Elephantstrunk

Sun 10/09/2006 14:42

I hope this is a teaser for something else. Picture taken on Southwark Street London.
[Update] Also seen here. I’m sure I’m being manipulated. It looks to expensive to be really meant.

Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: Marginal Notes on Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas’s Presentation of Golosov, Tsyviniski, and Werning
Before it rolls off the front page. Here is the paper. Working lunches. Golosov and Tsyvinski. Responses from, in the blue corner (British sense), Mr. Optimal Taxation and in the red corner, Mr. Overlapping Generations.

Longevity forecasts in pensions ‘too low’ reports the FT. But why would they be any other way? The higher the estimate, the more the actuary’s employer or client must put into the pension fund. Same goes for equity allocations and actuarial valuation techniques.

Goldman moves in on pensions
More interesting, not least because it is more visible is the Oliver Hemsley/Mark Wood vehicle Paternoster described here. Such moves are clearly of a piece with suggestions of a market in pension obligations. I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. If companies want to eliminate pension liability risk they […]

RGE - Stiglitz: Abolish GDP!
Joe Stiglitz is having fun. A good idea, or better yet remember that GDP != the good. Is the availability of time series for an alternative really critical?

As if by magiic but more likely because its the start of a new school year or my attention I notice that Marginal Revolution has picked up an excellent summary of the state of the art in school choice mechanism design. Tyler Cowen gives the following summary of Professor Hoxby’s presecriptions. A successful mechanism […]

Approximately 90,000 children are in the process of transferring from London’s 1,836 primary schools to its 406 secondary schools. Each student may apply to up to 6 secondary schools in an order of preference.
Each school will determine an order of preference for those children that have applied. In most cases it will depend mostly upon […]

Not so much a review as a collection of observations.
Good & Plenty by Tyler Cowen is free of the reductionism and economic triumphalism that it might be feared a book about the economics of culture would express.
Discussions of state involvement in artistic endeavour range from direct grants to CIA operations via copyright and tax […]

The Gherkin up for sale for £600m | This is Money

Bill Gates would actually be able to buy it to use as a house but no doubt is being put off by Stormbreaker. Mostly I wonder why Swiss Re is selling - as planned, due to internal pressures or because the property portfolio managers think […]