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Welcome to Pingree's Potato Patch, my online research lab for the study of Detroit's economy. I'll be keeping track of the results of my investigations here, along with collections of useful data. Feel free to leave comments on any of the posts, and if you want to contact me, you can use this form to send me email.
Add Comment 28 February 2010 - This Is Only Another Test by David
Ok, I think I've got this working now.
Add Comment 26 February 2010 - Krugman Explains Core Inflation by David
This posting by Paul Krugman does what I described in the post title, quickly and efficiently. I found it useful in refining my understanding a bit, so here's your chance to follow suit.
Add Comment 12 February 2010 - David's Brain: Greece + Groceries = Detroit by David
I was just reading about the Euro crisis again on Brad DeLong's blog, and I had a thought. The basic narrative from DeLong and Krugman regarding the Euro is that most of the countries having problems right now had major price runups during the pre-implosion period due to capital inflows, and now that the economy has declined the only way they can recover is either
- massive deflation, which will be accompanied by a lot of pain to their citizens, and possibly trigger complete collapse, or
- the big Euro countries (particularly Germany) boost their consumption, increasing their imports from the rest of Europe, and thus improve the intra-Euro trade balance of the smaller countries.
This idea of within-currency import/export balances got me thinking about Detroit's situation. In some regards we're in the some position as the PIIGS, needing to export more to the rest of the US to gain ground. The flip side is spinning up economic activity by capturing a larger portion of the economic cycles we're already involved in, basically the local-based economics ideas taking hold in Detroit; I guess at the national level that would essentially take the form of protectionist policies, which I assume are blocked by the EU agreements.
None of this is brilliant, just a parallel which jumped out at me that seemed worth recording. It also reminds me of the need to brush up on small-country fixed exchange rate trade policy, which I've been meaning to do for a while.
Add Comment 11 January 2010 - The NYTimes Says Nice Things About Detroit by David
Mary just pointed me to a New York Times article profiling the entrepreneurial movement in Detroit. It's pretty nifty.
Add Comment 08 January 2010 - The 3/50 Project and the Andersonville Study by David
As I mentioned below, I'd tracked down the source of the 3/50 Project's claims that the local economic impact of locally-owned stores was $68 for every $100 in revenues, versus only $43 for chain stores, thus arguing that local ownership is better for the local economy. Those claims come from the Andersonville Study of Retail Economics by Civic Economics. I've finally had a chance to look through the paper, and while it's hardly the most rigorous study it's not bad for empirical work. More...
Add Comment 05 January 2010 - A Doremus Jessup Can Never Die by David
That is all. Thank you for your attention.
Add Comment 31 December 2009 - Santa Left Some Econ In My Sock by David
Santa was very nice to me this year, and among other things I've finally got a copy of Jaroslav Vanek's The General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economics. I had a chance to read a bit of it while I was working on my doctoral coursework, and it's pretty snazzy, so I plan on posting some summary information on it in the near future. In a nutshell, though, Vanek takes the basic profit-maximization model of mainstream economics and substitutes an income-per-worker-maximization model, which results in a cascade of changed outcomes.
Add Comment 31 December 2009 - CEO Incentive Compensation Is Full Of Fail by David
The Huffington Post linked to a couple of recent studies which argue that the highest levels of CEO incentive pay (i.e. "pay for performance") are correlated with dramatic underperformance by the companies offering it. The first (which I've grabbed and uploaded here out of distrust that the Wall Street Journal's link will survive for long) focuses on dollar value of compensation, and is by Michael J. Cooper at the University of Utah, and Huseyin Gulin and P. Raghavendra Rau at Purdue. The second article, which concentrates on the percentage of company income going to CEO compensation, is by Lucian A. Bebchuk of Harvard, Martijn Cremers of Yale, and Urs Peyer of INSEAD.
Add Comment 19 October 2009 - Rolling Stone, Matt Taibi, and Fake Stock by David
Rolling Stone has just recently published an engrossing article by Matt Taibi that argues that one significant contributing factor to the banking collapse was transactions involving non-existent shares of stock. If he's right, it represents a big "DOH!" moment for the regulatory apparatus...