Month: March 2015

The Tory £12bn and manifest inadequacy

The leak to the BBC hinting at the scale of the cuts to welfare budgets being modelled by the Department for Work and Pensions has caused consternation. And so it should. Given that George Osborne has refused to say what he is proposing to cut from welfare spending […]

Economics blogging and the return of political economy

Alex Tabarrok posted yesterday on the relationship between the economics blogosphere and academic economics. He identifies three contrasts between economics blogging and publication in academic economics journals: Blogs are fast, journals are slow Blogs are open, journals are closed Journals reward cleverness, policy requires wisdom He notes that […]

International evidence on housing booms

This post is the first of its kind for me. The post is jointly authored by myself and my friend and colleague Ken Gibb. It is being published simultaneously on both our blogs. You can find Ken’s post here. A recent NIESR paper by Armstrong and Davis (November […]

Election pledges: The few would disagree edition

While I was sat in the auditorium at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference listening to Danny Alexander’s speech on the economy – which, by the way, was not too shabby an example of the genre – Twitter reported the unveiling of the Labour party’s five election pledges. Here […]

Stress testing society

In today’s Observer Sir Hugh Orde argues that the cuts to police funding being proposed by the Conservatives for after the election, layered on top of the cuts that have already happened, put the ability of the police to fulfil their basic functions at risk. He argues that […]