Matt Nolan

Anti-trust articles: Fintech and 5G

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One of the founding authors and editors of TVHE has a couple of cool anti-trust articles up for the Anti-Trust writing awards. I reckon we should go an give them some support. Will Taylor notes this on LinkedIn here – but if that doesn’t work for you the link to the voting for the two articles is here.

COLLABORATION AND COMBINATION DUE TO 5G: UNLOCKING INVESTMENT OR REDUCING COMPETITION?

FINTECH DEVELOPMENTS AND ANTITRUST CONSIDERATIONS IN PAYMENTS

The voting is for the “reader choice” award – you can vote towards the bottom of each of these links.

Go give them a read – I definitely learned a thing or two. Anti-trust stuff is complex, but getting this right is incredibly important – and industrial economics is definitely the topic that “feels” most like real economics, with its mix of theory, application, data.

Matt Nolan

Happy Valentine’s Day: Economics and the nature of a gift

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, from Gulnara and myself. To celebrate we’ve put up a video characterising two different ways of thinking about gift giving – specifically the conflict between telling someone what gift you want and the nature of a surprise gift.

People think and feel very differently about this, and fair enough we all have different preferences and have been raised in different gifting cultures (influencing the type of signal a gift is).

However, by thinking about why someone may feel differently about a gift allows us all to understand these different perspectives – as they say, economics is the path to tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately love.

We would love to hear how you think about both giving and receiving presents – what have we missed?

Matt Nolan

Book review: Time for Socialism

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Hi all – below is the text version of our book review of Thomas Piketty’s “Time for Socialism“. The video can be found here. Would be keen for thoughts, and if there are other books people want reviewed.

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Matt Nolan

Video: What can we do with GDP

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Hey team,

I realised that a lot of the videos going up presuppose knowledge about what GDP is and what the purpose of GDP is – but after hearing another series of people baselessly criticise GDP I realised that assuming this knowledge isn’t really the best place to start.

So I popped a video up at the start of the “Data and Aggregates” playlist that is just about what the point of GDP is.

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Gulnara Nolan

Video: Leaky buckets and inequality

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Today’s video is on Okun’s leaky bucket – a metaphor that is used to describe how we would think about a trade-off between transfer resources and the total number of resources.

Such a metaphor for considering this trade-off is useful – but as Matt has noted in the past we should be very very cautious about overinterpreting this example when looking at real economic data. Hence why I got him to chat about that at the end.

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Gulnara Nolan

Video: Capital explained in under 10mins!

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I’ve just popped up a video where I am to explain what “capital” is, in terms of a factor of production in an economic sense, in under 10 minutes.

The goal was to work out what capital is (and isn’t), to describe the difference between tangible and intangible capital, and to give a feeling for how we can add up quite different capital items.

Hopefully outlining what capital is will make the research discussed here and published here a bit more useful.

Keen for your thoughts 🙂

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