Carl Shapiro[!] and Ali Yurukoglu of the Stanford B-school argue what sounds an awful lot my old thesis advisor, Harold Demsetz:
. . . most U.S. firms aren’t acquiring market power through anticompetitive means but by outperforming their rivals in ways that benefit consumers.
Economist Donald Boudreaux argues relatively briefly but very effectively why Americans shouldn't worry about our trade deficits.
A relatively short refutation of the dopey academic idea that consumers are made worse off by "too many" choices. (The original experiment on which this idea is based is quite flawed.)
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget presents a "bank" of possible ways to reduce the federal deficit.
An interesting policy proposal, a solid knock on a common polling question, and . . . a pretty good crack about economists.
Piece presents a clever illustration of a point that probably isn't emphasized enough in undergraduate econometrics: be really careful that your regression's "control" variables don't control for too much.
Summary of findings of an interesting-sounding new book.
"Economist Claudia Goldin finds it largely comes down to societal expectations of how much men should do at home."
Forthcoming in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. Free download. Abstract:
This paper presents new evidence on the growing scale of large businesses in the United States, Japan and 11 European countries. It documents a broad increase in industry concentration across the majority of countries and sectors over the period 2002–2017. The rising concentration is strongly linked to investment in intangibles—particularly innovative assets; and software and data—and this relationship is magnified in more globalised industries. The results are consistent with intangibles disproportionately benefiting large firms, enabling them to scale up and increase their market shares by leveraging intangibles across multiple markets.
Much like school choice, this is a winning issue for conservatives.