Both Kalshi and Polymarket (betting prediction companies) are spending advertising money on providing free groceries. Seems like politicians can shape the narrative and public discourse

Here is my 2 cents on the nomination of Kevin Warsh as the Federal Reserve Chair. I’m not concerned about central bank independence, but I am worried about his ability to adapt to new scenarios. Rules of thumb generally don’t do well during unexpected situations. www.nominalnews.com/p/kevin-wars...

Should we fund the subway extension by taxing the poor?

This is an example of a false choice. Whether you should build a subway extension and how you should fund it are two independent questions. This pertains to every publicly funded program.

Tariffs are a domestic tax. So imposing them as 'punishment' on another country is a really interesting tactic....

Work from home appears to have stabilized - around 27% of the work week is done remotely. It’s worth noting that “work-from-home” was always an option- it, unfortunately, took the pandemic for companies/ leaders to realize. Thus, take it with a grain of salt, when leaders say things aren’t doable.

Interesting debate - do the French prefer more leisure or are they prevented from working more by laws/regulations. To counter the rebuttal - is there a consideration of having higher relative income?

My issue with a lot of the how to solve H-1B talk is that very rarely I see the solution of simply doubling or tripling the number of available H-1B visas. The conundrum would then solve itself.

There’s been a pretty change in how Supreme Court judges view court cases that involve a transfer of income or wealth:

Voters sometimes end up rejecting good policies. It's often because voters don't envision how other people will alter their actions under the new policy. That's why policies like road congestion pricing are extremely beneficial but very hard to enact. www.nominalnews.com/p/demand-bad...

Mark Carney is in the headlines and it’s probably a great advertisement to study economics. Looking briefly at his PhD Thesis, his research appears to argue for ‘strict anti-trust’.

Citadel's (a hedge fund) CEO says decisions made under the Biden administration "were so so poorly thought out in terms of economic consequences, it cost the U.S. economy dearly." The chart below are the programs that were enacted and later cut.

Inflation is the same as last year (accounting for October/November inflation measurement issue). Unemployment is higher.

Just a reminder - tariffs are an extremely inefficient domestic tax. It hurts the tariff imposing country. An occasional question I hear, why do other countries have tariffs - usually the reason is that the tax collected from tariffs is administratively easier to do than say income or property tax.

Credit card rewards programs are like social media - we'd all be better off if they didn't exist, but once they do exist, it makes sense we participate in them. www.nominalnews.com/p/should-rew...

The harder you make all avenues for legal immigration, the more undocumented immigration you will get. It’s a standard finding in economics.

It is unlikely that the 10% cap will be implemented. However, what actually might help consumers is restricting rewards on credit cards. Ultimately, credit card rewards simply increase overall transaction costs (benefiting credit card issuers), while rewards are simply a re-distribution.

Rather than capping interest rates to 10% on credit cards, limiting 'rewards' cards would be better for consumers. This could be done via capping interchange fees or perhaps, taxing points/cashback as income..

Most of the 'cashback'/points one gets for credit cards is nearly perfectly offset by a higher price at checkout - merchants pass on the fee imposed by credit card issuers on consumers.

Rewards credit cards are an example of bad equilibrium. - Credit card issuers charge higher transaction fees for them than other cards; - The higher transaction fees are passed on to all consumers via higher prices;

Cashback and points on rewards credit cards sound great, but they've put us in a terrible equilibrium. Rewards get paid by lower income individuals and ‘less sophisticated’ users, while credit card issuers take a larger cut. www.nominalnews.com/p/should-rew...

Concerns around country debt-to-GDP may be completely unfounded. If we look at other metrics such as debt-to-equity and interest-to-GDP, the data looks unremarkable* *A short note by Berk and van Binsbergen

Another example of using existing resources and policies to increase government outreach/efficiency. In the spirit of the intervention by Blattman, Duncan, Lessing and Tobin (2023) www.cityandstateny.com/politics/202...

This paper analyzes the affirmative action policy in France at SciencesPo. The results suggest large gains to society and students that got accepted, with little to no cost for the university. It also suggests that schooling is not just signalling, but upskilling.

If you want to stay up to date on policy relevant economic research, you can subscribe for free to our Nominal News Substack. Below is our 2025 recap - inflation related research dominated but also topics like immigration and work requirements were popular. www.nominalnews.com/p/nominal-ne...

This is what AI "thinks" of Nominal News, my economics substack - can't complain, as that's what I've set out to achieve :D

Academic economists correct predictions for the US in 2025: - Tariffs will increase inflation, reduce real wages, increase unemployment; - Congestion pricing in NYC will reduce traffic and pollution with no negative impact on economic activity;

An employer putting in time and effort to reward employees is often reciprocated by workers with higher productivity. For example, even giving a cash bonus in the form of an origami decoration (as in the image below) to workers resulted in higher worker productivity.

It may seem surprising, but employers gifting an item appears more valued by employees than just a cash bonus. Gifts in workplace settings appear to generate positive value.

Every year, the 1993 Waldfogel paper is cited as proof that gifts are 'inefficient'. But repeated follow up research showed that gifts are valued above the cost of the gift. It also turns out workers respond to gifts better than just cash! www.nominalnews.com/p/gifts-work...

Why 3% inflation today is different from 3% inflation a year ago - I’m a bit more concerned about current inflation than I was a year ago because of the following charts Below is median wage growth reduced by the consumer price index absent shelter. The right chart shows the CPI absent shelter.

Not too bad! I've written 32 articles on economics research this year. The most popular were about inflation (mainly the NK model of it) But also wrote about sports betting, immigration, free buses and tariffs. Credit to all the researchers and professors - thanks to their work, we learn new things

Research shows that homeowners are likely to remain locked-in an area that is going through to an economic downturn. This is a significant homeownership cost that is under-emphasized. open.substack.com/pub/nominaln...

Yeah - I don't think this will encourage good outcomes. Since people use savings/investments to gamble, that will make saving relatively less attractive.

Sports betting comes with costs, as people use savings to fund it However, it's important to note that gambling is a form of entertainment consumption, meaning the issue of gambling losses could be alleviated with solutions like prize linked savings accounts: www.nominalnews.com/p/the-costly...

The problem with this headline is that it sneaks in an incorrect assumption - Americans between 2020 to 2023 did get poorer. This is because transfer programs were cut. Real post tax/transfer incomes fell.

This shouldn't come as a surprise - not only did tariffs raise inflation and reduced efficiency, but it will also likely not raise the revenues they were expected too. A big transfer from consumers to shareholders.

Alternatives to Police - Do They Work? This week we dove in to research by Blattman, Duncan, Lessing and Tobon (2024) which suggests that alternatives to policing do actually work - under certain conditions. www.nominalnews.com/p/alternativ...

Update from Cavallo, Llamas and Vazquez. So far tariffs appear to have contributed around 0.7pp to CPI. Yeah, that's not good.

The Louie, Mondragon and Wieland (2025) paper (along with two paper responses and an FAQ!) shows that supply constraints (zoning etc) cannot explain the observed house price differences. What does? Income. www.nominalnews.com/p/housing-an...

Is this admitting to the permanent limitations of the current genAI approach?

LOL - right on cue, news media starts talking about gift giving

With holiday season around corner, we will start seeing news articles quoting economists that say ‘gift-giving is a negative value activity, and cash gifts are better’. Is it true? No! - better research has shown that gift-giving, besides any social implications, generates a lot of value!

You can always bring down inflation by slowing down the economy with interest rates. That’s why you may see ‘low inflation’ under tariffs. Tariffs → inflation ticks up → Central Bank responds by raising rates → Unemployment ticks up → wages fall → inflation falls.

One of the weaknesses in economic modelling is that we often significantly underestimate the cost of enforcement of things. This makes means-testing often a worthless, if not negative value, exercise. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-a-van-...

Is the large spend on genAI research motivated by potentially becoming an AI monopoly? That would match the paper of the recent Nobel Prize in economics from Aghion+Howitt? Can a firm even become an AI monopoly?

I would not think that this is a good policy mix from an economic and political perspective: - Increasing goods/food costs via tariffs; - Denying SNAP benefits; - Denying pay to government workers; - Cutting healthcare assistance. I wonder if this would also be called a ‘vibecession’….

The Economics Nobel was awarded to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt for their research on technological and economic growth. I’ve written about the Aghion and Howitt research - if you want to find out how ‘simple’ economics can give us plenty of insights - have a read! www.nominalnews.com/p/aghion-how...

The dangers of genAI and economic policy discussion: Not sure if anyone discussed this, but because in economics there has been a lot written about every economic theory and mechanism, genAI appears to treat every one of them as equally applicable.