About
I'm an Economics Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley focusing on public finance topics at the intersection of labor economics and macroeconomics. You can follow me on twitter @omzidar.
Homepage, CV, & Research
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2012 Alan Auerbach Baumol's cost books Brad Delong College debt Economic Policy Education Emmanuel Saez Enrico Moretti Finance Fiscal Cliff Fiscal Policy Government Government Spending Great Recession Growth Hamilton Project Healthcare Healthcare Costs Housing Immigration inequality Investment Jobs Labor larry summers Laura Tyson Local Labor Markets Middle Class Monetary Policy NYTimes Obama Paul Krugman Productivity Raj Chetty Romney Spending States Stimulus Tax Cuts for Whom Taxes Tax Reform Wages-
Recent Posts
- Great Questions from Paul Krugman
- Do Higher Corporate Taxes Reduce Wages? Micro Evidence from Germany
- Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority
- It Takes a Regime Shift: Recent Developments in Japan through the Lens of the Great Depression
- The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
- Worker Flows Over the Business Cycle: the Role of Firm Quality
- Does Entrepreneurship Pay? The Michael Bloombergs, the Hot Dog Vendors, and the Returns to Self-Employment
- Large Variation in Hospital Billing: Three Preliminary Takeaways from New U.S. Data
Twitter Updates
- Great Questions from Paul Krugman wp.me/p2otxR-m4 19 hours ago
- RT @bobkocher: The highest price hospital in the US is in…NJ and run by ex-Blackstone guys. Not exactly Hopkins! nytimes.com/2013/05/17/bus… 19 hours ago
- nytimes.com/2013/05/17/opi… 1 day ago
- 2. that fact is from Moretti (2011) and the sentence is from a recent paper. See the paper here: owenzidar.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/loc… 1 day ago
- 1.After adjusting for differences in skill composition, avg wages in the highest & lowest paying U.S. metros differ by nearly a factor of 3 1 day ago
Archives
Blogroll
- Andrew Samwick
- Austin Goolsbee
- Brad Delong
- Calculated Risk
- Donald Marron
- Economist – Democracy in America
- Economist – Free Exchange
- Economix
- Ezra Klein
- Felix Salmon
- FiveThirtyEight
- Greg Mankiw
- Jared Bernstein
- Keith Hennessey
- Marginal Revolution
- Mark Thoma
- Matthew Yglesias
- Miles Kimball
- Noah Smith
- Paul Krugman
- The Caucus
- The Fix
Search Results for: baumol
Why Healthcare, Education, and Government Spending Keep Going Up – Baumol’s Cost Disease
The Economist reviews an important book that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently (research extending these ideas is forthcoming). HEALTH-CARE expenditure in America is growing at a disturbing rate: in 1960 it was just over 5% of GDP, in … Continue reading
Large Variation in Hospital Billing: Three Preliminary Takeaways from New U.S. Data
The NYTimes has an interesting article on variation in hospital billing. In addition to highlighting substantial dispersion for the same procedure even within local areas (e.g. “a hospital in Livingston, N.J., charged $70,712 on average to implant a pacemaker, while … Continue reading
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Tagged Baumol's Cost Disease, CMS, Health Expenditures, Healthcare, Regional Variation
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Accounting for the Cost of US Healthcare
I read Steven Brill’s healthcare piece recently and wanted to get a better high-level view of where dollars in the healthcare system are spent. I find aggregate data more informative than anecdotes about hospital bill line items (not that I … Continue reading
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Tagged Baumol's cost, Baumol's Cost Disease, Healthcare, Healthcare Costs, MGI, Steven Brill
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Long Run Growth in Real Per Pupil Public Education Spending
Real per pupil education spending for elementary and secondary schools has increased roughly 23X since 1920. While there are many causes for this increase (special ed availability, reduced student teacher ratios, etc) and spending more on education is often a good … Continue reading
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Tagged Baumol's Cost Disease, Claudia Goldin, Education, Government Spending, Jesse Rothstein, Larry Katz
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A Quick Reaction to Matt Yglesias’s Healthcare Chart
Here’s a chart that Matt Yglesias thinks ought to dominate the healthcare conversation. It compares PPP adjusted per capita government* spending on healthcare in the US and in Canada. When I saw it this morning, I thought that it looks … Continue reading
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The Growing Burden of Payroll Taxes
Here’s a column on reforming the payroll tax that I wrote in NYTimes Economix today: Payroll taxes and corporate income taxes accounted for an equal share of federal tax revenue in 1969. By 2009, payroll taxes generated more than six times as much … Continue reading
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Tagged Baumol's cost, Corporate Income Tax, debt, Disability Insurance, Economic Policy, Fiscal Cliff, Healthcare, income taxes, inequality, Jobs, Medicare, Middle Class, NYTimes, Payroll tax, Progressivity, Revenue, skills, social insurance, social security, Stimulus, Tax Cuts for Whom, Tax Reform, Taxes, technology
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Why do We Need Productivity Gains in the Education Sector?
1. Antiquated Lectures: the college lecture format is antiquated. In my first year of graduate school, Brad Delong mentioned that the lecture format originally stemmed from a scarcity of books. Since only a few books were available, lecturers had to … Continue reading
Books I’m looking forward to reading: The Cost Disease
As I explained in a previous post, the effects of heterogenous productivity growth across sectors has huge impacts on the economy and on the cost of providing government services. Here’s Larry Summers on this issue: Third, increases in the price … Continue reading
Why are health and education costs exploding? Clues from Long Run Relative Prices
This isn’t the prettiest chart I’ve ever made, but it’s quite important. It shows that health (shades of blue) and education (green) prices have increased nearly 7X more than durable goods prices (reddish colors) since early 1980s. This massive increase … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Baumol's cost, CPI, Education, Healthcare, inflation, Productivity
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