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1500 questions
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8 answers

What would be the effects of an expiration date on currency?

Let's say we introduce a monetary system where each piece of money is printed with an expiration date - a year, perhaps. I'm imagining something rather different from inflation (although I do not know whether it would actually behave much…
kram1032
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How does a country devalue its currency?

I recently read an article in the New York Times that talked about China devaluing its currency (which I believe is held to a peg against the US Dollar). My question is: specifically what tools does a central bank of a country employ to devalue its…
rambalachandran
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How can I test for autoregressive residual terms in a fixed effects panel Poisson model?

I have panel data for counts of new firms in different regions for six years. I am estimating a static poisson regression with multiplicative fixed effects$^*$; I have also tried to estimate a dynamic model by introducing a lagged dependent…
Matthijs
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What is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?

I suppose GDP is supposed to create a measure of a country's wealth/welfare, something easily indexable. But how exactly is it composed? And is its composition disputed? How good is it at measuring a country's economic well-being?
FooBar
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What are the empirical techniques to show causation?

A simple linear regression only shows correlation between two variables. To establish causation, two commonly taught methods are IV regression and natural experiments. What are the other methods people use to establish causation?
Bravo
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Dynamic Optimization: What if the second order condition does not hold?

Consider the following dynamic optimization problem \begin{align} &\max_u \int^T_0{F(x,u)dt}\\ \text{s.t.}~& \dot{x} = f(x,u) \end{align} FOCs The Hamiltonian is given by \begin{align} H(x,u,\lambda) = F(x,u) + \lambda f(x,u) \end{align} The…
clueless
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Is 'full employment' synonymous with 'the natural rate of unemployment'?

Is the phrase 'full employment' synonymous with the phrase 'the natural rate of unemployment'? Parkin, et al. (2010) seem to use these two terms interchangably in chapter 20, but looking up these two terms in the Oxford dictionary of economics…
ahorn
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Why do people buy high dividend stock?

Dividend payout from stock makes the stock price fall by the same value. It is just rearranging your money instead of getting real interest like in bonds. Then why do some people aim at high dividend stock?
HetaXD
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Why does any treasury / central bank hold gold?

I know the US treasury is slowly selling its gold reserves, but what is the actual mission and purpose when it comes to the holdings? What is the reasoning behind the slow rate of liquidation? I have even heard "tradition" and "propping up…
Vasiliy Sharapov
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Economics of forgetting

I'm interested to know economic justifications of forgetting in various fields. On example is Green and Porter(1984). To sustain a Cartel, Cartel members have incentive to forget deviations in a sufficiently distant past. Another is Ekmekciy(2011)…
Metta World Peace
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How do economic sanctions work? How do they not create an arbitrage opportunity?

(Not sure if this should be on Politics.SE) This is something I've been thinking about since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many countries enacted sanctions on Russia in response. Let's say one of those countries (Silvonia) passes a law that…
Allure
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Conventions for reading mathematically rigorous academic articles in economics

How would an informed reader typically go about reading a mathematically rigorous academic article in economics, with lots of notations, assumptions and postulations (e.g, a typical article published in Econometrica). For instance, would you spend…
Eli J
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Marshallian Demand for Cobb-Douglas

When trying maximize the utility having a cobb-douglas utility function $u=x_1^ax_2^b$, with $a+b = 1$, I found the following formulas (Wikipedia: Marshallian Demand): $x_1 = \frac{am}{p_1}\\ x_2 = \frac{bm}{p_2}$ In one of my books I also find…
user1170330
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What metrics would indicate a house bubble rather than genuine market values?

There are concerns that Auckland, New Zealand, is currently experiencing a housing bubble. Auckland is one of the top 10 cities in the world on a housing unaffordability index. The question is - how as economists can we tell whether housing prices…
dwjohnston
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Prove the sample variance is an unbiased estimator

I have to prove that the sample variance is an unbiased estimator. What is is asked exactly is to show that following estimator of the sample variance is unbiased: $s^2=\frac{1}{n-1}\sum\limits_{i=1}^n(x_i-\bar x)^2$ I already tried to find the…
Andreas Dibiasi
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