Interesting Reading-- Below is a graph of the Cyclically Adjusted Price/Earnings ("CAPE")
Ratio (in blue), compared with the long-term average
interest rate;
i.e. 10-year US Gov't Bonds (in red). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P/E_ratio).
Data from website for Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance:
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. See: https://www.amazon.com/Magazine-September-October-economist-Shiller/dp/B0043H9TOE
Monthly data are current to November 2022.
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Research Links for Economics
IDEA Database of Economic Research, now based at the Universityof Connecticut,
is the largest FREE database of research papers in economics.
The
Economist . The best weekly news magazine in
the English language, Time Magazine for grown-ups. Widely
read by corporate and government policy makers, and by professional
economists. The "premium" material on this Economist web site
is only accessible via a Rensselaer subscription; you will need your Rensselaer login ID to get the
code. Go to the library's link for the Economist
RFE -- Resources for Economists on the Internet This is the most widely-used general gateway
for economic data-links. Be sure to look at the Short-cuts section for
a general listing. Three of the most commonly used and most interesting
links are given below.
Economic
Data & Links This is a good quick look
at the most commonly used USdata sources.
International Economics Gateway The name says it all.
WEBSITES of some prominent economists: Brian
Arthur Samuel Brittan
Bradford DeLong NicholasEconomedis PaulKrugman BarryNalebuff Stephen Roach Nourile Roubini RobertShiller JosephStiglitz Hal
Varian
Debates
about The IMF Joe Stiglitz,
the chief economist at the World Bank , was recently forced to step down. This may be
because he had initiated a fundamental criticism of the IMF as a
'global central bank'. This was similar to the way, in the 1930s, J.M. Keynes said that the
Fed and the Bank of England were doing exactly the wrong things.
Economics of the Internet, Information Goods Maintained by Hal Varian, a well-known
micro-economist and Dean at UC Berkeley’s School of Information
Management & Systems. This is the best source for "Network
Externalities," a very hot topic.
More
on Network Externalities by Brian Arthur, the economist whose ideas
helped launch the case against Microsoft.
Debates
about Intellectual Property on the Web A listing of organizations and publications
engaged in the battle to define and protect ownership for that form of
wealth most valuable in the information age.
The
Third Industrial Revolution: Technology, Productivity, and Income
Equality , by Jeremy Greenwood. A brilliant
paper, relating paradoxes of the IT revolution to earlier revolutions
in (1) railroads and (2) electrification. Really helps to
clarify many recent debates about the "Internet bubble" in equity
markets, the long productivity slump of 1972-1995, and rising income
inequality. Published by the Federal Reserve of Cleveland.
More Specialized Research
Brilliant essay in changes in Intellectual
Property that are transforming our world: "Coase'sPenguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm."
Bio-economicstries to promote the idea that economies are more like living systems
than like mechanical objects. Interestingly enough, the founder of this
group, Michael Rothschild, author of "Bionomics" ,is also helping to make the good old profit mechanism within firms work
better, by integrating IT process monitoring and feedback with basic
optimization techniques.
The Santa Fe Institute The
high-powered and increasingly influential world of non-linear,
"complexity" approaches to economics and other "Complex Evolving
Systems." Fascinating computer graphic simulations of evolutionary
processes.
University of Iowa's Electoral "Stock Market" This is a game in which you can buy "stock" in
one candidate’s winning a Congressional or Presidential race. It has
shown itself to be far more accurate than ordinary polling, and much
cheaper besides!
Money – Past, Present & Future This is, IMHO, the best link on my list – a
rare mix of history, economics, and financial-political debate. You may
think you know what money is, but that’s probably an illusion. It’s
amazing how little economists really understand about this force that
"makes the world go round."
EXPERIMENTAL
ECONOMICS SITES: This research is changing our understanding of how decisions get made,
and how markets actually work. The University of
Virginia's Veconabis an excellent site with tools for running online
experiments. Here you can LOGON to the
VECONLAB. The University of Arizona's Economics Science
Lab is
another research program on controlled laboratory experiments.
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** The Macro-Stability of Swiss WIR-Bank Credits: Balance, Velocity and Leverage uses
WIR-Bank data by industrial sector to understand the way that this
Community Curency enhances long-term relationships and reciprocity
between large enterprises and their network of small to medium
distributors and suppliers. This form of muli-lateral credit is
analogous to the merely bilateral "trade credits" so basic to these
networks -- as recognized by Silvio Gessel in the early 20th century.
The article was published in Comparative Economic Studies in 2016.
** Complementary
Credit Networks and Macro-Economic Stability** uses
data from a Swiss barter network (WIR-Bank) to argue that large scale internet
barter helps to stabilize the business cycle. My paper was
recently invited for a 2nd presentation to the Central Bank of Brazil,
and is in the Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization. ** A translation of the Swiss banking magazine
article ** , originally in German and French, is available here, taken from the magazine
of Wir-Bank.
Barter networks have recently attracted the attention of leading policy
makers like MervynKing, former Director of the Bank of England. A very recent article, soon to be published, looks at WIR-Bank lending by industrial sector,
and finds that this shows even stronger counter-cyclical
tendencies.
** Macroeconomic Stability of Centralized and
Decentralized Exchange: Anthropological Data ** This
paper revisits an anthropological and historical data set I used years
ago, and tests implications about macro-economic stability.
It is a companion piece to the "Reciprocal Networks" piece mentioned in
the previous piece.
** Connecticut's State' Tax Expenditures'** -- a form of spending 'Best Left in the Dark' (Testimony before the
State StateLegislatures Joint Finance Committee, April 2005.
** 'Uncorruption,'
Health and Education as Complementary Public Goods ** The criminalization
of international bribery by the United
States, accomplished by the late 1990s, is now
widespread. But it has not yet been very effective in reducing corruption.
This paper’s focus is on other measures of corruption, such as education and health care. The paper starts with the empirical observation that income growth
within a poor country may not mean less corruption. Empirically, it
tends to mean more corruption. This paper finds that better provisionof public health and education outcomes improves voluntary social
provision of other public goods, such as transparency and the rule of
law. Version of the paper delivered at XIII World Congress
of the International Economics Associationin Lisbon,Portugal,
August 2002.
** Scientific and
Engineering Workers: Education Supplies, Occupational Demands ** Alook at the relationship between scientific/technical education and the
demand for highly educated workers. Using a newly-developed
data set, the paper concludes that educational supply may be highly
responsive, especially in the lower degree programs, to modest
increases in salaries. A shorter version of this paper was
presented at the 2002 IEMC (International
Engineering Management Conference)
in Cambridge,England.
** "Consumer
Confidence and Income Inequality" **tests the degree to which income distribution can explain changes in US
Consumer Confidence. This paper was delivered at the XII World Congress
of the International Economics Association inBuenos
Aires, August 1999. The statistical
tests give surprisingly high estimates for Atkinson’s parameter of
"inequality aversion", the social preference for more equality relative
to more growth.
** "The Case for Redistributive Liberalism" appears in
a "discussion roundtable" on Eastern Europe in Economic Systems (March
‘98) published by the Osteruopa Institut of the Universityof Munich.
I argue that the dramatic growth of inequality in Russia and most East
European countries has slowed development, in contrast with
property-redistributing market reforms that have spurred the remarkable
growth of China and Vietnam.
** "Have Most People Benefited from the Recovery?" in
the Winter 1998 issue of The Connecticut Economy ,published by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at
the Universityof Connecticut.
Contrary to most reports, something like a majority of CT residents
were poorer by 1996 than in 1992, the end of the last recession. The
article considers how this is possible in a "recovery." Census Bureau data
on state-level income distribution are available, and deserve more
analysis than they have so far received.
I have a
long term interest in The Evolution of Exchange Systems seen
in "primitive" economies through anthropology, in economic history, and
in current technological developments. This is based on my earlier
articles on the Evolution of Complexity in Primitive Economies and Corporate Barter .
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Some Other
Publications
(Fully
downloadable articles are ** starred,
those un-starred and are available here only in a summary form.)
** Op-eds in the HARTFORD COURANT and other Connecticut newspapers:
** Who Will Pay for the Energy Transition?
** Taxes Less Drain than Spending Cuts,
** China's Wall and Ours,
** Criminals Love Pot Prohibiton
** A Bailout that puts Taxpayers First,
** Property Taxes Perpetuate Inequality,
** China as an Economic Rival
** Price
Discrimination and Resale: A Classroom Experiment ** (2008) Article shows how
price discrimination can be efficiency and welfare improving. Appeared in the Journal of Economic Education.
Shingo Prize(2003) for co-authored Book on Lean Management: "Better Thinking, Better Results".
** CONNECTICUT’S PROPERTY TAXES: ASKING THE RIGHT
QUESTIONS - a Study for the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Property Tax
Reform. How Regressive are
Property Taxes in Connecticut? (Go to P. 8) ** in The
Connecticut Economy,
published by UConn.
The Evolution of Externality Rights:
Flexibility vs. Ambiguity appeared in the European Journal of Law & Economics . A
shorter article on the same themes is** "An Experiment on Externality Rights" **, in Classroom Expernomics .
** Complexity Aversion** appeared in Eastern Economic Journal .
** The Evolution of Complexity in Primitive
Economies: Theory** appeared in the Journal of Comparative Economics, in the first issue of Vol. 20, 1995. Its companion piece --
** The Evolution of Complexity in Primitive
Economies: Empirical Tests** appeared in the Journal of Comparative Economics, in the second issue of the same volume.
Ex-Communist Economics: the Logic of Capital
Reform , appeared in the New York Economic Review .
** Experimental Moralities: The Ethics of
Classroom Experiments ** appeared
in the Journal of Economic Education .
**Equity-Efficiency Preferences in Poland and the
Soviet Union: Order Reversals under the Atkinson Index ** , appeared in the Review of Income and Wealth
**Double-Surnames and Gender Equality: A
Proposition**appeared in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies.
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