The following is from today’s Daily Bruin. UCLA professor and 2002 California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon often dresses up as famous economic figures like J.P. Morgan for his classes. “A couple years after I ran for governor, a friend of mine asked me, what are you going to do now?” Simon said. “I said I’d […]
Andrew Atkeson and Pierre-Olivier Weill’s work on the impact of Dodd-Frank regulations is described in this Anderson Review article.
The sharing economy represents a set of peer-to-peer online marketplaces that facilitate matching between demanders and suppliers of various goods and services. The suppliers in these markets are often small (mostly individuals), and they often share excess capacity that might otherwise go unutilized. Economic theory would suggest that the sharing economy improves economic efficiency by […]
Yesterday, Nobel Prize winner, Professor Heckman, gave a MAE distinguished speaker lecture on “Policies to Promote Social Mobility”. Professor Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has conducted groundbreaking work with a consortium of economists, psychologists, sociologists, statisticians and neuroscientists showing that quality early childhood development […]
In its latest issue, the leading German antitrust law journal “Wettbewerb und Wirtschaft” is interviewing UCLA-professor Volker Nocke. The interview centers around the usefulness of the “as-efficient competitor test” for predation and foreclosure, which the European Court of Justice appears to endorse in its judgment in the Intel case; the role of economics in antitrust […]
Robert Barro talked about his views of the effect of the 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”. He argued that the lower corporate tax rates will lower the cost of capital, and raise the long-run GDP by around 8%. He also argued that the individual tax cuts will raise the incentive for individuals to work […]
In an essay in Politico, Professor Lleras-Muney discusses the lessons from the Mothers’ Pension Program, an early 20th century welfare program that gave cash to single mothers. Using census records, she finds that children in the program lived one to two years longer, and obtained higher education and incomes. The article can be found here.
Merger approval decisions of national antitrust authorities have important effects on other jurisdictions. For example, the merger of two U.S. pharmaceutical companies may lead to higher drugs prices in Europe, or affect the worldwide level of innovation. As the efficiency gains induced by a merger might be sufficient to outweigh its anti-competitive effect in one […]
The rise of information technology has made it relatively simple to change prices over the life of a product. Such “dynamic pricing” is important for many industries: In retailing, sellers can carefully manage end-of season sales; in the airline industry, firms can adjust the price of a particular flight to the number of seats sold, […]
As part of the MAE Distinguished Speaker series, Pat Bajari, the Chief Economist of Amazon, gave a talk on using big data in practice. His talk focused on the methodology of how to continuous refine algorithms to make steady improvements, by developing new models, training them on data and then testing them against competitors. […]
