Will Rogers, commenting on the Depression, famously quipped: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?" Rogers's rhetorical question has an obvious answer: persistent stupidity fails to recognize prior errors and, therefore, does not correct them. For three decades, many financial economists have been arguing that there are deep flaws in the financial policies of the U.S.
Many organizations, such as banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, and police departments, routinely use queueing models to help manage and allocate resources in order to respond to demands in a timely and cost-efficient fashion. Though queueing analysis has been used in hospitals and other healthcare settings, its use in this sector is not widespread.
What do economics and history have to tell us about the ways euro zone countries are likely to resolve their problems of fiscal unsustainability and banking system insolvency? In answering that question, I am among the most pessimistic observers of the likely future of the euro and its membership. In my view, the euro zone's likely failure to avoid at least some departures, if not total collapse, reflects its poor initial institutional design.
Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves spent close to a year tracking the reporting of on-site news organizations—some of which were founded over a century ago and others established only in the past year or two—and found in their traffic and audience engagement patterns, allocation of resources, and revenue streams ways to increase the profits of digital journalism.
In 2009, a bipartisan Knight Commission found that while the broadband age is enabling an information and communications renaissance, local communities in particular are being unevenly served with critical information about local issues. Soon after the Knight Commission delivered its findings, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated a working group to identify crosscurrents and trends, and make recommendations on how the information needs of communities can be met in a broadband world.
In the wake of the crisis of 2008 and onwards, it has become fashionable to return to the work of Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, and cite them as showing the ubiquity of crises, how they are an inevitable result of human nature, and how they have therefore to be carefully and thoroughly regulated against. Charles Calomiris considers this view, first clearly distinguishing between financial crises and banking crises.
This paper documents that intermediaries play an important role in facilitating international trade. We modify a heterogeneous firm model to allow for an intermediary sector. The model predicts that firms will endogenously select their mode of export-either directly or indirectly through an intermediary-based on productivity. The model also predicts that intermediaries will be relatively more important in markets that are more difficult to penetrate.
In July 2007, Scripps Networks acquired Recipezaar, a user-generated recipe and cooking Website with a captive community of 2.3 million visitors. By September, Deanna Brown, president of Scripps Networks Digital, grappled with how to best integrate the recent acquisition into Scripps Networks Digital and its affiliated Website, FoodNetwork.com. Should monetization efforts trump the interests and aesthetic tastes of Recipezaar's members? Would restructuring the Recipezaar team dampen the enthusiasm of its five crucial employees and adversely affect the community they had built?