The Bowtie Economist's Daily Dose of 70-Word Wisdom


A Hail Mary for Sprint

10/17/2011

Because Sprint now sells iphones (as of 10/1/11), its bottom line will take a hit. The extra subsidy cost of selling an iphone to an existing Sprint customer (rather than a Droid phone) is $100. Based on data from Verizon…

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Payroll and Playoffs, Unrelated?

10/14/2011

The Friday File: Baseball’s 3 teams with the highest payrolls are watching the playoffs on TV. The Yankees ($202.6 million) were upset by the Detroit Tigers ($105.7 million), while the Philadelphia Phillies ($172.9 million) were upset by the St Louis…

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What’s my Share?

10/13/2011

Firms frequently buyback their own shares when they think they are undervalued. Problem is, firms often get it wrong! So far this year HP has spent $7.6 billion to buy 200 million shares at about $38/share. In ’10 HP spent…

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Nobel Prize Winners in Economics

10/12/2011

The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Tom Sargent at NYU and Chris Sims at Princeton. Sargent’s work has helped us understand the impact of permanent changes in economic policy. Sim’s research has helped us measure the effect of…

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Megaprofitable Texting

10/11/2011

Last year about 2 trillion text messages were sent in the US generating more that $20 billion in revenue for cell phone companies. Experts estimate that it costs cell phone companies about a third of a cent to send a…

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Cricket Cost-Benefit

10/07/2011

The Friday File: Despite the added risk of becoming bird food, male crickets gallantly give their mates priority in crawling into safe burrows. In a recent issue of Current Biology, researchers found paired males were 3.9 times more likely to…

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Regulation Bites

10/06/2011

Pinellas County FL has announced it will stop putting fluoride in its water. A Commissioner called it “a social sort of program” to be avoided. This is nuts. Adding fluoride is one of the great public health achievements of the…

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Nobel Prize Prognostications

10/05/2011

With the Nobel in economics to be awarded next week, here’s my list of candidates: Bhagwati and Dixit for research in international trade, Barro and Romer for growth econ, Hart for transactional econ, Nordhaus and Weitzman for environmental econ, Fama…

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Energy Sprawl

10/04/2011

While energy sources like the sun and wind are free, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires lots of lands. The math is easy. To get 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the Mojave desert your need 15 sq…

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Measuring Teacher Quality, Badly!

10/03/2011

Public school teacher effectiveness and thus salary, promotion, assignment and tenure decisions are based on certification, advanced degrees, and years of experience. Regrettable there is almost no relationship between those variables and teacher classroom performance with the slight exception of…

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