Weekly Econ Articles
A round up of this week's econ related news
Econ articles from this week:
Supply, Demand, and Equilibrium: Pope Leo's hometown seeks to purchase his childhood home |Aleteia
Pope Leo’s childhood home has experienced quite the demand shift! Last year, a house hunter purchased the unassuming property for $66,000 and renovated it, listing it in January for $219,000. As it struggled to sell, the property was successively discounted until the owner discovered the new pope used to live there. Now, the owner wants a premium for the property as interest in the Pope’s former home has skyrocketed, but the city disagrees, wanting a more reasonable price to turn the property into a museum.
Price Floors and Ceilings: 4th-generation resident of rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment fights eviction | Gothamist
Fights over rent-stabilized apartments in NYC highlight the topsy-turvy incentives of the city’s housing regulations. In this case, the landlord doesn’t want to kick out the tenant to raise the rent to market rate (that’s illegal as of 2019), but to receive higher payments from a subsidy program for lower income families. But it’s all a game of transitional gains trap musical chairs.
Externalities and Public Goods: Why does Scotland use more water than the rest of the UK? | BBC
Tragedy of the commons strikes again. The average Scot uses approximately 37% more water than his typical English counterpart. And it boils down to incentives-most English homes have water meters, with households paying based on the amount of water they use. Most Scots don’t have metered water. They pay for water via council tax.
Money and Banking: The paradoxical problem with simplifying bank regulations | Financial Times
It’s not as easy as you’d think to simplify banking regulations because bank IT systems aren’t standardized, modular systems. They’re built ad hoc over time and evolve. It’s a classic case of dispersed knowledge with significant policy implications. Regulatory pushes to standardize reporting favor behemoth banks with deep enough pockets to bankroll new systems.
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Labor Markets: The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley | The Hustle
Over 70 years ago, Stanford University transformed a 700-acre plot of unsellable land into Stanford Research Park. By colocating firms, engineers, and researchers, the office park leveraged the benefits of talent clustering and agglomeration economies to transform the region into an innovation powerhouse.