EconTech

Tyler writes:

Bargaining with your roommates
Joseph, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I recently leased my first apartment…with a friend who just graduated from college with me. It’s a nice apartment, and spacious, but it has one bedroom that is larger and nicer (better views, bigger closet, more windows) than the other.
We’re looking for the most equitable way [...]

. . . Al Jazeera reports. My question is, has there ever been a situation where a country that was outside the international mainstream made a change in policy due to sanctions. There are the obvious major counter-examples (Cuba, North Korea, Iraq). I cannot think of any evidence that supports the notion that sanctions are [...]

Tyler Cowen argues that most anti-trade positions are driven by xenophobia. Dani Rodrik argues that differing rule-sets (labor laws and such) are a serious source of concern. Tyler and his co-blogger Alex respond. All of those posts are worth reading.
In my mind, this is definitely not an either-or situation. I hope that before I die [...]

The roots of sticky prices
Apparently the beasts are back in charge:
Now we’re beginning to find out that eBay’s seemingly revolutionary core - the online auction - may have been a fad all along. As Business Week reports, eBay’s auctions are “a dying breed.” Buyers and sellers are reverting to the traditional retailing model of fixed [...]

Bore-Gush, revisited
Recently I worried that the news media would do again what they did in 2000, and somehow latch on to the storyline that a very conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat were really practically the same on the issues. And lo and behold, it’s starting (via dday).
As a numbers guy, I’m particularly upset that [...]

More on Carbon Policy Equivalence
Please read Arnold Kling.
My sympathies in economics lie with the so-called “new institutionalists.” I think institutionalists are going to see more clearly than neoclassicals the rather big difference between a carbon tax and a whole new market institution for trade in government-created and government-rationed permits.
But let’s back up a little, [...]

Congress Pushes Curbs on Doctor-Owned Hospitals
The N.Y. Times reports (”Concerned about costs…“) that Congress is trying to impose new restrictions on physician-owned, for-profit hospitals. The legislators fear that these hospitals 1) drive up costs and 2) provide poor quality.
Legislators worry that when physicians own the hospital, they may have more of an incentive to order [...]

DeLong adds to and neatly summarizes Thoma’s cleanup:
Thoma vs. Mankiw on Opt-Out Financial Regulation

I score this one for Mark Thoma. Mark Thoma is… puzzled, I think is the word… by Greg Mankiw’s claim that there is something intellectually wrong with Austan Goolsbee’s endorsement of the idea that there should be “enhanced regulation of any financial [...]

I don’t have much to add to the debate on emissions control policy that seems to have flared up recently. Clearly, both have advantages and disadvantages that the other doesn’t. The major difference seems to be that, under uncertainty on the optimal level of emissions, that cap-and-trade produces potentially excessive costs if the cap is [...]

I asked for some data on crane accidents and their supply and demand. Someone sent me a volley of links on accidents. However, I didn’t get data on crane supplies. However, there seems to be a pre-existing view that my hunch was right. This ABC article from January sums up what many others are saying:
The [...]

Pharmaceutical Facts
Time to develop and market a new drug: 10-15 years
Average Cost to develop a new drug (2006): $1.318 billion
Total R&D spending on drugs in 2007: $58.8 billion

Generic share of market in 2007: 67%
Percent of marketed drugs that cover R&D costs: Only 20%
Total number of drugs approved in 2007: 23
R&D as a percent of [...]

There SEEMS to have been a lot of recent crane collapses, more than in any other time that I can think of. However, not being an automated data collector, I am not particularly confident in such memories. The reason I ask is that I am told that there is a global shortage of cranes. After [...]

I won’t bother with the full post, [Edit: Which you can find here: Trade and Inequality] but this caught my attention:
Samuelson — who btw is a Nobel Prize winner and very much a mainstream neoclassical economist — has also published an important paper which shows that, theoretically, under some (quite plausible) circumstances a productivity gain [...]

Sweden: Image and Reality
Sweden is often viewed as either social democratic paradise or lefty hell, depending on one’s political and economic orientation.
Parts of the popular image are true. Sweden has a strong political left; the Social Democratic party was in power continuously for more than four decades in the middle of the 20th century and [...]

Lazy Lineup Study
Thursday’s Nature suggests standard police line-ups may not be so bad:
The traditional US procedure is familiar to any fan of television cop shows. Witnesses are presented with a line-up that includes both the suspect and a number of innocent people, or foils’, and are asked to identify the perpetrator. In the early 1990s [...]