Nouriel's song

Here

But the song doesn't say that he is also a master rollerblader!

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Ode to Krugman

Here. Best line: you got the Nobel Prize, Geithener uses Turbotax 

Tahnks to Suzanne

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Rapture index

I talked about this here,  the paper is now  out.  Title and abstract:

Irrational Exuberance in the U.S. Housing Market: Were Evangelicals Left Behind?

The recent housing bust has reignited interest in psychological theories of speculative excess (Shiller, 2007). I investigate this issue by identifying a segment of the U.S. population-evangelical protestants-that may be less prone to speculative motives, and uncover a significant negative relationship between their population share and house price volatility. Evangelicals' focus on Biblical prophecy could account for this difference, since it may enable them to interpret otherwise negative events as containing positive news, dampening the response of house prices to shocks. I provide evidence for this channel using a popular internet measure of "prophetic activity" and a 9/11 event study. I also analyze survey data covering religious beliefs and asset holding, and find that 'end times' beliefs are associated with a one-third decline in net worth, consistent with these beliefs providing a form of psychic insurance (Scheve and Stasavage, 2006a and 2006b) that reduces asset demand.

Thanks to Chris Crowe for letting me know.

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Facebook: Negative Externalities

I am in the BC lounge of Airfrance in Paris and had to wait 35 minutes to find an empty computer. They were all taken by people using Facebook. The demographic of FB seems to be changing very rapidly. It started with teenagers and people in their 20s, but all users here are in their 40s to 60s.
PS
It is iincredibly difficult to type with an AZERTY keboard
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Me on Radio

In Italiano (some of the things I said came out a bit distorted)

PS

from minute 8, need real player

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Cool statistics blog

Here

Even cooler new journal

thanks manu manu

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Measuring GDP

Much more difficult than you think

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Switzerland

Boot camp for new mothers!

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Stabilizing aid

A policy brief by my employer

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This is amazing

It works (I tried)

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Not for the faint-hearted

Naked germans
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Why Spain is better than Italy

Here Thanks to Francesca
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Citizenship in Lebanon

Here
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The coolest ad

Here
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Willem Buiter..

...on the state of macro. Some nuggets:

• If any market takes a finite amount of resources (however small) to function, complete markets would exhaust the resources of the universe.
• The manifest failure of the EMH in many key asset markets was obvious to virtually all those whose cognitive abilities had not been warped by a modern Anglo-American Ph.D. education
• So, no Oikomenia, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and no Auctioneer at the end of time.
• Charles Goodhart, who was fortunate enough not to encounter complete markets macroeconomics and monetary economics during his impressionable, formative years, but only after he had acquired some intellectual immunity, once said of the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium approach which for a while was the staple of central banks’ internal modelling: “It excludes everything I am interested in”.
  

Here is Krugman (a little but more optimistic)

Here is Blanchard  (much more optimistic)

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Check out these blogs

Zen-Habits
LifeHacker
Seth Godin
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Nadine and the UNSG

A friend told me that UN Newsletter has a picture of the Secretary General with Nadine.

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Contemporary art and sharks

I just finished reading the $12 million stuffed shark and found it fascinating (even though Pepina is sceptical about the book). This is the most amazing website for contemporary art. The websites of Gagosian and white cube. A profile of Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan

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David Warsh ..

.. likes Simon Johnson's blog (Here) and I like David Warsh (I really liked his book about Paul Romer). Here's Simon's blog.
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Performance Enhancing Drugs

Here is the article from The Economist. I tried Provigil (don't even ask) and it's amazing.
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Improving my writing skills

Books

• William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White “The Elements of Style”
• William Zinsser “On Writing Well”
• Deirdre N. McCloskey Economical Writing

Articles by economists

• Greg Mankiw’s "How to write well"
• Hal Varian’s "How to build a model in your spare time"
• John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Writing, Typing, and Economics”
• David Romer’s “Out in Five”
• John Cochrane’s “PH.D Paper Writing”
• Ross Levine’s “Recommendations for Better Research”

Non-Economists (but still good)

• Math-Genius Terence Tao’s advice on writing papers
• Mike Kaspari’s 10-point checklist
• Lessons from Kurt Vonnegut
• Lessons from Hemingway

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Anna

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Ricardo says: No time to pick a fight with China

That is my former boss (and one of the coolest economists ever) Ricardo Hausmann. Here's the punchline: Constructing this alternative development path is difficult and urgent. It is a win-win strategy for China and the world. Let us not derail it by promoting a confrontation on the parity of the renminbi that may lead to an even sharper recession in China. The whole article is here. 

If you are interested in "Ricardian" economics, here is Ricardo Caballero.

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2 Rainbows

The view from my office window: Today at 4:40 PM

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Daron Acemoglu on the crisis

In our obliviousness to the importance of market-supporting institutions we were in sync with policymakers. They were lured by ideological notions derived from Ayn Rand novels rather than economic theory. And we let their policies and rhetoric set the agenda for our thinking about the world and worse, perhaps, even for our policy advice. In hindsight, we should not be surprised that unregulated profit-seeking individuals have taken risks from which they benefit and others lose. The rest if here
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