Links of interest

Here are some links that I suggest people go and give a read if you haven’t already – they are all things I wanted to post about, but have decided to link without comment 😉

1. Seamus at Offsetting Behaviour (part 1 and part 2) on the Broken Window post by Shamubeel.
2. Seamus also discusses economic models and simplicity.
3. Eric at Offsetting touches on the living wage idea.
4. Bill at Groping to Bethleham on inequality, mental models, and policy – here he ties together the discussion on inequalities and the recent push for ‘evidence based policy‘.  Very neat.
5. Brennan McDonald points out the ‘myth of deregulation‘.  Indeed.  My only addition is that I think many people get stuck on a narrow “regulation vs deregulation” spectrum, and use this to fit their priors – but if we were to take this line, the growth in the size of government and sets of regulations would not be consistent with calls of deregulation!  In truth, government is an institution within society, that also influences society.  We are trying to understand this interaction and the purpose of policy within this – short slogans that paint “goods guys” and “bad guys” will often miss the point 😉
6. On a related point, Aaron Schiff discusses building regulation in Auckland.
7. Paul at Anti-Dismal talks about optimal firm size and transactions costs.  Paul also mentions the recent VoxEu piece on the minimum wage – I’m still planning to do a post on this one which is why there is no new bullet 🙂
8. Donal at Economics NZ mentions (rightly) that, when it comes to thinking about financial innovation, we should be thinking about trade-offs instead of just costs.
9. And David Giles puts up a neat list of ten basic principles applied econometricians should keep in mind when doing their work.  The first comment by Kevin is also a pretty central point to keep in mind, and Mark Thoma adds a couple!
10. And just to include TVHE, I was looking for an Idealog article I wrote saying we should have “measurable goals for policy analysts” a couple of years back – as I wanted to point out why what I was saying was quite different to this, this, and this criticism of mine of measurable goals for policy.  Instead I found James and myself making the same sort of points a couple of years ago.  Really want to find that link though, just to make sure I didn’t say anything stupid …

You might note that these are all links from sites that are from NZ, or have a relation to NZ, and are all in some way relevant to analysis and policy in NZ at present.  Isn’t that neat 🙂