Global Economy

from Dean Baker There is an effort by several progressive unions and other organizations to put a 5% wealth tax for the state’s billionaires on California’s ballot this fall. It’s not clear they will succeed in getting it on the ballot or how the initiative will do (I’m in), but Donald Trump has already one-upped them. […]

We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income shocks are magnified six-fold over time, increasing domestic income, education levels, migrant skills, and high-skilled migration. Remarkably, 74.9 percent of long-run income gains come from domestic rather than migrant income. Trade driven impa

Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking and aging populations affect the operations and fiscal sustainability of state and local governm

Total portfolio investing; job simulators; Copilots; investment excitement; trade; faith; and fonts

If you have no particular intellectual interests or ambitions and are content with the company of your family and friends, then life on Iceland must be very pleasant, because the inhabitants are friendly, tolerant, and sane.  They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism.  I always found that they welcome criticism.  But I had the feeling, also, that for myself it was already too late.  We are all too deeply involved Europe to be

From TruthSocial, 5AM ET:   Kalshi betting odds on number of ships through Strait of Hormuz through April 5: Source: Kalshi, accessed 4/5/2026, 11:30 AM CT. Notes: Orange arrow at 4 AM CT, 5 AM ET. There is no indication that prediction markets took the threat seriously, and indeed the expected number of ships transiting the Strait declined.  

This leads us to the next of Freud’s major contributions to neuroscience: his realization that cognition is, at bottom, wishful. That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing.  This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan. The post Good sentences appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Two recent joint-papers Did California’s Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment? by Clemens, Edwards and Meer and The Effects of California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices by Clemens, Edwards, Meer and Nguyen give what I think is a plausible and consistent account of California’s $20 fast food minimum wage. California’s $20 fast food minimum wage raised wages in the sector by roughly 8 percent relative to the rest of the country but employment fell by 2.3 to 3.9

1. Josefina Aguilar Alcantara, RIP (NYT). 2. Move abroad so you can default on your student debt (NYT). 3. History of golf course bunkers (WSJ). 4. Four reasons why possible aliens might make you more ambitious. 5. New learnings on octopuses and sex. 6. “They estimate roughly 90% of the tariffs have been passed through to importers, with foreign exporters absorbing only about 10% of the cost by lowering their before-tariff prices.“ The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Mar

Elif Ozdemir, Ankara, align satellites. Lily Zuckerman, University of Austin (and NYC), painting and general career support. Benjamin Unger, NYC, AI to measure the performance of New York governments. Maarten Boudry, Brussels, to write a book on who is really for progress, or not. Allan Wandia, San Francisco, foundation models that learn directly from raw experimental data. Richard Ng, London, AI agents. Jordan Unokesan, London, trust scoring for government contractors. Alexander Griffiths, Lond

If one uses a simple random walk with drift estimate over the 2022Q1-2025Q3 period, the answer is yes. However, given the Administration’s internment and removals program, the current projection of population suggests not. I use a simple error correction model with (log) GDP as the left hand side variable, and GDP and population as an error correction term, estimated over the 1986Q4-2019Q4 ad 2021Q1-2025Q3 period (excluding the pandemic, and with data available to the Troika). I then use

Jet fuel price, from EIA via FRED: From IATA: From a year ago through March 30, gasoline price (regular) has risen 26.2%, 50.4% for diesel. For jet fuel (Louisiana), it’s risen 90.2%. Thanks, Drumpf!  

Rich and poor countries differ in the size distribution of business firms. This paper shows that the right tail of the firm size distribution systematically grows thicker with economic development, both within countries over time and across countries. The author develops a simple idea search model with both endogenous growth and an endogenous firm size distribution. The economy features an asymptotic balanced growth path. Along the transition, Gibrat’s law holds at each date, and the right tail

The President’s FY2027 budget was released yesterday, some two months late. The economic forecast, based on data available in November, is out of line with other forecasts based on contemporaneously available data. And in fact, at 3.5%, 2026 q4/q4 was upped (!) from 3.2% in the Mid-Session Review. Figure 1: GDP (bold black), February CBO (blue), April Admin. (red square), March Survey of Professional Forecasters (brown), March FT-Booth (light blue triangle), all in bn.Ch.2017$ SAAR. Sour

1. Nyege Nyege Tapes. 2. Does it help poets to be religious? 3. Martin Jay on Habermas. 4. U.S. prime age employment rate is near an all-time high.  For a different perspective, here is NYT on AI and the job market.  And new measures of AI task performance from MIT. 5. China’s AI education experiment. 6. Real retail U.S. electricity prices have fallen since 2010. 7. Compare ride-share prices. 8. Is Mandarin being Europeanized? 9. 2000 or so additional pages of Leibniz will be published. 10

From Isiah Andrews, via Emily Oster and the excellent Samir Varma.  A good piece, though I think it needs to more explicitly consider the most likely case, namely that the models are better at all intellectual tasks, including “taste,” or whatever else might be knockin’ around in your noggin…I am still seeing massive copium.  But the models still are not able to “operate in the actual world as a being.”  Those are the complementarities you need to be looking f

I’ve asked a few people that question lately, and get either no answer or very exaggerated answers. Rep. Burchett recently raised the possibility of being terrified and not sleeping at night if UAPs are aliens.  But even if that is your immediate response, you need a more constructive medium-term adjustment to the new situation. One option would be to pray to the aliens as gods, but I do not recommend that. Another option is to not change anything, on the grounds that the aliens (probably?

The White House seeks to slash the NSF budget by nearly 55%, to $4 billion. The proposal also cuts all funding for the NSF division that funds research on the social sciences and economics. At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely. Here is the full story. The

ADP down while BLS up. Aggregate hours down. Figure 1: Manufacturing employment from BLS CES (blue, left log scale), from ADP (red, left log scale), in 000’s, s.a., total hours in manufacturing, production and nonsupervisory workers, in logs 2025M01=0 (teal, right scale), s.a. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, and author’s calculations.  

A year and a day ago, President Trump announced that he would enact, without a vote of Congress, higher tariffs across a wide range of countries. I had been thinking about compiling a range of evidence on what has happened, but was delighted to find that Scott Lincicome,  Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, and Chad Smitson have done it for me in “One Year After `Liberation Day’: Here’s What We Know and What We Don’t” (Cato at Liberty blog, April 2, 2026). For example: “The `rec