I have just bumped into an interesting twitter thread where an MMT theorist justifies their job guarantee by pointing to the Soveit Union’s Parasite law. Being born in the old Soviet Union, and having talked to my parents about their experience with it, I thought it might be useful to share my views on the […]
The recent data from the Big Mac index indicated that, in New Zealand a Big Mac costs $6.60 NZD. However, in the United States it costs $5.71 USD. As Stuff.co.nz notes this implies an exchange rate of 1.16 in USD/NZD terms (a US dollar is worth 1.16 NZ dollars) if the price of the Big […]
The latest speech by the RBA’s Governor Philip Lowe, they have ruled out negative interest rates as an alternative monetary policy option for Australia in the near future. In the discussion, the RBA outlined the cost side of this tool, namely “They can also encourage people to save more, rather than spend more, so they […]
Today I am going to discuss the relationship between the gender pay gap and wage stickiness. Wages are termed sticky when they don’t adjust to the optimal level driven by the changes in labour market conditions. The interaction between sticky wages and economic shocks helps to generate the business cycle, and also causes a lot […]
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working mostly from home as part of the COVID lockdown. However, now with the move back to Level One I’m heading back into the office on a more full-time basis. In the first few days back, I have heard a lot of people from around the building talking […]
In this post I am going to talk about price rigidities/stickiness. What do economists mean about price rigidities and how do we test them? On the face of it this sounds pretty simple – if prices change often then there doesn’t seem to be much scope for them to be sticky. But when we think […]