Opinion

  Verizon’s purchase of Yahoo! for $4.83 billion, while an interesting exercise in combining content, networks and mobile services, highlights the broken norms for paying executives of U.S. corporations. The short version is that issuing and repricing of stock options compensates executives for bull markets rather than their own performance is absurd. When the deal is complete, Yahoo Chief Executive ...

  Noah Smith One of the core pieces of modern macroeconomic theory, handed down to us by the great Milton Friedman, probably missed the mark. And now it might be on the way out. And this shift has big implications for how we think about economic policy and finance. The idea is called the permanent income hypothesis (PIH). Friedman first ...

  PHILADELPHIA En route to fight one of his many duels, French politician Georges Clemenceau bought a one-way train ticket. Was he pessimistic? “Not at all. I always use my opponent’s return ticket for the trip back.” Some Hillary Clinton advisers, although not that serene, think her victory is probable and can be assured. Her challenge is analogous to Ronald ...

  History was made early Tuesday when Solar Impulse 2 completed its historic round-the-world journey, becoming the first solar-powered airplane to circle the globe, with the aim to promote renewable energy. The selection of Abu Dhabi to be the launch-pad and the final leg of the epic odyssey wasn’t coincidental as the capital has been the centrestage of clean energy. ...

  Catherine Putz SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Days after two suicide bombers killed more than 80 people amid a peaceful demonstration in Kabul, the country’s president said the Af-Pak relationship is Afghanistan’s biggest problem. In an interview with Pakistani media, President Ashraf Ghani agreed that terrorist groups, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, are threats to the country but noted that ...

Standard economic theory says that taxation reduces productivity. If you tax income, you reduce the incentive to work. If you tax capital gains, you reduce the incentive to invest, and so on. When you discourage useful economic activity, the economy becomes less efficient. But what if it were possible to impose taxes in a way that also increased productivity? That’s ...

  A month has passed since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. While that’s nowhere near long enough for all of the economic aftershocks of Brexit to fully manifest, the evidence thus far suggests grounds for optimism. The FTSE 100 Index of the biggest U.K. companies, which dropped 3.15 percent on the day after the referendum, is now ...

  Undoubtedly, Bangalore is still the number one IT/ITeS outsourcing location in the world, as noted by an Economic Times article quoting a 2014 survey of the top 100 IT locations. It’s not difficult to see why — the city not only boasts the highest number of startups, but also has an ecosystem that supports the startup culture. It has ...

  Anthony Fensom The Bank of Japan is determined to cheapen the currency of the world’s third-biggest economy. Who might be the winners and losers, both at home and abroad? On Friday, the yen ended trading with its first two-week decline since May on speculation of further monetary stimulus at the Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) July 29 policy meeting. Despite ...

WASHINGTON If economic commentators (including me) seem to agree on one thing, it is this: Jobs in America have become less secure. If you’ve got an OK job, don’t let go, because you may not be able to find another. The conventional wisdom is widely shared — but it may be wrong. We now have an intriguing report from a ...