar) and to year-end (green bar). Source: NIFC1, NFIC2, author’s calculations.
Using the same regression (log acres on log acres ytd) used in this post, my estimate of acres burned has risen from 9.62 million to 9.76 million.
This in turn raises the estimated total expenditures from $2.27 billion to $2.29 billion.
Figure 2: Acres burned (blue, left scale) and total Federal firefighting expenditure in dollars (pink, right scale) predicted 2015 (pink triangle). Source: NIFC1, NFIC2, and author’s calculations.
I’ve only tabulated direct Federal fiscal costs; here is an article on part of the human toll. Further note that these costs do not include state level costs. Cal Fire’s total budget for the current fiscal year is about $390 million.[1]
Economic importance of China
How important would an economic downturn in China be for the United States?
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