Bill Watkins, Ph.D.
Bill Watkins, Founding Director of CERF, has been providing accurate, unflinching forecasts about the economic pulse of California, western states and the rest of the United States, for more than 15 years. He is a plain-spoken, no-holds-barred economist who studies the data and tells it like it is.
“Bill Watkins has the enviable ability to provide the simple-to-grasp explanations that are based on rigorous analysis of complex things. Sometimes it seems that we within the academy forget that our job is to make things easier to understand, not more difficult.”
Read BioCERF Blog: Posts by Bill Watkins
The California Economic Summit published a piece reacting to what President Obama’s push to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour would mean for California. There were a number of economists quoted who made some true statements – but they all missed the point. First, here is some of what… Read more
The year 1972 was a big one for me. I left the US Air Force, and I married the woman I still love. Once it dawned on me that I needed income to support my wife and our future family, I started looking about for what to do. I seriously considered working in one of… Read more
Forbes recently ran an article by William Baldwin titled “Do You Live in a Death Spiral State?” In the article, Baldwin calls states with declining economies Death Spiral States. (Confession: I really wish I’d come up that term) He correctly included California among his Death Spiral States. Then, he gives investment advice based only on… Read more
California has almost achieved zero population growth. According to the California Department of Finance (DOF), California’s population has stagnated at sub-one-percent rates for an unprecedented seven consecutive years. The slow growth was a result of negative domestic migration, declining international migration, and declining births. Unless we fix our education system and create opportunities for everyone,… Read more
The world’s horse population is estimated to not exceed 65 million, while the world’s population of people is estimated at 7.05 billion. We have at least 108 people for every horse. It wasn’t always thus. In 1800, Europe’s estimated horse population was 14 million, while its people population was an estimated 150 million. They had… Read more
This from a CNNMoney article: NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The International Monetary Fund said Monday that the global economy should continue to limp along at a modest pace, assuming leaders in Europe and the United States do not make things worse. In the latest update to its World Economic Outlook, the IMF said it expects… Read more
Tyler Cowen is a creative economist. Here, he proposes a novel approach to Europe. The key paragraph: Just to make the comparison biting, what if we postponed the costly benefits part of ACA for a year (it may be struck down anyway) and send $200 billion directly to Spain and its banks? Is more money… Read more
This morning I ran across this piece on five people who have left the labor force. It a why-and-how-are-they-dealing-with-it type of thing. What struck me was that four of the five were either back in college or planning on going back to college, some for advanced degrees. Improving human capital is a reasonable response to long-term unemployment,… Read more
David R. Henderson has a nice piece on property rights. The title of this post is a quote from Henderson’s article. It’s a nice piece with three example of “policy issues’ that cause conflict and one that does not cause conflict. Here’s his first paragraph: Should restaurants allow smoking or not? Should schools teach evolution… Read more
The title of this post is the title of a paper by Madeline Zavodny. In the paper, Zavodny tests to see if immigrants, especially educated immigrants, create jobs for resident Americans or take jobs away from them. She finds big positive impacts. That is, her work indicates that educated immigrants create jobs for resident Americans.… Read more
