A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world. Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master and co-creator of Paw Patrol, talks about his book No Experience Necessary with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Harary traces his journey from selling grass-growing novelty heads at 23, through Devil Sticks and Air Hogs, to building Bakugan and Paw Patrol into global franchises touching the lives of millions of children. Along the way, he reflects on the artistry of commercial creation and what it means to build something that outlives its founders. The conversation closes on the eternal magic of toys and our childhoods.
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Event
The Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group hosted “Money and Power: Historical Lessons for Stablecoins and U.S Dollar Dominance” with Michael D. Bordo, the Duncan Stewart Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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Synthetic control methods hold the promise of identifying a credible counterfactual by closely reproducing pretreatment outcome paths. Their reliability, however, depends in part on how effectively they constrain researchers’ less-visible degrees of freedom. We explore these methods’ sensitivity by constructing 1440 plausibly defensible specifications to estimate the employment effect of California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage. While over 96 percent of the estimated employment effects are negative, the range is vast, illustrating that synthetic control methods are sensitive to specification choice.
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Waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds are among the oldest and most persistent issues in American history.
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