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
It seemed a simple enough question. It was, really. Read more
Big organisations get up to a lot of stuff that looks pretty silly from the outside – and even from the inside. Corporate retreats with ridiculous team-building exercises. Read more
They say hard cases make for bad law. Hard cases are emotionally wrenching. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton discusses how our comprehensive, year-long econometric analysis buries the old myth that school quality is linked to school decile. Our findings are published in our latest Research Note, Tomorrow's Schools: Data and Evidence, written by Joel Hernandez. Read more
Our Chief Economist Dr Eric Crampton talks to Newstalk ZB's Kate Hawkesby about findings from our latest research, Tomorrow's Schools: Data and Evidence, and the importance of comprehensive, evidence-based research when it comes to looking at school performance. The Initiative has developed a school performance tool with the primary purpose of evaluating the relative effectiveness of every secondary school in New Zealand. Read more
For those of us of a certain age, part of the thrill of staying up late as a kid was getting to see and hear things on television that did not air during afternoon cartoons. Before 9pm, one set of rules applied. Read more
Last week feels like it was a year ago. And the past week has made the world feel a little smaller. Read more
I keep coming back to one tweet. Amid a steady stream of rage driven by pain and sorrow, a note of grace. Read more
Wellington is a small place. Everybody complains they’re always running into people they know, that it’s hard for young people to date people who haven’t been dated by their friends already, and that it’s impossible to have an impromptu coffee at Astoria without being recognised by some journalist. Read more
There’s an old joke about the neighbourhood dog that loved to chase cars down the road – what would it ever do if it caught one? The Government has been a bit like that with tobacco harm reduction. Read more
Partisanship is a powerful and deadly drug. Canada is the latest in a too-lengthy list of places badly in need of rehab. Read more
Reselling concert tickets is now a challenging problem due to scammers. Some people are struggling to sell tickets to Wellington's Eminem concert at the Westpac Stadium. Read more
Last week, Thomas Coughlin reported that “the wellbeing framework that puts the ‘value of a statistical life’ at $4.7 million is coming under fire.” There is a lot to criticise about the wellbeing framework, and I am hardly one of its cheerleaders. But it is absurd to criticise it for trying to apply proper cost-benefit assessment – and even more absurd to criticise it for putting a value on statistical lives. Read more
Some folks take the wrong lesson from intermediate microeconomics – or never took the course in the first place. I worry that too many of them staff Wellington’s bureaus. Read more
Only the officials at Inland Revenue know why they commissioned a poll on Kiwis’ attitudes to tax that included questions about the respondents’ general political orientation. Releasing the polling data should be part of fixing any perceived problems. Hamish Rutherford’s reporting at the Dominion Post raises questions about the Department’s political impartiality. Read more