Eric Crampton is Chief Economist with the New Zealand Initiative.
He applies an economist’s lens to a broad range of policy areas, from devolution and housing policy to student loans and environmental policy. He served on Minister Twyford’s Urban Land Markets Research Group and on Minister Bishop’s Housing Economic Advisory Group.
Most recently, he has been looking at devolution to First Nations in Canada.
He is a regular columnist with Stuff and with Newsroom; his economic and policy commentary appears across most media outlets. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
People have a bad habit of wanting to tell stories about random low-probability events. Whether it's a few dog attacks that happened in the same couple of weeks, or a blip in youth drinking rates, people want to know why. Read more
Oh, the perils of the silly season. If your office is typical, you’re in a mad dash trying to finish everything that needs to be done before Christmas. Read more
America got a little bit crazier this week. I’m not talking about the Ferguson riots, round two, which make me ever-grateful that New Zealand maintains an unarmed constabulary. Read more
A spending spree after an unexpected Christmas bonus is something we can all understand. Maybe it isn’t the best way of planning your finances, but it isn’t going to really do any harm. Read more
In 2009, I wrote a piece on the social costs of drugs for NORML; it appeared in their NORML News magazine. The police later sought to have several issues of NORML News deemed Objectionable; some articles described hashish production methods. Read more
When Gordon Tullock submitted his article, The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopoly and Theft, to the top journal in economics, The American Economic Review, John Gurley, then Editor, rejected it, saying “You will no doubt note that the referee neglects your point regarding the amount of real resources devoted to establishing, promoting, destroying monopolises, etc. However, I have noted it and, while I think it is certainly valid, it does not appear significant (as a theoretical contribution).” Tullock’s contribution was eventually published in 1967 in the rather less prestigious Western Economic Journal. Read more
We moved to New Zealand over a decade ago because I reckoned it the world’s least mad country: the Outside of the Asylum. It tops my informal ranking on this important metric. Read more
Economist Jean Tirole’s Nobel win on Monday is now perhaps old news. Marginal Revolution and the National Business Review have covered the theoretical work in industrial organisation and game theory that won Tirole the prize. Read more
Earthquakes are bad enough on their own but policy can always make them worse. Regulatory and planning policy in the lead-up to the February 2011 earthquake and in the subsequent response period led to needless deaths, too few options for those whose homes were damaged, a confusopoly in insurance, and an endlessly drawn out quest for the perfect downtown plan. Read more
Labour’s Sovereign Wealth Fund idea has taken a fair bit of criticism over the past week. The Herald’s editorial page called it “a policy without substance or merit”. Read more
In last week’s Insights, Oliver Hartwich talked about the dismal science but did not note the origins of the term. Economics came to be known as the dismal science because, during the mid-1800s, they worked with the Christian philanthropists of Exeter Hall to call for an end to British accommodation of foreign slavery. Read more
Adam Smith explained how the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. When we have more people with whom to trade, we can all better specialise in our areas of comparative advantage. Read more