CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST

Note:  On February 22, 2012, two  comments from readers added at the end of the post.  ____________ The United States has far fewer laws...

Los Angeles Magazine has a lively and well-informed article, " Between the Lines" written by Dave Gardetta about the history and ...

How should the scarce resource of the radio spectrum for communication be allocated? One of the classic triumphs of economic analysis has be...

Buried in a U.S. Department of Agriculture bill that President Obama signed into law on November 18 is a provision that will probably lead t...

Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer from UC-Berkeley point out in NBER Working Paper #17170 released last June: "The average we...

I had been blissfully unaware, until I saw an article about the federal tanning tax a few days ago in USA Today , that such a tax was part o...

K. Jack Riley of RAND has been thinking over the time and cost tradeoffs of airline passenger security. A short overview is here ; a chapter...

David A. Price of the Richmond Fed has an interview with Bruce Yandle . On the difference between a “systems approach” and a “process appr...

  Here's a gentle brain-twister:  Person A upgrades their car from one that gets 11 MPG to one that gets 13 MPG.  Person B upgrades ...