Econlinks for 16-01-’08
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Alessina, Ichino and Karabarbounis arguing for gender based taxation, on VoxEU. This recent CEPR working paper has the details. Their modelling is very basic (one obvious extension to make this more realistic– probably requiring a lot of effort– should be to allow for frictions in the search & matching of agents on the marriage market), but still makes for super interesting research with (potential) serious policy implications.
CES 2008 and Bill’s last keynote speech
SciAm’s full coverage of the ’08 CES. From where surely you won’t miss the Bill Gates bits: Bill on the future of robotics; Bill giving a personal tour of MS’s new “surface”.
→ Read more Romania gets a B for its flag. Think anthems, next…
With too much indulgence, I’d say. For one, lack of originality (compare us to Greece, same grade!) should not be rewarded… The full rankings are here (alphabetical order here).
→ Read more Please keep Economics out of that argument…
This time Andrew Gelman–one of my favourite bloggers, otherwise– is too pessimistic, exaggerates a lot, not to mention that he misinterprets the essence of Robert Hanson’s post , which he takes as starting point of his entry… In my opinion, the gist of Hanson’s is something completely different, aka ‘negative’ public incentives social scientists might often face (think, eg: Truman searching for one-armed economists that could never give him the ‘on the one hand…but on the other hand’)– that other scientists do not typically have to deal with– which could alter the true ‘scientific’ message etc.
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