The 2007-9 Financial Crisis turned Iceland into a major tourist destination, as a newly cheap currency combined with affordable flights and natural beauty. For anyone with plenty of time and a moderate amount of money, chasing the newly-cheap destination seems like a good travel strategy.
Since January 2020, here are the countries where the US dollar has gained the most vs the local currency:
Texas is one of the most regulated states in the country.
This is one of the surprises that emerged from the State RegData project, which quantifies the number of regulatory restrictions in force in each state. It turns out that a state’s population size, rather than political ideology or any thing else, is the best predictor of its regulations.
This is what I found, with my coauthors James Broughel and Patrick McLaughlin, when we set out to test whether a previous paper (Mulligan and Shliefer 2005) that showed a regulation-population link held up when we used the better data that is now available. We found that across states, a doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 percent increase in regulation.
US housing prices shot up during the pandemic. People spending all day at home wanted bigger houses, and the Fed fueled their demand with low interest rates. But home owners didn’t want to sell- the total number of homes on the market is less than half what it was a year ago. This combination of rising demand & falling supply has sent prices way up & cut the time homes spend on the market.
Contrary to popular belief, its actually rare for economists to make market forecasts and most of us aren’t especially well-equipped to do so- but I’m going to try anyway! I think home prices will almost certainly stop growing so quickly, and may actually fall, within two years.
Why? The end of the pandemic, the rise of new construction, and the end of low interest rates.
Continue readingI’m James Bailey, an economist at Providence College who studies how government policies affect health care and the labor market. Thanks to Joy for the chance to join the blog for a few months!
For my first post, I have to share the brand new book I wrote a chapter of, “Regulation and Economic Opportunity: Blueprints for Reform“. Normally academic volumes like this are sold for hundreds of dollars, so only a few people with access to academic libraries end up reading them. But the publisher of this volume, the Center for Growth and Opportunity, released it as a free Ebook– so I hope you’ll check it out. It covers everything from housing and health care to energy and education to beer and cigarettes.
I wrote chapter 5, on how various regulations affect wages and employment. Here’s an excerpt:
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