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Symposium on Operations and Economics of Competitive Sports Teams

Monday, April 11, 2016

UWL Graff Main Hall Auditorium

Featuring: Oliver Luck, NCAA Executive Vice President Regulatory Affairs

More details

Shut Down.

Estimates of the consequences of the shut down.

The Fed Surprise

As an exercise for the macro student, watch this video starting around minute 30. The video is a brief Q&A with Narayana Kocherlakota, the President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

Then make a prediction for monetary policy going forward.
A) The Fed Tapers or
B) The Fed Waits.

Then read what happened here.

Surprised?

Podcasts for Econ

You can find podcasts for econ here: http://audioecon.com/. I found this NPR episode on welfare for millionaire farmers interesting.

Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik speaks on “Alternative Perspectives on the Global Economic Crisis” at The University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.

[Video Link] 

Description: Patnaik, born in Jatni, Orissa, India, in 1945, is an Indian Marxist economist and political commentator who has achieved international acclaim for his analysis of economics and politics. He is in the Biographical Dictionary of 100 Dissenting Economists Past and Present.

For a less rosy perspective you might read this report from the Hindu Business Line

Pencasts

Students looking for help in their ECO110 or ECO120 would be wise to check out Professor Murray's pencasts. Below is an introduction to Supply and Demand. There are a host of others for ECO120 here. And since the first parts of ECO110 and ECO120 cover similar models you can probably find something useful for that class as well.

ECO 120: Intro to Supply and Demand
brought to you by Livescribe

One Percent

Do you want to join the one percent? Getting a degree from the college of business increases your chances. The NYT breaks down the top one percent by undergraduate degree.

Price of Weed

What explains the differences in prices of marijuana across North America? Demand factors, supply factors? Both? The data is here.

Connections and Contagion

What is the potential impact of the Euro crisis? Here is an excellent graphic on the degree of financial market integration.

Taxi Cartel

Here is a nice piece on the Milwaukee Taxi Cartel. Who is helped and who is hurt by the fact that no new taxi permits have been issued since 1992?

The city of Milwaukee capped the number of taxi permits at 321 way back in 1992, and consequently the price of a permit on the secondary market has risen to $150,000. That’s excellent news for people who made well-timed investments in Milwaukee taxis, but obviously it’s bad news for would-be taxi entrepreneurs who’d like to get into the market. Fewer permits means fewer jobs for cab drivers, and it means less access to taxis in the city. Dynamics of who uses taxis, what they cost, and where they’re available differ a lot from city to city and I’m not familiar with Milwaukee so I can’t say who in particular is disadvantaged by taxi scarcity but it’s not the sort of thing that helps a city’s quality of life or economy. Apparently the Institute of Justice, a libertarian law firm, thinks they have a chance of winning a legal argument that this is unconstitutional which I actually would find pretty surprising, but there’s no doubt that it’s bad policy. As I’ve noted before, when it comes to taxi cartels the proponents normally don’t even bother to make a public interest argument:

Deficit and Stimulus

Here is a very useful graphic on the budget deficit and its history. And here is a useful collection of papers on the effectiveness of the previous stimulus.

Reasoning in Economics

Here is a discussion about behavioral econ, psych, and inductive versus deductive reasoning. It is wonderful throughout.

What can the Fed do about stagflation?

The NY Times had a nice article about the Fed's lack of options to fight stagflation and the hope the China's economy doesn't sputter and make things worse for the U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/business/economy/29norris.html

FOMC post-meeting press conference

In an effort to be ever-more transparent, Ben Bernanke gave his first ever, of many, press conference. He'll be giving press conferences after every FOMC meeting.

Here is a summary of what he said,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/27/us-usa-fed-bernanke-highlights-idUSTRE73Q6ZU20110427

Central Banking Videos

The Federal Reserve has a lot of videos on its website about monetary policy and the federal reserve in general, and even information about recent news monetary policy actions.

Here is one short video about what the Federal Reserve is:
http://bcove.me/yq3ydto2

Here are all of the vidoes:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/media.htm

Fuel vs. Food.

The recent tax cut bill, rushed through at the close of 2010, extends a 45 cent per gallon subsidy for including ethanol in fuel. A recent NPR article discusses how this policy affects the price of food.

NPR: Fuel vs. Food

As an economics professor, I find the article woefully void of supply and demand graphs. If this bothered you too, checkout my newest 'PenCast'

To effectively view the PenCast below, click on the orange button on the top to go to full screen, then click the curvy arrow button on the bottom to rotate the view.

ECO 120: Supply Demand Ethanol
brought to you by Livescribe

QE2 in Cartoon

Pot

Two views on making it legal in California.

In the Long Run Keynes is Dead

From The New York Times. Whereas Europe looked to Keynes for getting out of the Great Depression, his influence has waned in the Great Recession.

Europe Is Turning Its Back on Keynes’s Cure for Recession
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
In the land of his birth, John Maynard Keynes’s view that deficit spending is crucial to avoiding a long recession has lately been willfully ignored.

Competition

Make a video. Win money.