Back in the early days of the coronavirus in the U.S., many economists believed that aggressive lockdowns would be the best long-term solution for managing the pandemic, despite the short-term economic pain they would cause. Six months later, we wanted to know: Did that logic
DMT (2020) draw attention to my treatment of the weighted WTP estimates. The regression model for the second scenario has a negative sign for the constant and a positive sign for the slope. When I "mechanically" calculate WTP for the second scenario it is a
DMT (2020) draw attention to my treatment of the weighted WTP estimates. The regression model for the second scenario has a negative sign for the constant and a positive sign for the slope. When I "mechanically" calculate WTP for the second scenario it is a
After an August jobs report that yielded better-than-expected results for American workers, economists have a much sunnier outlook on unemployment through the end of the year. But that optimism isn’t trickling into the rest of their economic forecasts — in part because there’s still so
When dichotomous choice CVM data is of low quality, the measure of central tendancy is sensitive to assumptions. As I showed in a paper presented earlier this year (Landry and Whitehed 2020), with the highest quality data it makes no difference the WTP estimator that
When dichotomous choice CVM data has a negative WTP problem, one of the standard corrections is to estimate a log-linear model and present the median WTP. With many estimated log-linear models the mean WTP is undefined. This is because the log-linear model flattens the estimated
Is the economy finally starting to rebound? Based on the headline numbers from the August jobs report, things sure look that way. The report shows that the economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, and the unemployment rate fell below 10 percent for the first
In Whitehead (2020) I describe the problems in the DMT (2015) data. It is full of non-monotonicities, flat portions of bid curves and fat tails. A non-monotonicity is when the percentage of respondents in favor of a policy increases when the cost increases. In other
I recently read an article in the journal Economics and Philosophy, written by Lisa Herzog, which has nothing whatsoever to do with environmental economics but nonetheless I think has interesting implications for it and for Pigouvian pricing in particular. In case you are unfamiliar with it,