| Reading: Diamond, D.W., and Dybvig, P.H., 1983, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity”, Journal of Political Economy, 91(3):401-419 |
| Lecture handout: Banking crises* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 7 (Section 7.3; pp. 216-225)
| Learning Objectives: Understand the origins of money. Understand seminal models of bank runs.
Cutting edge theory: Making assessments of digital and crypto currencies. |
| Lecture handout: Behavioural economics* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 11
“A science that claims to interpret demand fails every time it explains consumer behaviour as irrational”
Douglas, M., and Isherwood, B., 1979, The World of Goods (1996, Routledge, p.xvi)
This session surveys the key findings of behavioural economics and explains how they relate to day-to-day management. Participants will receive a thorough understanding of how economic insights for decision making can be augmented with experimental economics.
After this lecture you should be able to: Apply a range of examples of behavioural anomalies to real business situations. Understand behavioural anomalies in light of an ecologically rational framework.
Here is an explanation of the Birthday Paradox. Notice that the probability calculation assumes a uniform distribution (i.e. that there’s a 1/365 chance of being born on any given day). In fact, birthdays in July, August and September are more common than other months.
This applet allows you to play multiple games of the Monty Hall problem. An article in the Smithsonian Magazine asks “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?”
| Case: “Sun: A CEO’s Last Stand”, Business Week, July 26th 2004 |
| Instructor Resource: “A List of Behavioural Anomalies, March 2011 |
| Activity: Complete this Sun Microsystems quiz |
Here’s a nice poster of cognitive biases:
This is a nice illustration of the winner’s curse (h/t David Skarbek)
The UK government are so concerned with “excessive optimism” that they released guidance on how to mitigate it.
I used a pixelated image for an example of confirmation bias, and so I found it very interesting to see this example of bias contained within AI trained super resolution:
A nice example of attribution bias is provided in this article from The Economist, asking “what if executive memos were clear and honest?”:
We had a dreadful 2020. To be fair, nobody could have reasonably expected the executive team to predict a global pandemic which resulted in widespread economic shutdowns. But by the same token, if managers aren’t at least partly responsible during the bad times, they shouldn’t take full credit for the good times. Most executives are riding on the backs of central bankers who have slashed the cost of capital and on technology pioneers who have made it easier to transact and communicate… So, given that my fellow executives took bonuses in the boom years, we are slashing their salaries by half.
One of my favourite uses of behavioural economics is to reflect on the design of a menu when I am eating in a restaurant. This analysis by William Poundstone is truly fascinating. We should be very careful about believing too much of the highly disputed social priming literature, but framing effects are fun to think about. Apparently the second cheapest bottle of wine on a menu is actually good value for money, and here is an explanation of the decoy effect (note that this is different to the wine list example I use in class):
Everybody needs to know about this simple and effective marketing trick: The decoy effect.https://t.co/QNpM0fyIlp pic.twitter.com/I2tGeenWCf
— Lionel Page (@page_eco) May 8, 2021
If you are familiar with the Amanda Knox case you should find this essay fascinating, where she identifies a wide range of behavioural biases that played a role in her wrongful conviction and ongoing reputational damage: “A Surprising Gift from my Wrongful Conviction“.
Although I take behavioural economics seriously, I don’t think it majorly restricts the usefulness Efficient Market Hypothesis:
The reason for this is (partly) explained in Vernon Smith’s Nobel prize address:
Further videos on the implication for stock picking are: “The psychology behind irrational decisions“, “Understanding Unconscious Bias” (Royal Society) and from Marginal Revolution University: “How expert are expert stock pickers?” (and subsequent videos such as “Can you beat the market?” “Investing: Why You Should Diversify” and “Who Is More Rational? You or the Market?“)
Recommended books:
Recommended articles:
| Learning Objectives: Apply a range of examples of behavioural anomalies to real business situations. Understand behavioural anomalies in light of an ecologically rational framework. |
| Activity: Global conditions quiz |
| Lecture handout: Global prosperity* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 12 (Intro, Section 12.2, and 12.3; pp. 397-399 and pp. 404-421)
Here is my Economics Mission Statement, March 2018.
| Activity: Stoves Handout, May 2020 // Here are the Stoves charts |
The incredible data visualisation used at the beginning of my lecture is from Gapminder. I strongly encourage you to visit their website and play around with the tools. In particular, try to create a chart showing GDP per capita against infant mortality and then see how the data has changed over time.
Here is the more about Mansa Musa, the richest person who ever lived.
The increases in global income have been incredible. In Factfulness, Hans Rosling tells us that 100,000 years ago everyone was poor and most children didn’t survive long enough to become parents. 200 years ago, 85% of the world were still in extreme poverty. Today, most people live in middle-income countries, with living standards similar to Western Europe and North America in the 1950s (see p.38).
Some more detail can be found in “Rosling’s Charts“.
Higher incomes are important, they lead to:
One of the most important contributions to the rise in global living standards was the Green Revolution. A 2021 paper found that “if the Green Revolution had never happened GDP per capita in the developing world would be half of its current level… More realistically, if the Green Revolution had been delayed by ten years incomes in the developing world would be 17% lower today. In terms of cumulative GDP what this means is that the investments which made the Green Revolution possible were responsible for some US $83 trillion in benefits” (summary from Alex Tabarrok). Unfortunately, we missed out on similar benefits from Golden Rice.
In the lecture I argue that infant mortality figures are better proxies for living standards than life expectancy. As Hans Rosling argues, “this measure takes the temperature of the whole society” (p.20). This is because children are fragile, and you therefore require lots of good circumstances in order for children to routinely survive – it tells us about access to basic health care, the literacy of mothers, etc.
Some great videos to watch that explore the themes from the lecture:
Although as Tim Harford (“50 Things that Made the Modern Economy”) points out we tend to have more clothes and wash them more regularly, and therefore haven’t saved much time. A better example for a household technology that has unambiguously increased leisure time may be TV dinners and other forms of processed food
In the lecture I included some data on the long term declines in violence. You can see more about this in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, but one common rejoinder is U.S. gun crime. According to this article by Pew Research, gun murder has increased in recent years, but are still below their 1968 values. 
This review of Bryan Burrough’s 2015 book, ‘Days of Rage’, highlights a separatist movement that “bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.” In the 1970s they “bombed 2 theaters in the Bronx, injuring eleven, in 1970. NYT gave it 6 paragraphs.” For those who think street violence is new , “You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse.”
If our focus is on Development Economics, and a set of policy prescriptions that can improve the quality of life for the world’s most desperate people, a relatively simple solution is more free migration. For a thorough and highly readable defense of open borders see Caplan, B., and Weinersmith, Z., 2019, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, First Second New York.
This page ties into Chapter 12 of Economics: A Complete Guide for Business
| Learning Objectives: Understand the empirical evidence around economic growth and globalisation
Focus on diversity: Esther Duflo has done highly impactful research on the role of RCTs in combating poverty. She has shown how field research is an important part of the economics toolkit. |
| Group activity: “Macro Policy Workshop“, March 2018 and complete the Macro Policy Workshop Form. |
My video on Macro Policy summarises policy makers options. [Macro Policy flashcard]
Recommended reading:
If you think you could have done a better job than Mervyn King at leading the Bank of England through the global financial crisis, see my role-playing app
Interactive practice: What’s included in GDP?
Instructor Resource:
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| Learning Objectives: Test understanding and utilisation of important macro concepts.
Focus on diversity: In 2014 Janet Yellen became the first female chair of the Federal Reserve. In 2020 she was widely tipped to become the first female U.S. Treasury secretary. This would mean that she’s occupied the twin positions of being in charge of monetary and fiscal policy. You can learn more about her here. |
Activity: Josko Joras (A), December 2012
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Textbook Reading: Chapter 10 (Intro and Section 10.2; pp. 327-329 and pp. 342-357)
For an open economy
GDP = C + I + G + (X – M).
However it’s important to realise that imports don’t subtract from GDP.
Read more about the Big Mac index at The Economist. For more on how Argentina games it, see:
There are several nice utilisations of the Big Mac Index. For example, in a study that looked at the best cities in the world to study in, they used the Big Mac Index as a measure of living costs. (And if you’re curious, the best city in the world to study in is…. London!)
Here’s an intro to Balance of Payments:
Instructor Resource:
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| Learning Objectives: Perform foreign exchange calculations. Understand Balance of Payments |
| Reading: “The Stranger“ |
| Activity: The International Trade Game – I have tweaked this for my own use. Contact me for more. |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 10 (Section 10.1; pp. 329-341)
The best way to understand economic interdependence is the classic pamphlet I, Pencil.
Here is a great article showing the economic interdependence required to produce the Pfizer vaccine:
a medicine with 280 different components, manufactured in 86 different sites across 19 countries, driven partly by the research of a son and daughter of Turkish migrants to Germany. That’s globalization in a needle
This guy attempted to make a sandwich from scratch. It cost $1500 and took 3 months. It’s remarkable how cheap and plentiful sandwiches are, due to an extended global supply chain and division of labour.
This video shows the history of globalisation through some important maps:
Here we use basic demand and supply analysis to look at the welfare effects of trade intervention:
| Learning Objectives: Estimate the welfare effects of trade intervention
Focus on diversity: Deepak Lal is one of the most famous advocates of open trade policies. He was also a known skeptic of development economics. He passed away in 2020. |
| Case: “The Euro in Crisis: Decision Time at the European Central Bank” Harvard Business School case no. 9-711-049
Case preparation: The ECB During the Crisis, July 2021 |
| Lecture handout: Monetary policy* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 7 (Section 7.1 and 7.5; pp. 200-211 and pp. 227-236) and Chapter 8 (Intro, Section 8.1 and 8.2; pp. 237-278)
This lecture covers a lot of ground but tries to give you a relatively simple, usable framework to relate monetary economics to monetary policy decisions. One problem when studying macroeconomics is the belief that it equips us with an ability to forecast. See my video on Economic Prediction for why I think we need to be careful (and here is a short follow up quiz). Ultimately, we shouldn’t expect central banks to be able to forecast a recession because if they could predict them they can prevent them. To predict a (demand side) recession, therefore, we are really trying to predict central bank incompetence.
You may think that I am being harsh on economic forecasters. But I agree with Andy Haldane when he said, “It has been argued that these models were not designed to explain such extreme events. For me, this is not really a defence. Economics is important because of the social costs of extreme events. Economic policy matters precisely because of these events. If our models are silent about these events, this jeopardises the very thing that makes economics interesting and economic policy important.”
The key finding of monetary economics is that the root cause of inflation is excessive money creation. We looked at some specific examples of hyperinflation, and to learn more you can watch “Zimbabwe and Hyperinflation: Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?” (Marginal Revolution University). The BBC has an article to show how you can calculate your own personal inflation rate (provided it’s 2015 and you live in the UK!).
Conventional monetary policy is a simple link between a target (usually inflation) and a tool (interest rates). During the lecture I implied that central bankers change interest rates relative to the current rate. In some cases, however, they may be trying to move the policy rate closer to some sort of benchmark. A common benchmark can be calculate using a Taylor Rule. For examples, see Kaleidic Economics.
Recent changes to central bank targets include:
To get a feel for how central bankers should respond to changing conditions, try these simulators:
A corridor system is when the central bank targets three policy rates. We looked at how those rates changed from 2003-2015 in the Eurozone. The ECB website has more recent data.
| Group activity: Thermostat Worksheet, February 2020 |
| Group activity: Monetary Implications Worksheet, June 2020 |
The key goal for monetary authorities is credibility: [Credibility flashcard]
| Group activity: MPC Simulation, December 2012 |
You can read more details about the Bank of England’s MPC here. I used to regularly participate in the Shadow MPC. A useful resource may be the Kaleidic Dashboard.
| Group activity: ECB Simulation, March 2011 |
The lecture also introduces the concept of the signal extraction problem. This isn’t the most intuitive concept to grasp, but it explains how nominal shocks can have real effects. In other words how changes in the money supply can affect inflation and real growth. A good article on this is Steve Horwitz’s ‘The Parable of the Broken Traffic Lights“.
Audio
Scott Sumner has been described as “the blogger who saved the economy” due to the influence he had over the Fed’s late 2012 QE3 program. He also contributed to the “market monetarist” movement which potentially influenced the Fed’s decision to adopt average inflation targeting and use market forecasts when cutting interest rates in 2019.
For my account of the 2007-2008 financial crisis:
What is a yield curve:
| Learning Objectives: Understand the root causes of inflation, and contribute to policy discussions. Understand how monetary policy affects business decision-making and thus generates macroeconomic fluctuations. See the operation of a conventional monetary policy regime in practice. Contrast the ways in which the Fed and the ECB acted during the global financial crisis.
Cutting edge theory: Nominal income targeting and surveying current monetary indicators. Focus on diversity: One of the most influential books on monetary economics was co-authored by Anna Schwartz. You can learn more about her here. In 2019 Christine Lagarde became the first female president of the ECB. Prior to that she was the managing director of the IMF. You can read her article on how women can grow the global economy here. Spotlight on sustainability: We look at how interest rates enable intertemporal coordination |
| Case: Yared, P., “The Obama Stimulus“, Columbia CaseWorks, January 3rd 2014
Case preparation: The Obama Stimulus, November 2021 |
| Lecture handout: Fiscal policy* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 9 (Intro, Section 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4; pp. 287-322)
For some documentaries on the Obama stimulus, see:
Keynesian approaches to aggregate demand management became popular because they were seen to have explained the problem of the Great Depression. My video on the Great Depression explores some of the history, and also have a video looking at The Financial Crisis of 2008-09. The big debate between Keynesian and Hayekian economics was popularised by Russ Roberts and John Papola in the rap battles Fear the Boom and Bust and Fight of the Century.
If monetary policy is deemed to be ineffective the government can switch to fiscal policy:
The only reason we need to turn to fiscal policy is if monetary policy isn’t working. This may be because it looses its power at the ZLB, or it may be because it is not being implemented properly
To some extent, monetary policy determines the amount of total spending, fiscal policy affects its composition. Its main impact comes from shifting spending from the future to the present. The balance of spending between the public and private sector is a contentious issue because it gets to the heart of the argument about the optimal size of the state.
This article from the New York Times has a great visualisation of how unemployment is measured.
A practical example of the empirical claims of the signal extraction problem are mentioned in this letter sent to Sequoia founders and CEOs: “In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses”.
Here’s the official website of the Williamson Tunnels and for more on Chinese “ghost towns” you can watch China’s Empty City, or read this short World Bank blog post on the Rise of the Chinese Ghost Town. The photo of manual labourers in North Korea scrubbing the road comes from this article, and my grad school buddy Curtis Melvin created North Korea Economy Watch.
Despite what I say in the lecture… not all dog rescues are disasters….
Some podcast episodes that I particularly recommend:
The content on policymakers feeling pressurized to “do something” is an element of crisis management more generally. An interesting example of the types of trade off that policymakers face is BBC Radio 4’s ‘Discussion Time: Coronavirus‘. Even though it relates to an epidemiology situation, it is relevant for any PR situation. Policymakers face a balance between maintaining public confidence, being seen to be providing a quick and clear response, without inciting a general panic. This relies on having good frameworks and tools that relate to the specific situation (the Radio 4 panel explain how important expert forecasts of the spread of foot and mouth disease were, in a recession economic impact studies play a critical role); but also an ability to manage public expectations. The goal of successful crisis management is to balance these things without introducing new uncertainties.
Suggested reading: ‘The case for cuts was a lie. Why does Britain still believe it? The austerity delusion‘ by Paul Krugman, The Guardian, April 29th 2015
| Group activity: “Fiscal Multiplier Worksheet“, March 2018
UK Public Finances, December 2012 |
According to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it’s fashionable to claim that a country that issues their own currency cannot default on its debt. But as Stephen Kirchner points out, they can and they have.
MMT is also invoked to claim that governments can make spending commitments (such as welfare spending) without having to raise taxes. Recollect the three main forms of government finance: (1) taxes; (2) borrowing; and (3) inflation. MMT essentially says that 1 & 2 are only necessary to prevent inflation, and therefore at full employment (i.e. with stable inflation) taxes or borrowing aren’t acting as a constraint on spending. Technically this is true, but I believe that it is an exercise in semantic word games to distinguish between their claim – that “taxes don’t fund the welfare state” – and the fact that taxes are required to offset the inflation that would otherwise be caused by the money printing used to fund the welfare state. (see here). Ultimately the achilles heel of MMT is real resource constraints. The problem with public finance has never been a shortage of cash, but the scarcity of the real factors of production. Printing money can bid those resources away from the private sector, but cannot create more of them.
| Learning Objectives: Assess the efficacy of fiscal stimulus and aggregate demand management. Perform back of the envelope calculations to estimate the fiscal multiplier for a range of different countries.
Focus on diversity: Christina Romer was the Chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors during the stimulus. You can learn more about her here. |
Case: “Rovna Dan: The Flat Tax in Slovakia”, Harvard Business School case no. 9-707-043, March 2010
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Textbook Reading: Chapter 7 (Intro, Section 7.1 and 7.2; pp. 199-216) and Chapter 12 (Section 12.1; pp. 399-403)
When talking about macroeconomics I think it’s important to distinguish between the overall economy and the circumstances of an individual firm. We can’t always assume that macro conditions are felt the same by each company within it. I explain more in this video:
In 2011 the Mirrlees Review published ‘Tax by Design‘, a comprehensive overview of UK tax reform.
In terms of a flat tax, here is a short video asking “Would a Flat Tax Be More Fair?” There’s a good HBS article, from 2007, called “All Eyes on Slovakia’s Flat Tax”. Slovakia repealed the flat tax in 2013, which you can read about on this LSE Blog: “Slovakia has abolished its flat tax rate, but other Eastern and Central European countries are likely to continue with the policy.”
Here are some newspaper attempts to explain fiscal implications of tax policy:
Regarding public finance more generally, in 2012 I participated in the 2020 Tax Commission. You can read our report here.
Regarding tax compliance, you may hear things like:
Apple can pretty much choose how much tax it wants to pay and to whom. One EU estimate was that it paid less than 0.01% tax on profits of over $100 billion (Frisby 2019, p.175)
This may be true, but it doesn’t mean that tax is voluntary. The choice that Apple have is over what activities they undertake, each of which have different tax implications. So they can affect their tax obligations, but only in as much as they alter their business decisions.
| Group activity: Personal Taxation, December 2020 |
This page ties into Chapter 7 of Economics: A Complete Guide for Business
| Learning Objectives: Understand alternative types of tax regime.
Focus on diversity: Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) is best known as a pioneer of sociology, but contributed to the populising of classical economic insights on taxation. |
| Reading: Solow, R., 1956, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 70(1):65-94 |
| Lecture handout: Growth theory* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 7 (Section 7.4; pp. 225-227) and Chapter 12 (Section 12.1; pp. 399-403)
In the lecture I showed the dramatic transformation of Hong Kong harbour, as an example of fast economic growth.
In 1945 Hong Kong was a poor territory. After war and Japanese occupation many of its 600,000 people were starving. They had no traditionally considered natural resources, and yet soon became a major manufacturing location, the busiest port in the world, and a centre of the global financial market.
According to reasonable internet sources, Hong Kong’s GDP per capita is now bigger than the UK’s.
What happened? In 1945 civil servant John Cowperthwaite made Hong Kong a free port, which meant no tariffs for most goods, no export subsidies, and few restrictions on imports. Trade grew quickly.
On the supply side, it is not as though Hong Kong’s services lack in any way. The territory has the fourth best education system in the world, according to Pearson, and it ranks top of Bloomberg’s healthcare index. Its public transport system was ranked the world’s best last year, and it is consistently used as a model elsewhere (Frisby, 2019, p.13)
Perhaps even more powerfully, Hong Kong has been used as a model for other areas on mainland China. In 1980 Shenzhen became a “special economic zone” with low taxes and market-friendly regulation. The population rose from 30,000 to 13 million. Here’s Hong Kong in 12 amazing photos.
In 2014 I attended a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Hong Kong. Here I am in front of that amazing skyline, with my undergraduate econ study partner!
For more see Frisby 2019, Chapter 2.
Some other nice examples of side by side growth include this view of London from Greenwich, 40 years apart:
Here is Phnom Penh, 9 years apart:
Here is an introduction to the Solow model (more videos in the series are here)
Growth is like an iPhone:
See my Country competitiveness Dashboard.
Here is Tyler Cowen’s claim that economic growth is a moral imperative (which is based on his book, Stubborn Attachments):
Consider this photo of Nik Wallenda, cycling across a tightrope:
| Learning Objectives: Understand the foundations of economic growth. See how economic growth theories inform development economics.
Cutting edge theory: This session defines cutting edge growth Focus on diversity: One of the most widely respected economic historians of the factors that led to industrialisation is Deidre McCloskey Spotlight on sustainability: This session defines the sustainable growth rate as the balanced path between capital accumulation and capital consumption. |
