Tuesday's Assorted Links
PTO pay, inflation and wages, academic strike, economic development, and tech layoffs
Hi, y’all! Here are 5 stories from the past week that had some interesting economics conversations:
How much would you sell your PTO for? Some companies are offering cash for unused vacation time [Wired]
In the battle of inflation vs. wages, inflation is winning [Chartr]
In the largest strike of 2022, California academic workers go on strike [The Washington Post]
Tennesse wants to build new stadiums with the hopes of spurring economic growth, but the economics aren’t on the side [The Center Square]
Can creative destruction explain the recent wave of tech layoffs? [Today, Explained]
Yesterday I looked at three popular ballot measures in last week’s midterm elections that had some neat economic applications. Check it out now:
Week 45 is over and I’m up to 49 books for the year. Last week I finished Marc Bellemare’s newest book Doing Economics, a book on third-wave coffee, and the last book in a dystopian young adult series I’ve been reading this year. I wasn’t a huge fan of the coffee book, but that’s mostly because it veered away from the subject of the book and focused narrowly on Guatemalan coffee production.
If you like young adult dystopian series (like Hunger Games), I would recommend Unwind Dystology. The premise is that the US has entered into a second civil war focused on abortion rights. They develop a new Bill of Life that states humans may not be terminated until age 13. At that moment, parents have 5 years to determine whether their children should be “unwound.” There are 4 books in the series, and each of them was incredibly quick to read.
If you’re an applied microeconomics professor or graduate student I would highly recommend picking up Marc’s book. There were a lot of subtle recommendations that address a lot of the “hidden curriculum” about being in the profession. A lot of these I learned over the past few years, but this book would have been so much more helpful if I had read it in my first year or two after graduate school. There were some recommendations, particularly when it comes to writing an empirical paper, that I have already started to incorporate into my work.