Ask an Economist
Welcome to Ask an Economist, a public service of the Department of Economics at Iowa State University, designed to answer your economic questions.
Our talented faculty and alumni can answer questions on a variety of economic topics to help you make more informed choices about your day-to-day decisions--or to just add a more reasoned voice when talk of the economy comes up around the dinner table.
Questions & Answers
Thaler and Sunstein in their book define nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
This question addresses an important debate in the current economic climate in which global production network and offshoring are prevalent. Economic research on this topic from both theoretical and empirical aspects is vast and is still ongoing...
Economists and economic historians in particular have been quite interested in the economic impacts of slavery and its aftermath, including the effects of race-based discrimination.
The unusually shaped yield curve was in the news the other day.
Trumps tariffs are collected by U.S. customs officials when Chinese goods are imported into the US. They are not collected on goods imported from Japan.
1) According to page 16 item #23 "The empirical results show that inequality has a negative impact on economic growth.
The term you are looking for is product differentiation.
The challenge in describing a large economy with more than 300 million people in it is in finding helpful ways to simplify the data. Economists often measure economic performance by using one very simple statistic: income per capita, which i
For consumers, changes in prices and per capita income are influential determinants of demand.
In theory, a stiff and swift increase in the minimum wage may result in less employment (of minimum-wage-eligible workers) and may increase prices to some extent as firms pass on higher wage costs to their consumers.
Some of it is read by computers and some by humans. An online marketplace like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, employs millions around the world (including the U.S.) to work on these tasks at wages of 5 cents an invoice.
Yes, there is a potential for double counting---in the case of publicly traded companies included in the SP500 that are also held in the Berkshire's portfolio (e.g., Apple or American Express).
On January 29, 2019, Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) released updated forecasts, the general link is:https://www.mla.com.au/...
Alexander Hamilton was, as the musical portrays him, an influential figure in the early history of the United States. A full description of his views about and impact on financial arrangements in the newly formed United States would be well
The easiest way to see the connection between Month on Month Inflation and Year on Year inflation is to take a step back and recall where these numbers are coming from.
The balance of payments accounts are maintained on a double entry basis. An import of $1 million will show as a negative $1 million entry in the Current Account.
Fundamentally the change of the exchange rate reflects the difference of productivity growth between China and U.S.. In the past decade, the productivity of China grew faster than U.S.
Thanks for your ‘Ask an Economist’ question. I will provide some thoughts, but may not be able to answer it completely to your satisfaction given I do not fully understand how your fantasy league operates. For example, you do not expla
The sale of Treasury securities is the government's way of borrowing funds from the public. When the government sells bills, notes, and bonds, the public, the investors, become the government's creditors.
Any subnational economic modeling includes two challenging components: data and structure. Detailed subnational data for the US is automatically suspect because input-output tables are not collected at any subnational level. Interstate
To begin with, the premise of this question is somewhat mistaken. As was true in earlier wars, WW II did cause a large expansion of federal government debt both absolutely and relative to GDP. Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reached about 9
I am not sure there is any deep reason why a government would want to set a cap on wages. What purpose would it serve, other than to curb income inequality by lopping off the top rungs of the ladder?
Take a simple textbook example due to Keynes. If you are spending beyond your means, a financial advisor may recommend some austerity on your behalf: ask you t cut spending, pay off your debt, and stay within your means.
You are correct that modern economics requires a high degree of facility with mathematics, including probability and statistics. The requirements for mathematical proficiency will vary somewhat from program to program. That said, econo