Real estate mogul Donald Trump won seven out of the eleven states holding Republican primary elections on Super Tuesday, and two more on Saturday. His main competitor, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, came out on top in five states this past week, while Florida Senator Marco Rubio disappointed with just one victory in Minnesota. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton consolidated her lead over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, taking seven out of eleven states on Super Tuesday. However, Sanders won both Kansas and Nebraska in Saturday’s Democratic primaries.
The US labour participation rate increased to 62.9%, its highest level in over a year. Furthermore, the unemployment rate remained strong at 4.9%, as the US economy added 242,000 jobs in February. These encouraging figures suggest that the improving labour market is drawing people back into the labour force.
Brazil’s economy contracted by 3.8% in 2015, its largest slowdown in 25 years. The country’s slump is due to a mixture of causes, including political corruption scandals, slow global growth and low commodity prices. Brazil is struggling to cope with its economic woes, in part because of alarming levels of government debt. Additionally, credit rating agency Moody’s recently downgraded Brazil’s sovereign debt to junk.
Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology, published an article in Science that tried to replicate economics experiments whose results have been published in top economics journals between 2011 and 2014. Camerer and his colleagues found that 61% of the results could be duplicated, which is substantially more than recent surveys of papers in psychology and medicine, reporting similar results in only 38% and 11% of cases, respectively.
Images from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump#/media/File:Donald_Trump_August_19,_2015_(cropped).jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#/media/File:Bernie_Sanders.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Brazil#/media/File:Flag_of_Brazil.svg
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/64988/
