Economic Sense

I recently came across ‘Unnatural Causes’ a 7 part documentary about racial and economic inequalities in public health. I have not watched i...

Usually I don't write posts this long, but in light of the coming Independence Day holiday, and recent supreme court decision, both the ...

With the increase in commodity prices, including agricultural and energy futures, many critics have come down hard on speculators. Some are ...

Recently in the news there was a story about environmentalists targeting obese individuals as being major contributors to global warming. Wh...

The economic problem of society is more than just achieving an optimal or just allocation of resources. It is easy to formulate a ‘positive’...

According to a recent article in ‘Parade’ included in my Sunday paper, “Sens. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) and Olympia Snowe (R., Maine) introduc...

Given all of the environmental and health benefits from biotech foods, you would think that more supporters of organic production and 's...

I concluded my last entry on tax cuts and budget deficits by stating that there could be cases theoretically where Mankiw’s assumption about...

In my previous post, I concluded with findings by Mankiw that if consumers are uncertain about their future incomes and tax liability, Ricar...

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 ...