Middle East Soap Operas

Remember not to call sister in law Rori tonite, she will be busy with this.

Across the region, parents are naming their newborns after the two leading actors - Noor and her husband Muhanad - and styling their own hair in the same fashion. Tales of women divorcing their husbands for lacking their idol's romantic touch have been circulating...
..Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is apparently threatening fines for cars with pictures of Muhanad on their windows.
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Robert Solow's famous sex quotes

Solow once wrote that Galbraith's disdain for ordinary consumer goods "reminds one of the Duchess who, upon acquiring a full appreciation of sex, asked the Duke if it were not perhaps too good for the common people."
Of Milton Friedman, Solow wrote, "Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper." here
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The state of macro...

...is good, according to the new Chief Economist of the Fund:
For a long while after the explosion of macroeconomics in the 1970s, the field looked like a battlefield. Over time however, largely because facts do not go away, a largely shared vision both of fluctuations and of methodology has emerged. Not everything is fine. Like all revolutions, this one has come with the destruction of some knowledge, and suffers from extremism and herding. None of this deadly however. The state of macro is good.
here
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Hacking wifi in airports and public spaces!!!!

Probably this is morally wrong (so, it is only allowed if you have a hacked iphone) and, even worse, it may not work, but the link is here. I found this in the amazing Chris Blattman development blog.
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An old post on how to reform IMF voting quotas

The radical proposal is here...
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Woody Allen's Spanish diary

Very funny. Here are excerpts from the excerpts:
Met with Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. She’s ravishing and more sexual than I had imagined. During interview my pants caught fire.

Offered role to Scarlett Johansson. Said before she could accept, script must be approved by her agent, then by her mother, with whom she’s close. Following that it must be approved by her agent’s mother. In middle of negotiation she changed agents — then changed mothers.

Scarlett came late to the set. I lectured her rather sternly, explaining I do not tolerate tardiness from my cast. She listened respectfully, although as I spoke I thought I noticed her turning up her iPod.

The full excerpts are here. Thanks to Dan D.
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Ohhh yeah!

da wife will not like this! Read the first sentence.
I found it on MR.
One of the MR commentators says: "I just sent a copy of the article to my wife; she informed me that my taking a second wife would dramatically shorten my lifespan."
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Pornography and rapes

Is there a connection? It can go either way. According to some, watching porn can stimulate violent behavior. According to others, it removes urges. Todd Kendall says that the second effect domintes the first, so more internet porn reduces rapes. Steve Levitt (here) is not 100% convinced.
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The father of the IMF research department is suing the Fund

The story is here (thanks to Francesca R.). Several friends were present when the fact happened. They told me that it was a very sad moment. Polak is an amazing guy, he was still writing nice papers in 2007 (here) and maybe even after that.
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Improvinig aid in 6 steps

As usual, good ideas from Nancy Birdsall & Co. Nancy is amazing, she was very effective when she was at the IDB and what she did with the CGD is really incredible.
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... and they say economists are boring

This is how Roberto Rigobon teaches the art central banking at Sloan. But if you take Roberto's class, never complain about your grade. Look at this (Roberto is in blue and the poor student in red).
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Early childhood interventions

According to James Heckman: An estimated rate of return (the return per dollar of cost) to the Perry Program is around 10%. This high rate of return is higher than the post-World War II return on US stock market equity (5.8%) and suggests that society at large can benefit substantially from such interventions in the lives of disadvantaged children. The article is here.
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So, who won the olympics?

Most countries use a lexicographic ordering (first gold, then silver, then bronze), but in the US they rank countries by the total number of medals (it is strange that in a meritocratic country a gold has the same value of a bronze). Both approaches are probably incorrect. The first gives too little weight to non-golds and the second gives too much weight to non-golds. What about weighting silver 2/3 and bronze 1/3? Here are the alternative rankings. The big winner is France that goes from 10th to 7th and the big loser is Japan.

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Sex and the olympics

Apparently you don't need a medal to get lucky at the games. This was the most downloaded article from Timesonline.
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Looking for a rich friend

The glamour part of the FT is a lot of fun. After reading this (I always thought that PJ was pajamas), this (Diego is Diego della Valle) and this, I concluded that, with a growing family, I should really find a rich friend who could help me save $$$ in holyday expenses.
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The price of gasoline

The lowest is in Venezuela: $0.03 per liter (yes, 3 pennies), the highest is in the Gaza Strip: $7 per liter. Italy is $2.4 per liter, Switzerland $1.91 per liter, Lebanon, $0.90, US $0.98 per liter. The data (using US gallons, I converted, and then I say no original content!) are here. I found this in Andrew Sullivan's blog.
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Marc on the dollar

Wondering about the future of the dollar? Marc Flandreau, an economic historian, says that fundamentals matter more than history (here).
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The Nobel conference

You can watch the online lectures here. (thanks to Alessandro N.)
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Two stories from the Gulf

Both are pathetic, but at least the second is pathetic in a funny way.

A 16-year-old Saudi girl attempted to commit suicide to escape a forced marriage to a 75-year-old man… her father was forcing her to marry the old man so that he could marry his 13-year-old daughter in an exchange deal. (here)

Saudi Arabia's religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women.. (here)

I read the stories on Marginal Revolution, the two original MR posts (with comments etc) are here and here.
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Pop quiz from high and low-end sex workers (NAH wants non economics posts)

The original post with the pop quiz and the call for questions is here. The answers are here.
On the same topic, this is an amazing blog and the book is becoming a classic.
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Visting and working in a developing country for the first time

Excellent pieces of advice from Tyler Cowen and Chris Blattman. Chris Blattman's suggestions are particularly important for people visiting extremely poor countries.

My Lebanese wife will love Nr. 10 in Tyle Cowen's list.
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Lunch discussion among the very very very rich

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet discuss "Creative Capitalism." The discussion is here.

What about the very poor? I have no information about lunchtime discussion but Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo describe their economic lives (the published paper is in JEP). The same author also discuss the "middle class."
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What to say in (economics) conferences

George Stigler, via Justin Wolfers, via Paul Krugman. The Krugman post is here.

This reminded me of an old email with a discussion on how to interpret scientific phrases.
For instance:
"This research has left many questions unanswered." - I didn't find anything of significance.
"It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field" - I quit.
The full list is here.
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Economic reforms and the poor

So far, this is the most convincing pro-reform paper I have read. I don't know the first author but I do know Marcos Chamon. He is very smart.
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Guillermo knew it!

Guillermo Calvo always told me to look at the M2/Reserves ratio. Here are Obstfeld, Shambaugh, and Taylor.
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Rigotnomics & IV

The Econ grad students at HEI (where I teach part-time) have a cool blog appropriately named Rigotnomics.

A while ago I had read a nice post in the precursor (I think) of Rigotnomics (the name of that blog was less appropriate) on the interpretation of IV regressions and their use in policy-making. The post is here.
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Assessing causality

Chris Blattman reports on a new must-read paper by Guido Imbens and Jeffrey Wooldridge on Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation.

Talking about Imbens and Wooldridge, here you can learn from the masters without leaving your desk. Thanks NBER!
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Asking questions about econometrics (dedicated to MB)

From Peter Kennedy's A Guide to Econometrics (page 391) : "Econometricians experience this regularly when colleagues or students stop by for advice, prefacing their request with words to the effect that they do not want to take up much of the econometrician’s time so they will explain just the technical detail with which they want help. Acquiescing to this is usually a mistake because more often than not asking simple questions about the context of the problem brings to light serious misunderstandings."
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Learning economic history from Barry Eichengreen

Barry knows economic history well. His views on current monetary policy are here.

On a related note, LIBOR is still far from FED FUND rate. The normal spread is 12 bps, yesterday it was 81 bps. The story is here.
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Happiness research

In the past everybody believed in the “Easterlin Paradox” suggesting that higher material well-being does not increase happiness (see Sir Richard Layard’s Lionel Robbins Memorial Lecture Part I, Part II, Part III). Recent research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers suggests that material well-being does affect happiness (see here for a summary). This nice article by Robert Foa on the FT claims that it is not income but freedom (an older EJ paper by Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer is on Happiness and Democracy).

A fun book about happiness travel and the happiness project blog.

Other pioneers of happiness research in economics are Bruno Frey and Andrew Oswald.

Martin Wolf asks: should we always try to maximize happiness?

I once wrote a paper (with Monica Yanez) on happiness and economic reforms in Latin America (here), but I don’t think many people read it.
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Obesity around the world

Very nice tool from the WHO, lots of data and you can create your own graph. HERE.
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Aviazione (civile?) italiana

Senza parole (io, non loro), ascoltate qui. (Grazie a Luca M.)
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Debt sustainability: THE MOVIE

The story is here. This is another film about debt.

This is a very nice paper about domestic public debt by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

Shameless advertisment: this is another paper on the topic (but the R&R paper is better).
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Tyler Cowen on Chile

Both the post (here) and the comments are nice. The comment by Gannon reminded me of when two colleagues and I got so distracted from a bunch of students coming out from a Santiago high school that one of us was pickpocketed (it was not predatory distraction, just surprise. The pickpocketed person was a woman).

Another funny anecdote: a friend of mine (actually, the same one who was pickpocketed, but this was in another trip) was once sitting on a Santiago-Miami flight next to a very famous European economist. She asked the famous European economist what he thought of Chile and the reply was something like this: “Too rich to be interesting, too poor to be beautiful.”

On a more serious note, I agree with the post that Chile seems to be decoupling from the rest of Latin America. However, the comments show that Chileans think that they should do much better. I guess that here I should tell the story of what my Chilean friends thought about this article about Chilean minibuses, but I need to go to work.
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Love and recessions

Do we need a recession?
Ricardo Hausmann (here) and Kenneth Rogoff (here) say yes. Lawrence Summers (here) disagrees.

Since Rogoff spent some time as chief econonomist of the IMF and Summers spent some time as chief economist of the WB, this difference in opinions reminded me of a nice article by Rogoff on the future of the IMF and WB. It started like this: As the two Bretton Woods sisters turn 60, the tough love of the International Monetary Fund and even the free love of the World Bank... [the italic is mine, the article is here].

Wait a moment! What about Ricardo? He was the first chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (where he was my boss). What type of love did we practice at the IDB?

What about Nouriel Roubini? In the late 1990s I spent a considerable amount of time partying with Nouriel, we didn't talk much about economics, but on other things I am pretty sure that we were all supporting free love. And yet, this NYT article describes him as Dr. Doom (thanks to Francesca for sending the article). Is he getting into S&M? (sorry, I couldn't resist the joke). More seriously, here is what Nouriel thinks of the NYT article.

Update

This is Tyler Cowen on Nouriel (with also a link to Paul Krugman)

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Buon Ferragosto

Off to Cafasse. If you want to know what's going on in Torino, check out Grigio Torino

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Financial globalization and capital account liberalization

Prasad and Rajan on Financial globalization. Here is the official view of the IMF. In this paper, Reinhart and Rogoff seem to disagree with the view that financial liberalization does not increase the probability of financial crises. Peter Blair Henry has a much more positive view of capital account and financial liberalization and so do Ranciere, Tornell, and Westermann who say that liberalization is good even if it increases volatility. Rodrik and Subramanian review some of the papers linked above and present a sceptical view of the benefits of financial globalization.
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Talking about the crisis during the crisis

Carmen Reinhart produced an excellent real-time book on the sub-prime crisis. It is the first VOX Book (it is a collection of Vox columns on the subprime crisis). The book is here.
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Talking about the crisis before the crisis

In June 2007, BIS held a conference about financial system and macro resilience. I just received the paper with the summary of the conference. It is very interesting to see how optimistic policymakers were just two months before the eruption of the sub-prime crisis. The summary of the conference is here.

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John Kay on Measuring Value Added in Services

Very nice column on the problems with VA statistics here
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Martin Wolf on Creative Capitalism

This is a nice post.
MW's wise comments to this post are also interesting.
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Travaglio e Fazio

In tre parti (come la Gallia)

Prima parte, seconda parte, terza parte

Scuse di Fazio, Travaglio sulle scuse di Fazio, il Guardian sulle scuse di Fazio
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Alejandro M.

Apparently my friend Alejandro Micco has "vocacion de poder" but in the good sense of the expression (??). The link (in Spanish) is here.
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Subsidies in academia

From Marginal Revolution, the post is here

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Italian Spiderman

All the way from Australia (or Sicily?)

Click here for the trailer

Here is the alrUGO (???) website

Also in this case, thanks to Massi
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James Bond in Livornese (fun videos in Italian)

L'auto perfetta (ha anche la targa per Lucca) (click here)

Problemi di capelli? (click here)

Penso che gli autori siano questi

Grazie a Massi
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