Voiding cystourethrogram: How much should we be selective?

How Much Should We Trust

Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate o...

How much should nurse consultants be paid?

There was no consensus on the issue of how much nurse consultants should be paid among the practitioners we spoke to at last week's UKCC roadshow. Some suggested starting salaries of around £25,000, and others said 'the sky's the limit'.

How Much Redistribution Should There Be?

How Much Should Highway Fuels Be Taxed?

This paper provides an updated assessment of economically efficient taxes on gasoline (used by light-duty vehicles) and diesel (used by heavy-duty trucks) to address various highway externalities in the United States. The (second-best) corrective fuel taxes are estimated, and we discuss the implications of fuel economy regulations and prospective (nationwide) controls on carbon emissions. We al...

Future collapse: how optimistic should we be?

Prof. Kelly FRS is optimistic about the chances of avoiding a collapse, but sadly we find his arguments entirely unpersuasive. For example, have Malthus (or we) really been wrong about food security? Roughly 850 million people are seriously undernourished (lacking sufficient calories) today, and perhaps 2 billion are mal-nourished (lacking one or more essential nutrients) [1]. When Malthus live...