Justin Fox

In February, when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was at the seeming height of its chain-saw-wielding power, participants on the betting market Kalshi briefly put the odds that Musk and President Donald Trump would cut federal spending by $250 billion or more in 2025 at higher than 50%. The betting odds that they would cut spending by $2 trillion — the amount Musk had floated at a Trump rally before the election in October — had peaked at 15.8% not long after the market was launc

In the 1970s, big increases in house prices in many parts of the US brought big increases in property tax bills, followed by a tax revolt — represented most famously by California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 — with consequences that have reverberated ever since. Even-steeper house-price increases during the Covid-19 pandemic brought a less dramatic rise in property tax revenue nationwide, thanks in part to measures adopted during and after that 1970s tax revolt. But the tax increases were big enoug

Law school is back in fashion.

In the years after the internet stock boom-and-bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s, financial economists searched for more satisfying explanations of what had happened than “investors went crazy.” Among the most successful were Lubos Pastor and Pietro Veronesi of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, whose paper “Technological Revolutions and Stock Prices,” published in the American Economic Review in 2009 (ungated version here), was the focus of an entire conference at the Mass

Remember when Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were saying that tens of millions of dead people received Social Security benefits?

For most of the 1800s, US states restricted the power of corporations to expand into new businesses or across state lines, merge with other corporations or otherwise get too big for their britches. These limitations increasingly came to cramp the style of the nation’s rising industrial tycoons, and in the late 1880s a corporate lawyer who practiced in New York City but lived in New Jersey had the brilliant idea of getting his home-state lawmakers to adopt reforms that effectively amounted to tel

Stocks are almost as expensive as during the dot-com bubble, but with a key difference.

Early in President Donald Trump’s first term, there was much talk about whether his xenophobic utterances and immigration restrictions would decimate tourism to the US. In the end, they really didn’t.

The boom in capital expenditures related to generative artificial intelligence is generating lots of questions about whether it is sustainable. Coming up with definitive answers to them is something of a fool’s errand. Quantifying the size of the capex surge seems like a more productive endeavor — and one that may offer some hints as to its sustainability.

It’s looking as if the city has gone from "dead forever" to outpacing the nation in its recovery from the job destruction of the early days of the pandemic.