New paper on recovery form recessions

Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Family cost sharing in Switzerland

Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Need to read when I am back in Geneva

This
-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Writing tips...

Here. I liked this comment:

Also, don't make the grad student mistake.

The classic grad student mistake in a talk or a paper is to talk about what was hard, rather than what was interesting.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

The Yacoubian Building

Just finished reading it and loved it. Here is the wikipedia entry

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Posner versus Thaler

Here, Here, Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Maids (at the pool) in Lebanon

...right as you’re about to jump in the pool, the resort manager approaches and tells you to stay out of the water because “people are not used to the sight of workers swimming.” .... at least one resort Asian and African workers are allowed to swim in the sea but not in the pool, because “not all people like maids to swim with them in the water.”

The full article is here

Thanks to EJ (AKA, the "Z")

Older posts on the same subject: here; here; and here.

-------------------------------------------------

♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

The best book I've read this year

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I think one should read The Feast of The Goat first (even toough Junot Diaz does not seem to like Vargas Llosa's book; too nice to Balaguer?)

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Journal for rejected papers

So far only in math. (found on MR). The first time I heard the idea of a journal for rejected papers was 15 years ago from Alberto Cassone.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Cheesecake factory

Here is an article. I went there twice and found it disgusting. The second time was to see how my parents would react. You should have seen my mom's face when they brought her a salad which could have fed 15 people.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

The 4th most expensive city in the world

Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

My first job and then scholarship

Here, the second is here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Easterly on Collier

here
-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Restaurant prices

Prices of the buffet at Massaya (Here is the menu with prices):

• Adults: $33;
• Children between 15-10: $20;
• Children between 9-4: $15;
• Nannies: $20!!!

Micro 101 question: Why do nannies pay less?
-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook
prices

Off to Beirut (for one month)

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Interview with Samuelson

Waiting for part 2. In the meantime:

And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: 'Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.'

However, unlike someone like Milton, Greenspan was quite streetwise. But he was overconfident that he could handle anything that arose. I can remember when some of us -- and I remember there were a lot of us in the late 90s -- said you should do something about the stock bubble. And he kind of said, 'look, reasonable men are putting their money into these things -- who are we to second guess them?' Well, reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

part two is here

By the way, I don't want you to think that I think that everything for the next 15 years will be cozy. I think it's almost inevitable that, with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there's going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar. And I doubt it can stay orderly, because all of our own hedge funds will be right in the vanguard of the operation. And it will be hard to imagine that that wouldn't create different kind of meltdown.

Last thing. Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO -- they didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one. There 's a lot of causality in economics, even though it's very far from an exact science.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Krugman interview

Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Forecasters

here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt!   ♦Add to del.icio.us   ♦Share on Facebook

Cipolla applied to Italy

From M.G. in progress

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt!   ♦Add to del.icio.us   ♦Share on Facebook

From today's FT

Sado-monetarists and reasonable people

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Museums (economics and modern art)

Rigotnomics has a post about the economics museum in Mexico City. I know that the University of Buenos Aires has a museum dedicated to external debt crises but I've neve seen it. I will try to go when I go to LACEA this October.

Talking about muesums, last week I was in London and went to Tate Modern. It's amazing. I got goosebumps from this Cattelan piece.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Paul Krugman likes one of my favorite movies

Here is a quote

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

Brad DeLong on Posner and the Chicago School

Here

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Share on Facebook

FT exchange rates

The Financial Times is the best place to sell your dollars. In the normal world 1 USD buys you 0.7 euro cents or 0.6 pence. In the FT world 1USD buys 1.7 euros (2.5 times the normal exchange ate) or 0.8 pence (1.3 times the normal exchange rate). 

Here it is: How much would you pay to read this page? At about 2,000 of the roughly 50,000 printed words in a typical copy of the Financial Times, it should in theory be worth about 4 per cent of the newspaper's cover price - 10 US cents, 17½ euro cents or eight pence.

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt!   ♦Add to del.icio.us   ♦Share on Facebook

Growth after the crisis

New (at least to me) paper by Dani Rodrik

-------------------------------------------------
♦DiggIt!   ♦Add to del.icio.us   ♦Share on Facebook