Free Republic

Academics have been arguing for decades that colleges and universities are engines of economic growth. Now they seem to have scientific proof, or do they? "We estimate fixed effects models at the sub-national level between 1950 and 2010 and find that increases in the number of universities are positively associated with future growth of GDP per capita (and this relationship is robust to controlling for a host of observables, as well as unobserved regional trends)," Anna Valero and John Van Reenen, of the London School of Economics, write in a working paper that they published this month at the National...

Facebook users are constantly being bombarded with ads, but sometimes one shows up on the screen that is so well-suited, it's as if the site has tapped into your thoughts. ... 'The majority of promoted topics that I see in my Facebook feed are relevant to my interests, and they're worth clicking on more often.' However, others are not sold that Facebook's methods are completely innocent. Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls them 'the most invasive in the world.' 'Facebook's business model is to amass as much first-party and third-party data on you as...

Following the recent announcement by the BOJ that it would double its ETF purchases to ¥6 trillion, or $58 billion, up from the current ¥3.3 trillion, which is the equivalent to the Fed purchasing $580 billion in ETFs over the next two years, we noted that according to a Bloomberg analysis this would make the Bank of Japan the top shareholder of 55 companies by the end of 2017. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that as CLSA's Nicholas Smith wrote in a research report, the "BOJ is nationalizing the stock market" because that is precisely what it is...

Cox told Business Insider that the situation in Pinal County will likely raise calls for a public option, or a government-run health insurance option similar to Medicare or Medicaid.

....men and women who control the global monetary system get together for three days to debate the challenges facing the world economy – and how they might use monetary policy to fix it. This year’s title is “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future”... ...Here are three good ones to start with: is quantitative easting actually working? Have we broken the banking system? And isn’t it time to update economic models that no longer tell us much about the real world? First, why isn’t QE working the way it was meant to? For a long time, central bankers were...

On the Tube in London there’s a sign saying “Mind The Gap” to warn riders to be careful when stepping on the train – NBC might want to pay attention to the expression when it comes to Olympics ratings. With a 4.0/14 rating among adults 18-49 and 16.85 million viewers for the Closing Ceremony of the Rio Games, NBC is looking at the worst Summer Olympics results in decades. Not only are fast affiliates down to the second lowest result of the 2016 Olympics for the Comcast-owned net’s primetime coverage but they took a whooping 56% fall in the...

CHICAGO The cash-strapped Chicago public school system will rely on a $1.55 billion line of credit in fiscal 2017 to boost cash flow, up from $1.065 billion in fiscal 2016, according to a briefing document released by the district on Monday. The bigger credit line will be on the agenda for the Chicago Board of Education's Wednesday meeting, along with a $5.4 billion operating budget, a $250 million property tax hike earmarked for teacher pensions and authorization to issue up to $945 million of general obligation bonds for capital projects. The nation's third-largest public school district said it needs access...

Spider-Man has many powers: Wall-crawling, web-slinging… and race-bending. According to a story posted by The Wrap, 19-year-old Disney Channel star Zendaya is set to play Mary Jane Watson in next year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, a re-reboot that will see young British actor Tom Holland as a high school-aged Peter Parker. This is a great idea. It’s 2016, why couldn’t – or shouldn’t – Spidey have a love interest who isn’t white? And many people agree, with Twitter and Facebook full of responses from folks who think a black Mary Jane is a fantastic choice. But, as always, there are pockets of...

The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration jointly issued a new regulation last week that is meant to help protect the world from “climate change” by limiting “greenhouse gas emissions” and improving fuel efficiency in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles operated in the United States. The 1,690-page regulation is approximately 700,000 words long. A “regulatory impact analysis” published by EPA and NHTSA estimates the regulation will add an average of as much as $13,749 to the cost of a tractor truck and $1,370 to a trailer, making some tractor-trailer combinations $15,119 more expensive in 2027 than they...

If there’s one thing that drives the Fact Checker nuts, it’s a repeated talking point that is based on actual data but is obviously misleading. The Clinton campaign is clearly fond of saying that 15 million jobs — or, alternatively, 15 million private-sector jobs — were created in the Obama administration. Clinton frequently indicates that she’s talking about the entire Obama administration. She uses phrases such “than when they took office” or “in the last 7 1/2 years.” But that’s 5 million jobs too many.

<p>Does the Federal Reserve play politics? You could just as well ask if the Pope is Catholic.</p> <p>Investors should be wondering about the Fed’s politics because its interest-rate setting committee will meet two more times before Election Day — Sept. 20-21 and Nov. 1-2.</p>

While it is not exactly clear what public relations goals the privately-owned Fed (recall Bernanke's Former Advisor: "People Would Be Stunned To Know The Extent To Which The Fed Is Privately Owned") hoped to achieve by launching its first Facebook page last Thursday, the resultant outpouring of less than euphoric public reactions suggest this latest PR effort may have been waster at best, and at worst backfired at a magnitude that matches JPM's infamous #AskJPM twitter gaffe. Here are some examples of the public responses to the Fed's original posting: they all share a certain uniformity... [Screen captures] [More by...

U.S. television star Larry King received $225,000 from Ukraine’s disgraced former ruling Party of Regions, Ukrainian journalist and politician Serhiy Leshchenko has claimed. Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Leshchenko said that he had uncovered evidence which proved that the Party of Regions had paid King using shadow assets. The longtime CNN host received the money in return for a 2011 interview with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, said Sevgil Musaeva-Borovyk, the chief editor of the Ukrainskaya Pravda news website. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 following months of anti-government protests.

As recently as last year, the Democratic Party’s leaders thought the idea of a $15 federal minimum wage was unrealistic and even pushed back against it. That ended in July when the official party platform, bowing to pressure from organized labor and Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, adopted a call for a $15 federal minimum, more than double the current rate of $7.25 an hour. […] When Seattle increased its minimum to $15 in 2014, a boost of nearly $6 an hour, it also commissioned a study of the increase’s effect by the University of Washington. A report released...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has surged to a 5-point lead over democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania as per a latest poll.

New York has knocked off London as the world’s premier city for foreign investment in commercial real estate due to fears the vote to leave the European Union would diminish the British capital’s appeal as a global financial centre.

Hillary Clinton spent the past two weeks rolling out economic proposals that include the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II" and a tax hike on corporations and the wealthy, which could create lucrative opportunities for many of the corporations that have lined her campaign coffers. She has proposed refurbishing the electrical grid to make it "clean," and establishing a government-run bank that would steer taxpayer funds toward the private companies that are chosen to implement her projects. One ambitious aspect of her plan involves extending broadband access to every American household by 2020. Similar efforts launched...

... The overwhelming majority of Mr. Trump’s detractors have never sat across the table from him to hammer out a multimillion-dollar business deal. I have. So I think I’m in a better position than they are to judge his effectiveness as a top-level executive... The first thing I noticed about Mr. Trump was that he was a stickler for detail. As a politician, he may affect a breezy platform style, but in the office, he was all business. Right off the bat, he corrected my team’s estimates of future financing requirements. He must have phoned an expert minutes before the...

The new comedy War Dogs tells the true story of two cynical young men who took advantage of bureaucratic failures to become successful weapons dealers. These two men — who sold weapons to the government during the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq —ultimately secured a $300 million contract with the United States military. The film, which was inspired by a true story, operates as both a comedy and a hard-to-imagine drama that shows how these two guys in their twenties were able to take advantage of a lax governmental policy.

Susquehanna Township resident Carl Shuman was heading home from a business trip in Pittsburgh Monday night, and after a pleasant drive, he pulled up to the toll booth at the Carlisle exit, ready to pay his toll. There, he was stunned by something that in his more than four decades of driving and in his professional life as an employment-law attorney, he had never encountered -- not like this, anyway, he said. As the car in front of him left the booth, Shuman noticed the toll collector shaking his head and smirking. "He said something very close to, 'Them black...