In my recent Times article on the possibility of a public option, I wrote

An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all ex ...

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser on transportation policy.

For academics, it always a delight when some old, obscure thing we've written suddenly gets noticed. So I was pleased when econoblogger Mark Thoma decided to draw attention yesterday to a speech I gave six years ago (pdf version) to the National Association of Business Economists. I had not looked a ...

The NYU economist looks at the data: Read both Part I and Part II.

Intriguing new research from UCSD economists Garey and Valerie Ramey (via Dan Hamermesh) shows that parents respond to the incentives:

After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the U.S. began to rise dramatically in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the rise in chil ...

...about the proposed health reforms:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of U.S. voters at least somewhat favor the Democrats’ health care reform plan, while 45% are at least somewhat opposed.

While the overall numbers favor the plan, those with strong opinion ...

Milton Friedman has long been one of my role models. So I was delighted to read that, according to BYU econ prof Richard Evans, at least in one small way, I have managed to emulate him.

In a brief blog post on healthcare, Paul Krugman says that George Will and I are "either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous." I cannot speak for George, but I can attest that I am completely ingenuous. So I suppose I must be remarkably ignorant.

There is a lot of that going around lately. In ...

As seen by the Times (UK).

I have a soft spot for novels about adolescent ennui. Not that I was a particularly disaffected teenager. Quite the contrary. But I am sometimes a disaffected adult, so I still easily relate to this genre of fiction. Last year, I reread Catcher in the Rye and enjoyed it more than I did when I first ...

An excerpt from Scott Sumner's thought-provoking blog:

See what you make of this:

“In early 1920, he [Keynes] set up a syndicate, with his brother, some of the Bloomsbury circle, and a financier friend from the City of London. By the end of April 1920, they had made a further $80,000. Then s ...

Analysis from economists Alan Viard and Ted Gayer.

Pro and Con.

My Harvard colleague David Cutler has been a healthcare adviser to President Obama. Click here to read how he and coauthor Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin believe healthcare costs can be contained.

Judge Posner is not impressed.