microeconomics

The annual economics award recognises the value of micro analysis and good, old-fashioned legwork.

Microeconomics analyzes how individuals and businesses behave as they try to get the most they can for as little money as possible.

An unfunded expansion of the social transfer system could lead to even worse economic outcomes — the medicine should not be worse than the disease.

Supports: Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 14, Section 14.2. Image created by ChatGPT An article in the Wall Street Journal discussed why the price of chicken in supermarkets has been falling. The article notes that, “Bigger chicken breeds and flocks not being decimated by disease over the summer have led to a glut in an industry that slaughters … Continue reading "Solved Problem: Too Much C…

dc.title: Essays on applied microeconomics and social policy dc.description.abstract: This dissertation consists of three essays on social policy, and the economics of health and education. The first essay studies the effects of targeted school funding on student outcomes, using a lawsuit settlement that allocated additional resources to the lowest-performing schools in Los Angeles as a natural e…

Software had a superpower. Build the product once, distribute it to a million users for roughly the same cost as distributing it to one. Every incremental customer flowed largely to the bottom line. This created a gross margin profile, 75-85%, that made software unlike any other industry in history. Those margins made the unit economics of aggressive customer acquisition work in a way that seemed…

Published on July 8, 2026 1:01 PM GMT Introduction The organization of e-commerce—spanning both physical and digital assets—is arguably the defining microeconomic problem of the 21st century. The debates over wealth concentration and taxation that dominate contemporary political economy may, to a significant extent, be macroeconomic symptoms of lax competition policy in the digital sector—a laxit…

Supports: Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 6, Section 6.3, and Essentials of Economics, Chapter 7, Section 7.7. Image created by ChatGPT An article in the Wall Street Journal on June 25, noted that after Apple increased the prices of iPads and MacBooks, the price of its stock declined by 6.1 percent. That decline meant that the … Continue reading "Solved Problem: Higher Prices and Lower Prof…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 21 June 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-08005-1 Small-scale merchants’ acceptance of UPI payment apps: evidence from India

I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average. In other words, we increase the offered load linearly with c to keep the per-server load constant. Once a r…

Digital platforms have changed what it means for a small business to enter the global market. A seller no longer needs a physical storefront abroad to learn what international customers want, but success still depends on knowing where to look for useful signals. This study shows that cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) platforms do more than connect buyers and sellers: they create hidden networks thro…

Costs can rise with chiplets. Will that change? Will it matter? The post With Chiplets, What Role Does Economics Play? appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering .

Tyler Cowen asks a good question about papers in microeconomics and macroeconomics, that generalizes to ecology papers: Imagine adding [a] button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other … Continue reading →

This article examines how the entry of commercial lenders (CLs) transforms microfinance markets, focusing on borrower outcomes and market-wide spillovers. Using detailed credit registry data, we show that increased competition improves loan terms for both graduating and staying borrowers, generating sustained benefits. Our setting also allows us to document what happens when entry fails and entra…