A big issue we talked about after my presentation was whether or not supplementing (and ultimately replacing) the pharmaceutical patent system with a reward system…
Economics 398 Winter 2017
I hope everyone is making it through finals. This is a topic we discussed recently and Professor Smitka made a lot of interesting points with…
Okay, so this post may be a little political. It is obvious that there is a strong bias against Trump in class, so some may…
We looked at a paper Hoshi & ItoNote that argues Japan’s budget deficits are not sustainable, indeed that without adjustment bond issues will exceed total…
Social Security is at the center of many current debates, with many politicians and citizens arguing that the program will become unsustainable in the near…
Real estate usually makes up 15%-18% of America’s GDP. This number is broken down into 3%-5% from “Residential Investment” and 12%-13% from “Consumption Spending on…
In 2015, 65.1 million people received benefits from the Social Security Administration and this number is constantly increasing. As we’ve talked about in class, the…
As I stated in my comment in the previous blog post, I was surprised that healthcare was not among the top two expenditures on the…
One of the things that intrigued me in class this week was thinking about the spending habits of those in retirement age. During a person’s…
The long-term visualization of home prices in the U.S. tells an interesting tale of overall domestic growth, labor force demographics, and mortgage industry changes. Beginning…
As we’ve already discussed the Case-Shiller index and mortgage metrics in order to assess the health of the housing market, I would like to take a…
The National Transfer Accounts project is spearheaded by Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason. It has compiled data on income and consumption by age, as well…
Housing starts have historically indicated a strong real estate market, which indicates a strong economy. As you see from the FRED graph, the 2008 crash…
Courtesy of the graphs to Prof. Smitka who made them in excel using data from CoreLogic – thank you (Apologies if they’re blurry – I…
The labor force participation rate is the percentage of people in the civilian noninstitutionalized (not in prison or the military) population, aged 16 and older,…
A multitude of useful construction data was released last week. In addition to overall construction spending, public construction spending, and total housing starts, it is…
Full employment is usually defined as any level of employment under 5%. Full employment means that all eligible workers regardless of skill level are in jobs.…
Overall, the construction industry has experienced far from rapid growth in 2016. With oil prices low, major capital projects from firms involved in the energy…
Long-run CPI trend Figure 1: CPI for all items and all items less food and energy This graph shows the long-run CPI trends since the…
Wednesday’s release of the Consumer Price Index (seasonally adjusted for All Urban Consumers) revealed inflation of .3% in December of 2016, leaving annual 2016 inflation…