My home state of Texas is famous for its large number of executions. For years, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice maintained an online list of what these inmates requested as their last suppers. TCDJ recently took down the list, but it is now available on a mirror. The list makes for fascinating reading. Be [...]
Our friend Tony came for a visit last weekend. It was a great time, and I thought I’d share some pictures. These are from the Golden Gate bridge, a kayaking trip in Tomales Bay, and a beach near Point Reyes.
In a previous post, I estimated the following equation for the demand for gasoline (January 2002-December 2009): where P is price in cents, U is unemployment in percentage terms (i.e. 7% unemployment equals U of 7), and δ equals monthly variation (because gasoline consumption differs substantially by month.) In previous posts, I also estimated the [...]
I just read something in my economics textbook similar to the ideas expressed in my “Marketing to the Womb” post from several months ago: … Some promotional tactics are subtle. For example, grocery stores place sugary breakfast cereals on lower shelves so that they are at children’s eye level. According to a survey of 27 [...]
[Previously: parts 1, 2, and 3.] Let’s talk about gasoline taxes. As I pointed out in previous posts, gasoline consumption is lowered only slightly by an increase in prices. While this makes it difficult to reduce consumption (and carbon dioxide emissions), it does give us the opportunity to raise an enormous amount of revenue. And [...]
I’ll continue the gasoline story soon, I promise! First, I want to share a video from the talent show at GSPP (my graduate program.) It’s a tongue-in-cheek commentary on efficiency and equity in economics, described by its creator, my colleague Jay, as … superficially an allocation problem. But the subtext is really about contrasts in [...]
[See preceding posts for more information.] After writing yesterday’s post, I decided to update my data to include the last quarter of 2009. This definitely changes things, as you can see from this graph: What makes these record-low consumption rates interesting is that they are not completely explained by high fuel prices. The same [...]
Using the equation I estimated yesterday, I decided to calculate the price elasticity of demand for gasoline. Price elasticity of demand is basically the responsiveness in a good’s consumption to a change in price. This number is (nearly) always negative, because the more expensive a good becomes, the less of it people buy. As the [...]
[Updated: I re-estimated this with daily consumption instead of monthly consumption for the simple reason that some months have more days than others. The F-score took a hit, but the model is more accurate, overall, I think.] I decided to play around with some of the stuff I’ve been learning in my econometrics class to [...]
