When the unexpected occurs and changes our view of stock market risk, we call it a black swan or fat tail because it is far from the mean of a bell curve.
This week’s everyday economics stories included minimum wage, price floors, cost-benefit analysis, behavioral economics, financial regulation and public goods.
In its 2300 pages of financial regulation, Dodd-Frank has an Eddie Murphy Rule. Do you remember the end of Trading Places? Having bribed someone to get a USDA orange crop report before it was publicly released, the Duke brothers start…
It will be tough to remedy “too big to fail” with the Volcker Rule. At the other extreme, some suggest a 2013 version of Glass-Steagall. Here is the short version of the facts: Proposed by former Fed Chair Paul Volcker,…
Presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer said there would be six 15-minute segments in the first presidential debate on October 3rd. Devoting the entire first half to “the economy,” he will also cover healthcare, the role of government, and “governing.” Like the…
What happens when everyone knows how much you earn? A Boulder, Colorado firm, has voluntarily decided to let workers check a spreadsheet and see what others take home. One employee said she likes it, even when she discovers someone earns…
Having experienced an economic calamity, don’t we just need to figure out how to prevent it from happening again? Yes…but that might be impossible. MIT economist Andrew Lo read 21 books on the financial crisis. 11 were from academics, 10…
University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales tells the story of being asked to tape his windows during a tornado watch in Boston. A similar mandate in Italy, he said, would mean that the brother of the mayor was in the tape…
In Boca Raton, Florida, during the early 1990s, a group of JP Morgan bankers gathered for an “offsite” weekend. Have some fun, get some sun, do some brainstorming. They had hoped to create a new product. And they did. Their…
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