Opinion

The economics profession’s gender problems came to the fore last year. A number of people had been speaking up about the issue for a while, but this time the concern really boiled over. The spark was a paper by then-undergraduate Alice Wu, highlighting sexist language in an anonymous internet forum used by some economists. But the profession’s gender issues run ...

It is perhaps fitting that President Donald Trump’s salvo of tariffs on solar-power equipment was unleashed in a press release dropped late on Monday and sporting a headline that actually led with “large residential washing machines.” Why? Because, digging into the impact, the tariffs help to demonstrate one thing: Solar modules— blocks of cells that are put together to make ...

I began sharing my work online two decades ago as one of the early financial bloggers. I started on Yahoo Geocities in the 1990s, Typepad in 2003, and finally on WordPress at my own domain in 2008. That is where the Big Picture still resides. In those days, blogs had robust comment communities. They were a terrific source of discussion ...

One of the hardest questions in economics is mobility versus stability. What happens to workers who are displaced by recessions, technological and industrial change, regional shifts, or corporate failure? Can humans move fluidly from occupation to occupation, industry to industry, and city to city, like interchangeable parts in a well-oiled economic machine, always going to where their contributions will be ...

China’s economic performance is all about what hasn’t happened. That’s huge. The world’s No. 2 economy didn’t implode under a mountain of debt, nor did trade tensions with the US bring exports undone. And there certainly hasn’t been the trade war many feared a year ago. The country’s growing reliance on services and consumption as an engine of growth — ...

Many predicted that the beginning of last year would finally bring an uptick in volatility. Instead, 2017 was one of the least volatile periods on record for the stock market. The S&P 500 was up every month. The largest peak-to-trough drawdown was slightly more than 3 percent, the lowest on record since at least the mid-1990s. And this phenomenon isn’t ...

There’s little doubt that the Higher Education Act, which affects more than $120 billion in annual federal spending, needs an update. Less clear is whether Republicans’ proposed reforms will do more harm than good. The law, last revised a decade ago, sets the conditions under which federal student financial aid is disbursed. It is the government’s primary tool for preserving ...

For more than two decades, Jeff Bezos has famously sacrificed profit for growth, persuading Wall Street that Amazon.com Inc. was best served pouring money into the logistical nuts and bolts that have turned his company into the Wal-Mart of the web. More recently, investors have found solace in the company’s profitable cloud services business, which has helped offset losses in ...

No one is more eager for the next bear market than long-short hedge funds. Long-shorts had a good year in 2017. The HFRI Equity Hedge Total Index — an index of long-short equity hedge funds — returned 13.5 percent last year, its best performance since 2013. But as my Bloomberg View colleague Barry Ritholtz pointed out last week, it wasn’t ...

Experts may be out of favour these days, but when it comes to reforming the euro zone, expert consensus is as important as political consensus. Most voters only understand the basic drift of such change; if experts agree on details, it can be reassuring. Luckily for political leaders, an expert consensus now exists: It’s laid out in a paper signed ...