I have posted the schedule and syllabus: no texts, just readings, and more readings. Alongside your capstone project, this term I emphasize three overlapping themes.…
Author: Mike
Prof of Economics, Wms School of Commerce, Washington and Lee University, Lexington VA
The recent depreciation of China’s exchange rate with the US$, to which it is pegged, garnered headlines. Until now those watching China believed that the…
I regularly read a variety of blogs that cover macroeconomic issues. This is an item I picked up from the Economist’s View [also in the…
In the blogosphere there’s an ongoing discussion of labor force participation (cf. the decline in “headline” unemployment despite few additional jobs). A good example is…
To start thinking about this issue see Fiscal Policy Debates on the Economist’s View blog.
The US recovery continues at a snail’s pace; the auto industry is doing better. The rise in the SAAR [seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales]…
Economics 398 Winter 2014 MWF 1:25 am – 2:20 pm, Huntley 220 Econ 398 has two goals. The first is to develop a full research…
…”flagship” colleges are not a local public good… I’ve long been puzzled by state support for elite universities. In contrast, I’ve long been puzzled by…
We’ve read papers by DeLong, Ramey and others — this is a timely article on Bloomberg for our upcoming debate on multipliers and stimulus.
I track a variety of indicators, including age-specific employment-to-population data and employment relative to the normal level using census age-specific population projections. What the latest…
From EconPapers. The first article lets you follow up on the political economy of political systems that overrepresent the interest of retirees. (Of course, if you read the abstract that’s not their phrasing.) The second addresses the point I’ve made in class and on the blog, that the social security trust fund is economically meaningless; they stress how it has led the debate over retirement in counterproductive directions.
…sequestrian offers a “natural” experiment to test views of government… Microeconomists will thank Congress for providing a natural experiment to test competing views of government.…
Steve Rattner worked very hard on behalf of our economy with the Auto Task Force. The US was already in the throes of the Great Recession. Had the bankruptcy process not been handled in a timely manner, our economy would have been thrust into a second depression. (See the related Autos and Economics blog.)
However, while Rattner has been able to step back and rethink standard ways of doing things in the realm of corporate restructuring, he has not similarly been able to distance himself from received thinking on fiscal issues. Above all, he continues to view retirement security (Social Security and Medicare) as boats that ought to run on their own bottoms. Since money is fungible, there is nothing inherent in this, except as it changes the politics. However, over the last four decades Congress has not treated the operating budget as something separate from these programs. The “on-budget” and “off-budget” distinction is irrelevant.
Corsetti et al (2012) use a “Taylor Rule” approach to estimate normal (endogenous) fiscal policy, and then use the error in the fitted values as a measure of “true” fiscal policy that would not be automatically included in the variables of a typical VAR. They then use this to test the size of the multiplier, using a panel of countries to include ones with pegged vs floating exchange rates, with high debt levels, and in a financial crisis.
Seasonally adjusted vs non-adjusted data: graphs say it all.
Click the title for a post “the” multiplier from Jared Bernstein
A long-standing quip is that computers are seen everywhere but in the productivity numbers (due to Robert Solow? Dale Jorgenson?). Why?
James Kwak in the Baseline Scenario blog gives a nice example: electronic records in healthcare. Let me quote:
…how can you discuss policy if you can’t count?… Some comics are simply too good to pass up. I’ve seen jokes using the 110% quip,…
There’s a certain fascination with gold; it seems to offer a way to constrain central bankers, at one end of the rules versus discretion debate. Mind you, central banks don’t have a stellar track record. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates during the onset of the Great Depression, surely worsening matters. That’s a core criticism of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their Monetary History of the United States. So it’s sensible to ask if there’s a viable alternative.