Peter Coy

The snafu over 5G cellular service at US airports is unfortunate and unnecessary. From what I can tell, most of the blame falls on a bureaucratic battle between sister agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. Politics trumped economics. The latest:…

Glenn Hubbard tried to dissuade President George W. Bush from putting tariffs on imported steel. As chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, he told the president in 2001 that the harm from tariffs suffered by consumers of steel would vastly outweigh the benefits to steel makers. He argued…

The cheap shot about economic forecasters is that God put them on Earth to make astrologers look good. One reason that’s unfair is it’s not just economists who get things wrong. As a way to say a not-so-fond farewell to 2021, I’ve compiled 10 of the worst predictions made about the year by…

The rash of flight cancellations over the winter break — is it a major blunder by the airlines or the forgivable consequence of the outbreak of Omicron? I looked into this over the past couple of days and my conclusion is that it’s a little of each. First, the case against the airlines. They’re…

Businesses have increased their profits at the same time that they have raised their prices, so it’s natural to ask whether profiteering is responsible for inflation. The numbers support the idea that companies have widened their profit margins through higher prices. According to data from the…

Labor shortages in the United States have led to renewed calls to increase immigration to enlarge the work force. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa shortage.) “Even if it’s just temporary workers, immigration is a really, really effective tool to make sure you have people in open jobs who can…

Two widely followed surveys “significantly overestimated” how many American adults got their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine last spring, says an article in the scientific journal Nature that was published online on Wednesday. The surveys have large numbers of participants but nevertheless aren…

Retirement isn’t always forever. Over the course of a business cycle, about 20 percent of people are working within 12 months after they first report being retired, according to calculations by Goldman Sachs. The question now is how many people who took early retirement because of the Covid-19…

I have a T-shirt that I have never put on because I don’t deserve to wear it. It says “Master of ’Metrics” on the back. I got it in 2015 as a promotional tie-in with a review copy of a book on econometrics called “Mastering ’Metrics: The Path From Cause to Effect,” co-written by Joshua Angrist,…