Assume you have lent your brother 1000 laris, and because he is a close family member, you do not charge interest from him. One day you get a phone call from your brother, and he offers you to pay back the debt either today or in one year from now. What would you choose? If you act in line with standard economic theory, you would choose to get the money back today. You are driven by what economists call time preference, a kind of “psychological interest rate” with which you discount future payoffs.
There are a couple of reasons why it makes sense for hum...
ISET Economist Blog
A blog about economics in the South Caucasus.
Mar
10
Feb
24
Last week, we argued that political decision makers have a tendency to overregulate a society, as new laws, even useless or harmful ones, create the impression that politicians are addressing problems in a society. Moreover, we outlined the theory of a military historian who claims that the Red Army was an “overregulated army”, explaining the disproportionate death toll of the Red Army in the Second World War. In today’s article, we will first look at the advantages of regulation, and we will then propose a set of tools called “Regulatory Impact Analysis...
Feb
17
Regulations apparently address problems of a society in a quick and uncomplicated way, and the call for regulations therefore is one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of populists. Whether or not a regulation will help to solve the problem, in any case it creates the impression that politicians are doing something. As regulations are so popular among political decision makers, the US Code of Federal Regulations, not including regulations on state level, in 2009 had 163,333 pages.
In this article we discuss the cost of regulations, an aspect th...
Feb
10
Over the winter holidays, I had the leisure to read the book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson (Crown Business 2012, 544 pages, Hardcover $20.00). Both authors are very eminent – one would not be surprised if Acemoglu, a Turkish-born Armenian and the most frequently cited contemporary economist, would receive the Nobel Prize in economics somewhere down the road.
After reading the book, I was rather disappointed, because it appeared to me as i...
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