James Bailey

Will Commodity Sports Last? - Econlib If you wanted to bet on the Super Bowl this past weekend, you had options. You may have bet with a friend. If you live in a state where it’s legal, you could have gone to a casino or used a casino’s a...

My debut piece for EconLog.
I cover how we now put some sports bets in the same regulatory category as corn futures:
www.econlib.org/econlog/will...

Forecasting An Eventful 2026 May you live in interesting times – apocryphal Chinese curse In early 2025 I shared forecasts about the economy that turned out to be pretty good. This year, economic forecasts center around …

Markets see political turnover in the US and across the world this year: economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/02/05/f...

Seems like Congress should amend the War Powers Act to add a "List of Countries We Definitely Aren't Authorizing The President To Attack Now, No Not Even For A Few Days, No Not Even If He Says Its An Emergency" and the list should start with every NATO country

The Hot Social Network Is… LinkedIn? So says the Wall Street Journal. They have data to back it up: Plus quotes from yours truly: Even before Elon Musk gutted X’s content moderation, James Bailey was tired of the shouting. “It’s like …

The real winner of Bluesky vs Twitter seems to be LinkedIn economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/15/t...

Heading to Philly #ASSA2026

How Good Were 2025 Forecasts? Last January I shared a roundup of forecasts for the year from markets and professional economists. Were they any good? Here was their prediction for the US economy: WSJ’s survey of econo…

I check back in on the predictions that markets and professional forecasters made last January to see how they turned out: economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/01/h...

Benefit Cliff Data I said years ago on my Ideas Page that we need data and research on Benefit Cliffs: Benefits Cliffs: Implicit marginal tax rates sometimes go over 100% when you consider lost subsidies as well as h…

Cool dataset alert: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/04/b...

Thanks to the Readers Bryan Caplan explains why blogging is his favorite way to write, even as someone who has published many articles and books. It’s because of the readers: The blog posts, finally, are the most …

Happy Thanksgiving economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/11/27/t...

What Tariffs Mean For Your Finances That’s the title of a talk I’ll be giving Saturday at the Financial Capability Conference at Rhode Island College. Registration for the conference, which also features personal finance …

As of now tariffs are raising Americans' costs by about 2%:

Do Required Personal Finance Classes Work? 41 states now require students to take a course in economics or personal finance in order to graduate high school: Source: Council for Economic Education 12 states representing 21% of US high schoo…

12 states representing 21% of US high schoolers passed mandates for personal finance classes just since 2022. This sounds like a good idea that will enable students to navigate the modern economy. But does it work in practice?
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/11/13/d...

Missouri’s Medicaid Contraction and Consumer Financial Outcomes | American Journal of Health Economics: Vol 11, No 4 Abstract In July 2005, the state of Missouri implemented a series of cuts to its Medicaid program. These cuts resulted in the elimination of the Medical Assistance for Workers with Disabilities progra...

My paper on the consumer financial impacts of Missouri's 2005 Medicaid cut with @1armedeconomist.bsky.social and Slava Mikhed is finally out in the fall issue of AJHE: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

The Art of Spending Money The author of The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, has a new book “The Art of Spending Money” out this month. Its main point is that people tend to be happier spending money on thing…

Morgan Housel's new book is pretty good:

Kihwan Bae of @kneecenter.bsky.social and @1armedeconomist.bsky.social of @provcollege.bsky.social evaluate the effect of Certificate-of-Need laws on health care workers.
#CertificateOfNeed #HealthCareWorkers #Wages #Employment

A Better Man / A Better Woman There are 62 songs called “Better Man” just on Ultimate Guitar (which doesn’t claim to be comprehensive), plus many more slight variations like “A Better Man” or &#822…

Why are there 60+ songs called "Better Man" and only one called "Better Woman"?

Triumph of the Data Hoarders 2: The Institutions Datasets can be pulled offline for all sorts of reasons. As I wrote in February, this shows the value of being a data hoarder- just downloading now any data you think you might want later: Several …

Where to find data if the government shutdown takes it down: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/10/09/t...

What Killed Youth Optimism? The young have always been more optimistic than the old, but this is no longer the case, at least according to the Michigan consumer sentiment survey: Source: Bloomberg via Joe Weisenthal But as Je…

The young have always been more optimistic than the old, but this is no longer the case, at least according to the Michigan consumer sentiment survey:

Exclusive | Trump Administration Cancels Annual Hunger Survey The government has been measuring food insecurity since the mid-1990s but now says the report has become “overly politicized.”

RIP Current Population Survey Food Supplement
1976-2024
www.wsj.com/economy/trum...

Is the Fed’s Inflation Target Really 2%? The Fed has had an official inflation target of 2% since 2012, a commitment they reaffirmed just last month after their policy review: The Committee reaffirms its judgment that inflation at the rat…

The last time inflation was at or below 2.0% was February 2021. The Fed just cut rates despite inflation being at 2.6%. If you didn’t know about their 2% target & looked only at their actions, what would you guess their target is?
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/18/i...

Don’t Cut Rates The Federal Reserve will probably cut rates next week: I can’t advise them on the complex politics of this, but based on the economics I think cutting would be a mistake. I see one good reaso…

The Fed is about to make a mistake: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/11/d...

Replicability Project: Health Behavior (RPHB) The Center for Open Science (COS) is launching the Replicability Project: Health Behavior (RPHB), which is a large-scale, multi-team effort to help support a transparent and trustworthy foundation in ...

New replication project for Health Behavior research.
They offer funding if you try to replicate a paper this fall:
www.cos.io/rphb

Why I Started Grading Attendance I’ve taught college classes since 2010, but I never graded attendance directly until this year. I thought that students are adults who can make their own choices about where to spend their ti…

Physically showing up to class is one thing I can still be sure the AI isn't doing for you:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/08/14/w...

Parental Job Lock The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make it easier for American workers to switch jobs by making it easier to get health insurance from sources other than their current employer. Mostly it didn…

Parents work longer instead of retiring in order to keep health insurance for their adult kids:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/08/07/p...

State Demographics 1962-2024 I provide a simple, clean panel dataset of the historical demographics of US states here. I made this state-year level dataset from the individual-level responses in the Current Population Survey&#…

Making a clean panel dataset of the historical demographics of US states available here:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/07/31/s...

Comprehensive Certificate of Need (CON) Laws Dataset | Cicero Institute Filling the Gap: Issue Areas Related Content Certificate of Need (CON) laws require doctors and hospitals to get special permission from the state to open

New dataset gives exact dates for when every state passed and repealed their Certificate of Need laws: ciceroinstitute.org/blog/compreh...

Freedom for Freestanding Birth Centers Iowa recently joined the growing list of states where midwives or obstetricians can open a freestanding birth center without needing to convince a state board that it is economically necessary. The…

Iowa just joined Connecticut, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, and West Virginia in the club of states to repeal Certificate of Need requirements for Birth Centers in the past 2 years:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/07/17/f...

Writing Humanity’s Last Exam When every frontier AI model can pass your tests, how do you figure out which model is best? You write a harder test. That was the idea behind Humanity’s Last Exam, an effort by Scale AI and …

What I learned trying to stump frontier AI models:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/07/10/w...

The Ugly Gray Rhino Gathers Speed A black swan is a crisis that comes out of nowhere. A gray rhino, by contrast, is a problem we have known about for a long time, but can’t or won’t stop, that will at some point crash i…

At this point John Maynard Keynes himself would be saying to cut the deficit, but we're about to make it bigger:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/07/03/t...

Healthcare should be a macroeconomics topic

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

ADP reports that the US economy lost jobs in June for the first time since March 2023, and only the second time since 2020:

Excluding “Non-Excludable” Goods Intro microeconomics classes teach that some goods are “non-excludable”, meaning that people who don’t pay for them can’t be stopped from using them. This can lead to a &#82…

Technologies like hydrophones and satellites, if used well, will increasingly make public waters more “excludable” and reduce “tragedy of the commons” overfishing:
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/06/26/e...