Scott Barkowski

Another interesting economic feature of AirBnB cleanup fees: a core market friction is the impossibility of complete contracting. The problem is there's too many contingencies to spell out; so any contract leaves room for abuse and ex-post squabbling by the resident and landlord

I think having AirBnB guests clean up their own garbage does solve a moral hazard problem. The cost of reducing garbage is plausibly much lower than the cost of cleaning up garbage, so it's efficiency-improving to make the guest the residual claimant on garbage

My standard error before clustering.

@UBuffaloEcon is hosting a health econ (and adjacent) conference on Oct. 9th. Come for the beautiful fall, maybe visit Niagara Falls while you're here, and also meet some fellow health econ researchers! Submit your abstract by Sept. 11! Submit here: lnkd.in/g6Q33WZd

I'll be honest, I'm starting to just not believe in human capital. It just seems incorrect to me that being able to educate large numbers of people is the main reason why rich countries are rich

@Noahpinion correctly emphasizes SHARE. Part of the story is that total spending as a share of GDP is 50% higher in the US, dragging down this stat. The other key point is that the average masks large differences across insurance plans. Most people with Medicare and roughly half with Marketplace and employer sponsored insurance have moderate cost sharing or less. Everybody else with coverage is increasingly exposed to massive out-of-pocket costs. We calculate that 63 million have a deductible of $1,500 or more. KFF data shows that the average deductible for ESI has increased from $500 to near $1,900 over the last 20 years. And this is not to mention the 27 million Americans with no coverage at all.

Second main result: the timing of growth reverses. The conventional view puts the peak of US growth in the postwar "golden age" — but that view rests on price data from exactly the black-hole period. We estimate real goods-consumption growth of 5.4%/yr in 1900–1939 vs 4.2% in 1946–1983 (existing estimates: 2.0% and 3.1%). Productivity shows the same reversal. (8/9)

“Second, there is high and persistent concentration at the top. Along with the downward growth, the top-1% authors accounted for 38.4% of top-5 publication credit in 1990 and for 78.3% in 2025.”

The other G7 countries spend less, as a portion of GDP, on healthcare than we do and get similar results. Why would you, as a sensible person not wanting to waste money, spend far more on a good when the quality differences are minor?