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
Thank you for these interesting questions. As they indicate, you are already well aware of potential distortions associated with tax policies.
Thank you for your question! These ideological "definitions" and distinctions can be quite confusing and arbitrary.
While it is true that lower prices at the pump benefit consumers, stock markets also infer that low oil prices signal weak demand for oil, in this case from travel-related fears due to the corona virus.
The adverse effects of the minimum wage depend on how high it is compared to the prevailing wage in the area. Because wages are higher in San Francisco than Des Moines, a $15 minimum wage in San Francisco, where the median wage is $25.11, is
The U.S.
No, there is nothing preventing non-profit organizations from offering insurance.
Private developers will identify profitable opportunities from constructing toll roads; the current road system may be too congested or outdated, or an undeveloped route may have potential to be lucrative.
I found a policy report that might be a little dated (2013) but I think is probably still relevant. You can find the report here: <https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41897.pdf>
As many observers have noted, economists are not especially good at forecasting the future.
The following FEDS Note by Bonis, Fiesthumel, and Noonan (2018) provides detailed answers to your questions: https://www....
Continue Reading AnswerThere is a large body of research that shows that peers matter for later academic and economic success. A prominent study in which children were randomly placed in kindergarten classes showed that children who were placed in schools with hig
My name is Marcelo Oviedo and used to work as Assistant Professor at Iowa State University.
1. The most common credit score is of the form used by FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation). The calculation has five components, payment history, amount owed, length of credit history, new credit, and type of credit used. The first two
For such a strategy to work at the least following two conditions must hold:
The question you are asking is about the bid-ask spread. The bid is what a buyer wants to pay for an item.
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.