The winners hold views on dealing with financial crises that many monetary economists find strange. The committee that awards the Nobel Prize in economics announced Monday it has chosen three U.S. economists for the 2022 prize: former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip H. Dybvig ...

The Inflation Reduction Act gives the government the ability to ‘negotiate’ prices. People will die. The Inflation Reduction Act has eight provisions intended to reduce future drug prices. Some observers were surely pleased that Congress gave the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services new powers to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. ...

When companies divert their attention to social goals, they produce less, driving prices higher. With inflation running at a four-decade high, it’s time to reconsider the idea that the economy will benefit if corporations sacrifice their bottom lines in favor of environmental, social and governance considerations. The truth is that ...

If you, unlike Michigan Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow, have bought gasoline lately, there's a good chance that you've seen a sticker on the gas pump with a picture of President Biden saying, "I did that." Typically, those stickers are placed by customers, not gas station owners, and for that reason, I'm against them: they violate the ...

His regulatory and tax agendas seem designed to negate the good things the economy has going for it. Most discussion about the possibility of recession focuses on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. But there are also factors on the supply side of the economy that may tip the U.S. economy into a recession. Among them are the tax ...

With the increases in oil prices since late December, it's time to look at some basic facts about oil prices and oil markets. Doing so will help us understand where the Biden administration has gone wrong and where it has gone right. Yes, you read that correctly: Biden has done one good thing, selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum ...

Freedom is the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination.” Where does that leave us? We both strongly favor vaccination against Covid-19; one of us (Mr. Hooper) has spent ...

Human behavior can’t always be studied in a lab, but these researchers found other opportunities. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded Monday to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens of Stanford University. The prize committee ...

Recently the Wall Street Journal stated that President Biden's July 9 executive order on competition is a "sweeping proposal to spur competition." That raises an important question: how can a government spur competition? Economics has a lot to say about that question. The major way, which goes back to Adam Smith, is to get rid of barriers ...

"The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00." That was the title of a 1987 editorial in a major American newspaper. The editorial stated: "There's a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage would price working poor people out of the job market." You might expect the Wall Street ...

In-person classes turn out not to cause spikes in cases or fatality. But keeping kids home has a high cost. Tens of millions of students started the school year completely online, including those in 13 of the 15 largest school districts in the U.S. The primary reason is concern over safety for students and staff. But recent data are shifting ...

Economists Paul Milgrom and Richard Wilson get the prize for devising spectrum auctions. On Monday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to two American economists at Stanford, 83-year-old Robert B. Wilson and 72-year-old Paul R. Milgrom. The citation was “for improvements to auction theory ...

On September 13, 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Milton Friedman titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The article made quite a stir. It still does. The editors of the New York Times invited a number of economists, business people, think tankers, union officials, and others, twenty ...

Four new analyses of actual results show how the initial projections overestimated the value of lockdowns. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, an influential economic analysis from the University of Chicago concluded that the likely benefits of moderate social distancing would greatly exceed the resultant costs. The New York Times and the ...

Most governors in the United States have shut down their economies, requiring people to shelter in place. The measures are destroying one of the world’s strongest economies before our very eyes. We’re also relying on the very same governments that spent many weeks sending contradictory messages, blocking testing, and generally being ...

Congress’s mandate that medications be proved effective is unnecessary and delays potential cures. The federal government requires pharmaceutical companies to prove that their drugs are both safe and effective before putting them on the market. Before 1962, companies needed to prove only safety. While there is some appeal to this ...

Immigration and growth would help more than addressing the winners’ ‘manageable questions.’ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kremer of Harvard “for their experimental approach to alleviating ...

Angus Deaton wins the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded its 2015 Nobel Prize in economics to Scottish-born economist Angus Deaton for his “analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare.” Mr. Deaton, 69, who is both a British and U.S. citizen, is a Princeton University professor of economics ...

Most people who earn the minimum wage or slightly more are the only earners in their households and therefore are poor, right?

And so, if the federal government or state governments raise the minimum wage, that will be a nicely targeted way of helping poor people, right? ...

The latest winners of the economics prize taught us about market efficiency in pricing assets. Sometimes the Nobel committee seems to make a partly political statement in choosing winners of the prize in economics. Not this year. On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2013 Nobel to three deserving American economists: ...

Nobel laureate Ronald Coase taught that economists should study real markets. Ronald Coase, who died on Labor Day at age 102, was one of the most unusual economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1991 for his insights about how transactions costs affect real-world economies. In a 75-year career he wrote only about a ...

Armen Alchian never won a Nobel Prize in economics. But no less than Friedrich Hayek said he 'deserved' one.

In 1975, I attended a week-long conference in Connecticut at which the star attraction was Friedrich Hayek. Hayek, who had shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was doing a kind of victory tour of the United States. I told him that I ...