Entries by Simon Board

Arbitration in Wage Negotiations

Arbitration is a private bilateral conflict resolution procedure in which a third party, the arbitrator, makes a binding decision on the dispute. Compared to formal litigation through a court system, it is generally faster and cheaper. Arbitration has been extensively employed to resolve disputes including labor impasses, disagreements concerning commercial contracts, and tariff negotiations, among […]

Granular Comparative Advantage

Large firms play a pivotal role in international trade, with a significant share of exports done by a small number of mega-firms, which enjoy substantial market power across destination markets. The fates of these large firms shape, in part, the countries’ trade patterns. For instance, Nokia in Finland or the Intel plant in Costa Rica have […]

Match-Specific Quality in Education

Despite dramatic expansions in access to schooling in low-income countries, learning levels remain low. For example, in rural Pakistan, 25% of primary school students don’t experience any test score gains over the course of year. This has led to substantial interest by policymakers and researchers alike in interventions such as teacher training that aim to […]

Walter Williams, UCLA Ph.D.

From the Wall Street Journal: America has lost one of its greatest economists and public intellectuals. Walter Williams died Wednesday morning after teaching his final class at George Mason University on Tuesday. He was 84. For 40 years Walter was the heart and soul of George Mason’s unique Department of Economics. Our department unapologetically resists […]

Remembering Ed Lazear

Described as “perhaps the foremost labor economist of his generation,” UCLA alumnus, Stanford economics professor, and White House advisor, Edward P. Lazear passed away this week. Professor Lazear received undergraduate and masters degrees in economics from UCLA in 1971. He then obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard before joining the faculty at Chicago and Stanford. Professor […]

Bond Liquidity During the Covid-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on the global economy. To cope with this unprecedented economic shock, many large US corporations turned to the $10 trillion corporate bond market. However, with the prospect of downgrades and possible defaults, along with widespread outflows from corporate bond funds, reports of illiquidity began to surface very early on: […]

Anastasia Bogdanova

“All these equations and graphs, how often am I going to use them at work anyway?” More likely than not, this question will have crossed your mind at some point in your undergraduate career, especially when you’re scratching your head over an elusive concept in lectures or working through pages of dense problem sets. But […]

Do Youth Employment Programs Work?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 10% of workers today are unemployed. This rate however is at least twice as high among those ages 15-25. This pattern is not unique to today. In fact, youth unemployment rates have always been much higher than unemployment rates for the rest of the population, at least […]

Lloyd Greif

UCLA is ranked as the top American school for economic mobility, and there is no better example than that of Lloyd Greif. Once a full-time student and employee, he worked his way to become one of UCLA’s most prestigious alumni and one of California’s most accomplished investment bankers. Before coming to Westwood, Greif grew up […]