Opportunities for Improvement in Productivity – Manufacturing vs. Services
Country Happiness Ranking
Give Me Shelter
The responsiveness of taxpayers to changes in marginal tax rates has become perhaps the most central issue in public finance, and nowhere is the debate more heated than at the very high end of the income distribution. Yet it seems there is little direct evidence on the rich and their money. Data used to study tax responsiveness of the rich – based on actual tax … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Austan Goolsbee | Source: Capital Ideas | Subject: Economics
The High Price of Success for Silicon Valley
Matthew Budman / Stan Davis
Business thinker Stan Davis uses a pipeline metaphor to describe the pattern of job creation and motion. “I’m not concerned about U.S. job losses so long as we’re feeding the front end of the pipeline with growth and innovation,” he says. “As each new innovation creates new jobs and new sectors mature, those jobs migrate down the global food chain. The issue is, ‘Does the … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subjects: Economics, International
Jonathan Zittrain
As Eben Moglen once said: “Society has been vastly underproducing pyramids since the time of the Pharaohs.” The economic and social system that made pyramid production sensible simply doesn’t exist anymore, and no one seems to miss it, even if we’re a few pyramids short of where we’d like to be.
Content: Quotation | Source: Darwin Magazine | Subjects: Economics, Miscellaneous
Erik Brynjolfsson
The 20th-century company was characterized by a separation of conceptualization and execution; a small group of people-the “brains”-developed a plan, and a large group of people-the hired “hands”-carried it out. That distinction is obsolete in the information economy.
Content: Quotation | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Business Rules, Economics
Erik Brynjolfsson
Computers are great at making information cheaper and cheaper, but it takes humans to respond and act on that data. For most tasks, you still need a person in the loop. But humans can also be a bottleneck. We have more demand and overload on our cognitive abilities, and that prevents technology from being as effective as it can be.
Content: Quotation | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Economics, IT / Technology / E-Business
Accounting For Tastes: A Simple Theory of Advertising As A Good Or Bad
“Economists, traditionally, have had a very uneasy relationship with advertising,” says University of Chicago professor Gary Becker. “Consumer preferences were thought to be either too stable or too easily manipulated.” But in his latest book, “Accounting For Tastes,” Becker employs the tools of modern economic analysis to confront the problem of preferences and values — how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Advertising, Economics | Industry: Advertising
Impact of ATMs on Bank Teller Employment
DoC Puts Q1 2004 E-Retail at $15.52B
Advances in Technology Impact Value of Workers’ Skills
It is no secret that advances in technology can greatly impact the value of workers’ skills. Older workers often find the updating of complex technology uneconomic, while younger workers acquire and readily employ skills tailored to the newest technology. The result: the latter group’s productivity rises, diminishing the value of output produced by their older counterparts. A recently published study is the first to model … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Glenn MacDonald | Source: Discovery@Olin | Subjects: Career, Economics
Average Output per Worker
Jeffrey W. Bennett / Thomas Sowell
In his book “A Conflict of Visions,” the economist Thomas Sowell argues that much of the philosophical debate of the last 200 years has been shaped by the struggle between two competing views of the world.
The “Unconstrained View” is based on the premise that man is basically good and has a natural desire to behave in ways that maximize the benefit to society as … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Personality / Behavior
Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke – Trade and Jobs
“Despite what seems to economists to be a compelling case for trade, non-economists are far more skeptical. A perennial public concern, from the emergence of the “Rust Belt” in the 1980s, to the days of Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound,” to the more recent debate about the effects of international outsourcing, is that the expansion of trade will cause production to move abroad, at the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Ben S. Bernanke | Source: The Federal Reserver Board | Subjects: Economics, International
Future Value: The $7 Trillion Challenge
Nearly 60 percent of the aggregate value of the US stock market is based on investor expectations of future growth. And because this future value tends to be concentrated in industries and companies that are built on intangible assets, it is critical to find better ways to recognize, report and manage these assets.
Content: Article | Authors: Göran Roos, John J. Ballow, Robert J. Thomas | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subjects: Accounting, Economics
Stock Indices
Every day we hear that the Dow was up (or down) or that the S&P was such and such. What does it mean? What is the Dow? What is the S&P?
In order to gauge how the stock market did on a particular day or a longer period, we use a market index to measure performance. Market indices take many flavors. … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: FinanceProfessor.com | Subjects: Economics, Finance
State of the World 2004
Worldwatch’s venerable annual focuses on “the consumer economy” – how the world’s citizens live, eat, and buy energy, transportation, and consumer goods. Chock filled with data and examples. This is a great place to get grounding on global trends. There’s a viewpoint, to be sure, but it is delivered with so much authority that it seems hard to question, even if you want to. … [ Read more ]
Content: Book | Source: Worldwatch Institute | Subjects: Economics, International
Economics of Networks
At this site, you will find a collection of information on economic issues of networks, such as the telephone and fax communications networks, the Internet, financial exchange and credit card networks, as well as on “virtual networks,” such as the virtual network of all Windows or all Mac computers.
Content: Online Resource | Author: Nicholas Economides | Subject: Economics