MPLan

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Submissions

Alternatives to Police – Do They Work?

nominalnews.com

5 pointsby MPLanقبل 8 أشهر1 comments

Housing and Affordability – No Easy Solutions

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanقبل 8 أشهر1 comments

Timely Economics Nobel – Creative Destruction and GenAI

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanقبل 8 أشهر1 comments

A Tax by Any Other Name: Equity Stakes, Tariffs, Government Debt

nominalnews.com

4 pointsby MPLanقبل 9 أشهر2 comments

H-1Bs – Immigrants with Degrees Spur Economic Growth

nominalnews.com

2 pointsby MPLanقبل 10 أشهر1 comments

A Reader's Guide to Economic Headlines

nominalnews.com

2 pointsby MPLanقبل 11 شهرًا1 comments

GDP Will Reflect "AI" (Response to Dwarkesh Patel's Concern)

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanقبل 11 شهرًا1 comments

More Than a Safety Net – Value Created by Unemployment Benefits

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanقبل 11 شهرًا1 comments

Republican Administration Fires Head of BLS After 'Bad' Jobs Report

nominalnews.com

6 pointsby MPLanقبل 12 شهرًا2 comments

The Federal Reserve Is Right

nominalnews.com

6 pointsby MPLanقبل 12 شهرًا1 comments

Work Requirements – An Ineffective Policy

nominalnews.com

24 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية2 comments

Clearing Up the Free-Bus Debate

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية1 comments

GenAI – Will Workers Disappear?

nominalnews.com

2 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية2 comments

Yes – Tariffs Have Increased Prices and Inflation in the US

nominalnews.com

14 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية2 comments

Can Large Tech Companies Be 'Bad' for the Economy but Good for Workers?

nominalnews.com

2 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية1 comments

News: the US Credit Downgrade

nominalnews.com

1 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية2 comments

Modelling the Impact of Tariffs

nominalnews.com

2 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية0 comments

Why Import Tariffs Are Identical to Export Taxes

nominalnews.com

4 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية1 comments

Not Incentivized yet Efficient: Working from Home in the Public Sector

papers.ssrn.com

2 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية1 comments

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy

1 pointsby MPLanالسنة الماضية1 comments

comments

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

The debate around improving safety in cities often revolves around whether this means deploying more police or not. In New York City, the recent mayoral election had certain candidates promise an increase in police patrols, while another candidate proposed the creation of a non-police unit to deal with certain issue (homelessness and mental health).

But do these non-police approaches work? A recent paper by Blattman, Duncan, Lessing and Tobon (2024) (“BDLT”) tackles this issue with a fascinating research design and find somewhat surprising answers!

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

Louie, Mondragon and Wieland (2025) show that typical supply constraints such as zoning laws cannot explain the observed price differences across cities.

What does? Income.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

On October 13, 2025, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr1 – “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” – and Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt – “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction”.

The work by Aghion and Howitt is very timely, as it may help explain some of the rise in genAI investment spending.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

The US government has made headlines over the past year by taking an equity stake in Intel Corporation, along with 4 other companies. At the same, the US government has also levied significant tariffs, and continues to issue new debt (the current total debt to GDP is 125%).

So how are all of these topics connected? They’re all a form of tax.

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

Restricting college-educated immigration appears to:

    Reduce employment of locals;

    Reduce the wages of (most) locals;

    Reduce venture capital investment and IPOing;

    Reduce patenting;

    Increase outsourcing and offshoring.

Many of these effects are compounded when it involves smaller firms.

قبل 11 شهرًاdiscuss

With the media posting sensational economic stats daily, filtering out the noise becomes crucial.

قبل 11 شهرًاdiscuss

Should we care about Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Does GDP reflect what matters? Is GDP a good measure? Recently, an influential tech podcaster and interviewer, Dwarkesh Patel, brought up the topic in the following context:

"As measured by GDP, AI will be super undervalued. How would the datacenter of geniuses show up in GDP? GDP would show raw inputs (aka chip & energy), and raw outputs (aka cost of tokens). But wouldn't clearly reflect the value of the crazy new [stuff] that's being cooked up in those tokens. Similar problem to how the Internet's value is undercounted today (since many products are free, and thus contribute nothing to measured GDP).”

Dwarkesh Patel is both right and wrong. To understand why, we need go over what is the GDP measure, why we measure it, and does it capture what matters to us.

قبل 11 شهرًاdiscuss

Unemployment insurance, beyond consumption smoothing, allows people looking for jobs to find better job matches, which in turn increases earnings by $15,000 in the two years after UI receipt. The cost of UI, in comparison, is only $4,000.

قبل 12 شهرًاdiscuss

Immediately after the publication of the July jobs report, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, accusing her office of “manipulating” data for political ends. What really happened?

قبل 12 شهرًاdiscuss

Jerome Powell has come under significant criticism. Under closer inspection, the Federal Reserve's decisions are fully driven by economics.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Work requirements are often touted as a remedy to prevent the misuse of benefits. Instead, they only end up harming those who are most in need.

By looking at a natural experiment, researchers were able to find that work requirements end up pushing the most vulnerable people of the programs.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

The debate around free-buses and transit has been often framed as a question of whether a person would prefer cheaper transit or more transit.

This framing is not actually economic - how much of a service we provide and how we fund it are two different questions. This pertains to all government services (parks, parking, healthcare etc). Fares (and lack of fares) cause externalities and those should be discussed. That's what recent economic research on Chicago showed - an optimal transport policy would set fares close to zero.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Public predictions about the impact of genAI on workers and the economy are dramatic – but are they right?

Depending on our assumptions on the effectiveness of AI, economic models often suggest outcomes differing from what we see in the public sphere. For example, employment may rise in AI impacted jobs if the level expertise needed for the non-automatable parts of the job is not high.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

The price increases from tariffs can be seen in both economy-wide data and retail data. Core goods inflation in the PCE reading is already 0.33 percentage points higher due to tariffs, increasing overall inflation by 0.1 percentage points.

So far, we've only seen half of the tariff pass-through.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

A recent paper looks at an economic puzzle - innovation has been declining, but the number of researchers has gone up along with wage premiums.

A more concentrated market for researchers can partially explain these patterns.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

On May 16, 2025, Moody’s downgraded the rating of US debt from AAA (Aaa) to AA+ (Aa1). What does this mean and what does economics have to tell us about it.

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Fenizia and Kirchmaier (2025) (“FK”) studied the impacts of working from home by public sector employees. Workers assigned to work from home end up recording about 9%-10% more cases compared to workers in the office.

To read more details on this study: https://www.nominalnews.com/p/wfh-hybrid-productivity

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Clemens, Lewis and Postel (2018) (“CLP”) looked at the impacts of the termination of the Bracero Agreement. The original reasoning for cancelling the Bracero Agreement was to improve wages of US citizens in the agriculture sector, especially in states that had a high number of immigrants from Mexico under the Bracero Agreement. CLP found that there was no change in real wages for citizens after the agreement was terminated. Moreover, there was also no change on employment.

For additional information on this paper and other papers regarding non-college educated immigration, see here - https://www.nominalnews.com/p/h-2b-immigrants-economic-growt...

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

A firm that goes from having about half of their H-1B applications succeeding to winning all of their H-1B applications (firms on average apply for 2.5 H-1B visas in a given year):

- sees a 4.5 percentage point (10% more likely) increase in getting venture capital funding;

- sees a 1.5 percentage point (20% more likely) increase in going public (IPOing on the stock market);

- sees the number of patents increase by 4.8%.

More details at - https://www.nominalnews.com/p/h-1bs-immigrants-with-degrees-...

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

College-educated immigration is often considered to reduce local job-hiring and push down wages. It appears, however, that an additional H-1B lottery win increases both immigrant and local employment. Moreover, immigration reduces offshoring, increases patenting and increases venture capital investments.

To read more: https://www.nominalnews.com/p/h-1bs-immigrants-with-degrees-... ("H-1Bs – Immigrants with Degrees Spur Economic Growth")