Stephen Popick

Party, Party

July 13, 2010
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For two weeks and change I ventured across the pond to Merry Ole England for travel and a good friend’s wedding.  For one night while I was in London, I was to meet the bachelor party at a very hip London nightclub. It was two hours before arriving that I found out that we were [...]

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Reading the Tea Leaves

June 10, 2010
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A hotly debated financial reform bill has passed the US Senate and very little (except some process) remains until a unified bill is slid under President Obama’s signatory pen. Discussion now shifts from debate on financial reform to understanding what financial reform has reformed and its impact on us, the consumer.  For good or for [...]

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A Little Nudge

June 2, 2010

You may or may not have been aware of a little book that’s made waves in the econo / political blogosphere recently.  Nudge, a work by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (though, one is not an economist), discusses how very small changes to our behavior lead to great(er) improvements in our well-being. For a personal [...]

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Numerophobia

May 18, 2010
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Numbers? Ahh! Recent work highlighted in this week’s Economist showed that, after accounting for a whole host of differences between people who took out “sub-prime” mortgage during the run up to the housing finance crisis, the defining variable that predicted whether or not these people would miss payments, default, or be foreclosed upon came down [...]

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You’ve Sunk My Costs

May 12, 2010

Economists tend to think about decisions in a different way than non-Economists. Sometimes our ideas make theoretical sense but are hard to put into practice. For instance, we’ll typically argue against pre-paying on a mortgage (given a reasonable interest rate, say less than 9%) because most American households hold unbalanced portfolios that are made up [...]

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Socioeconomic Standing, Age & Where We Live

May 3, 2010

The other week, I talked about asset diversification involving our biggest physical asset (our house).   I felt that how we treat our house in our investment portfolio and what kind of house we buy is not properly understood, so I brought in an economics toolkit and went to town. This week, I’ll be focusing my [...]

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Realtors Should Rent

April 19, 2010

Did that get some attention? I hope so. The conclusion that realtors should rent comes directly out of urban economics, an understudied and ignored branch of modern economics. But while it is a cute fact you’d expect to see in Freakonomics- it wasn’t there. I wanted to take some time to explain this counterintuitive fact, [...]

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