The Perils of Winding Down

I drove home listening to a left-wing talk radio show that focused on the $1.8MM in bonuses that Hostess Brands is using to retain 19 execut...

Taleb Mishandles Fragility

Christmas traditions have gone from stockings and exchanging gifts, to fruitcakes, bad sweaters, NBA games, and now Taleb books, a sign that...

Fighting Inequality

NYT reporter Nicholas Kristoff notes that private power generators are extremely useful given the poor quality of modern US electricity infr...

Another Overnight Return Puzzle

An interesting fact of returns is that all of the stock returns since 1993 are from overnight returns. Here are the total returns using on...

Is Low Vol a Beta Phenomenon?

Eugene Fama states that the low volatility anomaly is really just the excess return low beta, and this has been well known for 50 years. I t...

Online Education's Advantage

I'm a big fan, and hope the best for Marginal Revolutions new online class, as Alex Tabarrok notes: Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the ...

Government Response to Scarcity: Make it Free

So, someone decided to make gas free in areas affected by the big northeastern storm, but needless to say, they ran out.  Connecticut, New ...

Interview with Eugene Fama

Always insightful: I was in Belgium for two years working solo. When I returned, I showed Merton Miller my research produced over that two y...

Election Bounce

The Financial Times (Lex) had the following trading advice for people willing to make financial bets based on political hunches (I can't...

Idiocracy in Action

Ideally, politics is about coming up with a set of understood compromises on issues trading off redistribution and efficiency. As most peopl...

Match of the Century

Kyle Dake wrestled David Taylor last weekend in a preseason match. Both are dominant college wrestlers, and they had a great match. Both wer...

Lakoff Refuted

George Lakoff  has a theory that Republicans are master manipulators of emotions by their clever framing of issues. He sometimes says we are...