Various teaching links

Some teaching cases taken from this month's CEP Centrepiece magazine.

1. Selling UK citizenship.  We will learn about how markets allocate according to willingness to pay. Here's a proposal to allocate citizenship this way.

2. Complementary goods. If you ban YouTube videos, you might cause sales of music to fall if there are inter-related demands.  Exactly this happens. 

3. Productivity spillovers.  How wikipedia content spills over to benefit others.

Various teaching links

1. Wise words on the need for increased captial requirements and whether they will stiffle growth from Howard Davies. 
2. Very nice case study of two-sided markets in the music industry and how record companies don't get it from Prospect magazine. In the lecture on demand we studied how demand might be affected by a network: in this case, demand for one good (in this case live music) is affected by demand for another good (in this case recorded music).
3. A really bad tax idea: taxing you as you get a suntan. This from Tim Taylor.

Immigration: what are these people thinking?

Am I the only one unnerved by the outbreak of anti-immigration feeling on the left at the moment? Such views the right might be expected, but from the left? Here in the UK, Labour politicians, yes, that's Labour politicians, are falling over themselves to blame the immigrants for everything (reminding me of the way Conservatives used to blame feckless single mothers). The London Times writer David Aaronovitch links approvingly to a very good piece by Jonathan Portes on why the facts don't support Labour (Labour are apologising for immigration record. They are wrong to do so. ind.pn/p6fwRF > Excellent article).  But all this is as nothing in comparison to the extraordinary plan from Democrat Presidential Candidate Micheal Dukakis in the New York Times (which I saw tweeted yesterday HT, Alex Tabarrok).  The cunning wheeze is this:

1. Immigrants only do the worst jobs
2. So if you can get rid of the worst jobs then immigrants won't come
3. Plan: raise the minimum wage, which makes the worst jobs disappear, so achieving 2. 

And this is a plan from the liberal left?  In a country built on immigration? 

Demand for oil and concert tickets

1. The price elasticity of demand for oil: is pretty inelastic. goo.gl/Et060.

2. Price discrimination: Ticketmaster to do its own touting.

www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/20/135568378/ticketmaster-to-scalp-its-own-tickets