David Landes

Here is the NY Times obituary of the great Harvard economic historian.

Ec 10 is still number one

But just barely.

Who predicted the sluggish economy?

Robert P. Murphy looks back.

A Striking Labor Market Fact

John Lott points out the following: "So far this year there have been 848,000 new jobs. Of those, 813,000 are part time jobs.... To put it differently, an incredible 96% of the jobs added this year were part-time jobs."

Update: Here is the CEA take on this general topic.  And this is from the San Francisco Fed.  I found the following chart of interest.

 Part-time employment as a share of total employment for selected groups

This shows that part-time work is notably higher than it has been historically for prime-age workers with little education (no more than a high school degree).  Whether this is just due to a weak labor market or other more structural changes is an open question.

Ronald Coase has died

Here is the news from the University of Chicago.

Marginal Tax Rates under Obamacare

Back in 2009, I pointed out in a NY Times column that President Obama's healthcare reform would involve substantial increases in implicit marginal tax rates.  I am delighted that Casey Mulligan is now giving the issue some serious attention in two new NBER working papers (here and here).  He reports:

This paper calculates the ACA’s impact on the average reward to working among nonelderly household heads and spouses. The law increases marginal tax rates by an average of five percentage points (of employee compensation), on top of the marginal tax rates that were already present before the it went into effect....Measured in percentage points, the Affordable Care Act will, by 2015, add about twelve times more to average marginal labor income tax rates nationwide than the Massachusetts health reform added to average rates in Massachusetts following its 2006 statewide health reform.

Don't 'Fight for Fifteen'

U Chicago's Allen Sanderson opines on the minimum wage.

Addendum: And here is an interesting new contribution to the empirical literature on minimum wages.