The federal government's reported figures for jobs "created or saved" by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or "ARRA") are now known to be wrong. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees these figures, apparently has decided not to correct them.
A scandal has erupted over the federal government's reporting of the number of jobs created or saved by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).
This scandal would have been avoided if the government had complied with the Information Quality Act.
Apparently the new "Cash for Clunkers" program is a big success. It began on July 24, 2009, and according to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and many other sources, the $1 billion appropriated for it may be running out.
It is a fact of physics that vehicles with greater mass do better in collisions. Wall Street Journal automotive columnist Joseph B. White explores this trade-off from an odd perspective -- one in which he seems to wish that it it weren't so.
Wall Street Journal airline columnist Scott McCartney reports that Spirit Airlines has established a "boundary-stretching usage fee" for buying a ticket. His story illustrates a number of practical applications of the principles set forth in Nudge, the recent book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who has been announced as President Obama's choice to be the next administrator of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Nudge provides an easily accessible, non-technical tour of behavioral economics. It also offers a useful guide to the regulatory policies of the Obama Administration.
The world price of oil has fallen from about $140 per barrel to less than $50, all within just a few months. Global macroeconomic conditions have deteriorated, of course, but that does not seem to explain what has happened.
Wall Street Journal columnist Joe White discusses the drop in oil prices, and he cannot seem to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
The Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed on April 22 to significantly increase the fleet average fuel economy standards motor vehicle manufacturers must meet beginning in the 2001 model year. More...
Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Spector writes on the draft agreement within the Congressional leadership on Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The text of the bill is not yet available, but Spector's reporting provides useful information. More...
Regulation is widely understood as a tax on the activity or person being regulated. Where these activities repair genuine market failures, benefits from regulation may result. If there are benefits from, say, automobile safety regulation, one would expect the beneficiaries to be persons who otherwise would have been killed or injured at the pre-regulatory safety level.
But what about the costs of regulation? Who bears them? More...
In the wake of JetBlue's latest problems, air travel in general is getting more attention. Much of this is focused on various proposals for air travel "customers bills of rights." We've shown that CBORs don't (and possibly can't) address every circumstance of interest. They also have the peculiar effect of taking service quality out of the domain in which airlines can compete. An alternative approach not only allows airlines to compete on service quality, but encourages them to do so.
One requirement for this to work is passengers have to have access to high-quality information that addresses the kind of service quality questions they care about. The Department of Transportation has issued regulations concerning air travel delays. There is mounting evidence that these rules have not yielded the kind of information passengers need.
The Washington Post recently carried a story on motor vehicle air pollution. Part of the story concerned carpooling, which normally is required for access to "high occupancy vehicle" (HOV) lanes on urban interstate highways. The story shows how the original purpose of HOV lanes -- reducing rush hour traffic congestion -- is evolving into the entirely different purposes of air pollution control and fuel efficiency. This is the predictable result of extending HOV lane privileges to solo drivers of hybrids. More...
Consumer Reports says that new clothes washers do not perform as well as their predecessors. This is not normally observed in markets. Quality improves over time, as manufacturers constantly work to improve their products to satisfy what consumers want.
Why is quality declining? CR says the culprit is federal energy efficiency regulations. Clothes washers that achieve equivalent levels of cleanliness are much more expensive, and according to CR's testing, most machines perform worse than the products they replaced. More...
The tragic bus crash outside Atlanta killed five Bluffton University baseball players, the driver, and his wife. News reports indicate that many more remain hospitalized, some in serious or critical condition.
There is a great deal of commentary in the press and in the blogosphere, much of it focused on assigning blame. We are not going to add to that.
We provide links to the most useful information we've found of interest to highway risk analysts, who take seriously their commitment to improve safety but also realize that they cannot prevent all catastrophic bus crashes. More...
