Peter Coy

If the recent rout in the stock market has you drastically cutting back your retirement spending plans, it probably means that you were counting too much on ever-rising asset prices. But a new research paper suggests that spending less at advanced ages is not necessarily a sign of failure to plan…

In popular culture the midlife crisis is fodder for comedy, personified by the 40-something guy who suddenly hankers to sky-dive or buy a convertible. In scientific circles the midlife crisis is sometimes said not to exist at all: “Epidemiological study of psychological distress in adulthood does…

Over the past decade, Chinese banks have lent generously to poor nations for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a politically and economically motivated effort to help build ports, rail lines and telecommunications networks abroad. But now that some of those borrowers are having trouble…

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be remembered for Britain’s exit from the European Union long after the world has forgotten the tousled hair, the quotations in Homeric Greek, the fibs, fabrications and scandals — not to mention the time he got stuck on a zip line while serving as London mayor,…

Covid-19 has killed mostly old people. But since the pandemic began, the rate of death from all causes for younger adults has risen by a bigger percentage than has the rate of death from all causes for old people. When I heard that stat I thought it had to be a mistake. If Covid is ravaging the…

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s push to give renewed prominence to the old imperial system of weights and measures in the United Kingdom is stirring fresh interest in a fascinating corner of economics: path dependence. Path dependence explains how small, even random, events can have lasting…

Prices of gasoline and diesel fuel are crazy high and oil refiners are earning stupendous profits. But the refiners, who convert crude oil into consumable products, aren’t price gouging — that is, they aren’t deliberately charging an unfairly high price. Highlighting that combination of facts…

Courage can seem like an outdated virtue in a world of selfish genes and utilitarian economics. If we are meant to put ourselves first — to maximize our individual utility — then what room is left for heroism? How can a self be selfless? It sounds almost illogical. It isn’t. Volodymyr Zelensky,…