England has a reputation around the world for awarding generous payouts to the financially weaker party in a divorce. A prenuptial agreement (or “prenup”) is not legally binding in England, and judges have extremely wide discretion when deciding how assets should be divided upon divorce. Although increasingly rare, English courts can grant a type of […]
The Economist has a new article asking why rich people work longer hours than the poor nowadays. According to them: … the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only […]
One simple graph by the Thomas M. Hoenig, Vice Chairman of the U.S.’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on how big banks (defined as those with assets over $10 billion) in the U.S. have become bigger and bigger in the past three decades. Simon Johnson summarizes his observations nicely: The facts may startle you. In 1984, […]
Hong Kong’s Education Bureau has caused a furore last month by claiming on their website that Cantonese is just a “Chinese dialect” and “not an official language” of Hong Kong. According to them: Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 per cent of the local […]
More than five years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I decided to take a deep dive on the mechanics behind the derivatives world. One of the most interesting documents was the report by Lehman’s court-appointed bankruptcy examiner Anton R. Valukas, which runs 2,200 pages (disclaimer: I did not finish reading all!). The report shed light on accounting […]
The FT has an article featuring overseas Chinese students. According to the article, The number of Chinese studying overseas has more than tripled in the past decade and continues to shoot up. The rise has been particularly dramatic among lower-middle-class families: according to a report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, up to the end […]
The one thing I am impressed the most with my stay here in the US is the creativity and entrepreneurship of the young people. When there is a problem, there is always a solution–and people can make money from it. I once moaned about the difficulty of getting a taxi in Boston, and have recently found […]
This is a small world, as we know it. Most people are connected through the so-called “six degrees of separation”. But what does it mean for our professional life? Researchers have found very short paths in collaboration networks within professional communities. There is a “connection” if two authors have collaborated/coauthored before. A “path” means the […]
I still remember the days of studying dynamic optimization in my advanced macroeconomic class in the MPA/ID program. A few students like myself once moaned about the difficulty and “irrelevance” of dynamic optimization to the real world. Indeed, “optimal control”, a key approach to dynamic optimization, was developed in the 1950s during the space race, and […]
Institutional reforms are the buzzwords in developments nowadays. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s best-selling Why Nations Fail is all about institutions: the balance between inclusive versus exclusive political and economic institutions would determine the development path of countries. Indeed, the full name of the book is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty… (I […]