Interesting blog bits

1. Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov and Cezar Santos on US inequality due to assortative marriages.
   

   How Americans form and dissolve families has changed dramatically since 1950. One of these changes has been an increase in assortative mating, i.e. how likely a person is to marry someone of similar educational background. This column argues that since education is an important determinant of income, these patterns of matching have had an important impact on the economy's distribution of income.

2. John Taylor on Next Time Remember the Lessons from Stimulus Packages
   

   It’s the five-year anniversary of the 2009 stimulus package. I’ve done a slew of empirical research on the stimulus in those years from predicting in advance that its impact would be small to estimating afterwards that its impact was small.

3. John Taylor asks Should Policymakers or Macro Models Be Taken to the Woodshed?
   

   There’s a good debate going on about the usefulness of macro models, and in particular whether the so-called New Keynesian models let us down or even helped bring on the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

4. Alexander Czombera on Zimbabwean Currencies: Condoms, Sweets and Paper Money
   

   If there is one single law in economics then it is that markets tend to equilibrium. Or, to align this with Grove’s law (“Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers”), the free market will find its ways, whether in white, grey or black market.

5. David Henderson on CBO's Minimum Wage Study: Dealing with Publication Bias

   I've finally got around to reading more details about the Congressional Budget Office's report on the number of jobs lost from raising the minimum wage.

6. Don Boudreaux on The CBO On Minimum-Wage Studies.

   If I understand correctly what’s going on here, it’s not obvious to me that publication bias for minimum-wage studies runs the way the CBO assumes.

7. Robert P. Murphy on Economists Debate the Minimum Wage

   Economists famously argue about everything. Even so, it used to be that economists across the board—whether left, right, or center—generally agreed that the minimum wage was ill-suited to help the poor.

8. Henrik Braconier and Mauro Pisu on Roads to deeper European integration
   

   Despite substantial integration, national borders still provide a large obstacle to trade in Europe. This column shows that much of these ‘iceberg costs’ can be attributed to underdeveloped infrastructure, namely roads. Improving international roadways to the level of national ones could substantially raise gains to trade.

9. Chris Dillow on The "Middle Class", & Marxism

   Is Marx more relevant than ever before? This is the question posed by talk of the falling middle class and poorly-paid self-employed.

10. Chris Dillow on the Bonnie Tyler syndrome

    Trouble in Venezuela has led to some rightists sneering at Owen Jones for supporting the socialist government. Such partisan point-scoring, however, hides an interesting question: what is the origin of Owen's mistake, assuming it to have been one?