Bob Murphy

Author Archive

[UPDATE: It was not until I pushed this post out on Twitter that I realized I should have called it, “WHY DID THE ECONOMIST CROSS THE ROAD?” Ah, life is full of regrets. But seriously, that is a clever title for this content, beyond the obvious.] I am in the middle of a lot of […]

Spillover Bias in Contiguous County Approach

Daniel Kuehn has a very interesting new paper on possible spillover bias when using a “contiguous county” approach in economic analysis. For example, this is the approach in the influential Dube et al. (2010) minimum wage paper, which Paul Krugman for example singled out as epitomizing the new research that overturned the old view about […]

Economists Critique Trump’s Industrial Policy

On Thanksgiving, while most Americans were drinking beer and watching football, Donald Trump was hard at work keeping jobs in America!! When word came out that the company Carrier would in fact keep its operations in Indiana, rather than outsourcing, naturally the Trump forces claimed victory. But Justin Wolfers on Twitter was horrified: Every savvy […]

Lara-Murphy Show on The City of God

Sorry for the hiatus, my travel schedule the last two months has been pretty crazy. Carlos and I have released another episode of our podcast. It’s definitely not your usual fare; we talk about his latest reading, Augustine’s *The City of God*.

The WaPo’s Absurd Conspiracy Theory About Conspiracy Theorists

Everybody and his brother has made fun of this recent WaPo piece. In case you missed it, here’s the punchline: The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton…say independent researchers who tracked […]

Scott Alexander on Trump’s Alleged Racism

Someone posted this long post (is there any other kind?) from Scott Alexander in the comments a while ago. It is a simply PHENOMENAL refutation of what “everybody knows” about Trump being a flaming racist. I didn’t read it until I was on a business trip and was stuck with my conscience and my phone […]

Liberty Classroom CYBER MONDAY Special

(Don’t worry, if you ordered based on my Black Friday post at the “Master” level, then I’ll retroactively give you this bonus too. I’ll be in touch, but if you don’t hear from me in a few days, feel free to email me to make sure.) OK I have been informed that there is still […]