Clark Center Forum

 

Anil Kashyap offers his summary of how the Greek crisis started and has evolved. Read summary 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) Economic analysis can identify whether countries are using their exchange rates to benefit their own people at the expense of their trading partners’ welfare.

B) Bank of Japan monetary policies that result in a weaker yen make Americans generally worse off. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

Behavior in many complex and seemingly intractable strategic settings can be understood more clearly by working out what each party in the game will choose to do if they realize that the other parties will be solving the same problem.  This insight has helped us understand behavior as diverse as military conflicts, price setting by competing firms and penalty kicking in soccer. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

The 9% cumulative increase in real US median household income since 1980 substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

Californians would be better off on average if all final users in the state paid the same price for water — adjusted for quality, place and time — even if, as a result, some food prices rose sharply and some farms failed. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

The Fed should wait until its preferred measure of inflation (Core PCE) is clearly rising — and not just forecast to rise — before it begins hiking interest rates.  

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A)  Giving tax incentives to specific firms to locate operations in a city or state typically generates local benefits that outweigh the costs to the city and/or state providing the incentives.

B) The US as a whole benefits when cities or states compete with each other by giving tax incentives to firms to locate operations in their jurisdictions. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

A) Declining to be vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles imposes costs on other people, which is a negative externality.

B) Considering the costs of restricting free choice, and the share of people in the US who choose not to vaccinate their children for measles, the social benefit of mandating measles vaccines for all Americans (except those with compelling medical reasons) would exceed the social cost. 

Last year Chris Said, who is now a data scientist at Twitter, created a tool for summarizing the answers from the experts panel so that anyone could see which expert they would be most similar to. Chris has updated his analysis to include the 2014 questions and answers. If you are interesting in taking his […]