Seminar: John Murray

Our first seminar speaker of the semester has been scheduled. John Murray (University of Toledo) will be here on Friday, October 9th to present “Information Asymmetries in Maternity Insurance Before Federally Mandated Coverage.” The seminar will be held in room 230 from 4:30-5:30. A copy of the paper is available from the link above. We invite our economics majors to attend.

For those who have asked about graduate school in Economics....

Twenty-Cent Paradigms: New Econ PhD Rankings

100 Blogs for Econ Students

via Marginal Revolution. The best 100 blogs for econ students.

Economics in the News Blogs

Murray's ECO 120: Global Macroeconomics students have an Economics in the News Blog. In each entry, they cite a newspaper story related to economics and give a brief discussion about it. There should be dozens of entries each week:

http://www.murraylax.org/eco120/studentblog/

I also have my own Economics in the News Blog that I rarely update:

http://www.murraylax.org/econblog/

Econ Club

You are invited to the first Econ Club meeting of the year. We’re still working to get official club status, but that doesn’t stop us from meeting. We’ll be discussing current economic events, meeting some new faculty, and starting on a plan for the year. Hope you can make it.

Meeting: Thursday, September 17th at 5:30pm in room 114 Wimberly Hall.

If you have questions, contact Josh Lieder at lieder.josh at students.uwlax.edu, or check out the facebook group here.

Nothing is new.

A recent report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve suggests that the current flood of bank failures result from only four problems:

1. An imbalance of risk versus return,
2. Failure to diversify,
3. Offering products and services that bank management doesn’t fully understand,
4. Poor management of risks.

They further suggest that none of these things are anything new. That is, every bank failure from recessions past and present can be explained by one or more of these four factors. As much as we might like to call the current situation "unprecedented" and blame our problems on new fancy financial assets, lack of regulation, bad monetary policy, or bad economic policy from your least favorite politician, maybe it is just a problem of us failing to learn from our past mistakes.

Here's the link:
http://www.stlouisfed.org/newsroom/displayNews.cfm?article=496

Salaries

Why should you be an econ major? Because you want to make lots of money, but you don't want to be an engineer. Data here.

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more.