Economic Sense

My recent post on tax cuts and budget deficits concluded that evidence does not support the contention that wealth effects result from tax c...

While this blog focuses mainly on environmental and agricultural issues, I do occasionally discuss more general economic issues, as there ar...

Recently I attended a forum on the possibility for local growers to sell agricultural carbon offsets to the Chicago Climate Exchange. Beside...

The following link will take you to a video- commentary from scientists and poor subsitance farmers in developing countries. http://www.mons...

Carbon taxes are the method preferred by many economists with regard to combating climate change. The other alternative would be a Kyoto sty...

If we accept the IPCC 4th Assessment Report as consensus, we get the following conclusions: 9/10 experts agree humans have net warming effec...

In previous posts I’ve discussed that when resources become scarce prices rise and they are used in a way that is more sustainable. I also n...

In a previous post, I mentioned that policies can be evaluated by the net benefits that they produce. Does this analysis consider the impact...

In most all cases, benefits and costs used to evaluate the efficiency of a policy are measured in dollar terms. Dollar prices are often used...

In earlier posts ( Discretionary Monetary Policy I-III) I presented a brief overview of a hybrid monetarist/Austrian view of bubbles and bus...

"The combination of quantitative training and applied work makes agricultural economics graduates an extremely well-prepared source of ...

The ongoing theme for some of my recent posts has been tools used by economists in studying the environment. In this post I am going to disc...

If we are concerned with economic growth, we must carefully consider how pollution may affect growth. Can we quantify a critical amount of p...

When resources become scarce in market economies with relevant price systems, prices increase. This price increase which reflects the increa...

I've just recently wrapped up a series of posts related to public choice economics. Public choice is useful because the analytical frame...

This past Thanksgiving, Michael Maniates wrote a dismal piece in the Washington Post stating that “We need to be looking at fundamental chan...

Thanksgiving was not about the Pilgrims embracing diversity and thanking the Indians for helping them survive. The celebration was about tha...

With all of the problems previously mentioned such as voting paradoxes and the results of the median voter theorem, democracy is not without...

Many of my recent posts have probably seemed a little more formal than my normal analysis of the biotech industry, agriculture, and natural ...

In a past post I discussed the scenario described as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which characterizes many environmental problems, especiall...