Ask an Economist

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.