Economics Roundtable
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
November Payroll Employment
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
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Economic Principals (David Warsh)
Curious about why you’ve heard so little out of Davos? For the first time in thirty years, China sent none of its various vice-premiers to the World Economic Forum, ostensibly because the meetings this weekend fall in the middle of Chinese New Year celebrations. More likely the Chinese are preoccupied ...
There was a good little snow in Boston this weekend.
As a result (that is, taking advantage of it), there is no Economic Principals this week
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Modeling the passage of time is notoriously difficult in economics. Living the passage of time is much easier. Each year’s Nobel Prize turns up as a subject of discussion fifteen months later on the program of the meetings of the American Economic Association. Since one of the main functions of ...
Economic Principals is in Chicago at the four-day meetings of the American Economic Association.
The single most interesting development was the adoption by the AEA’s Executive Committee of stringent new disclosure requirements for authors seeking to publish in the association’s seven journals, including the flagship American Economic Review.
Three stages are ...
…In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable ...
In “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” economist Joel Waldfogel years ago declared war on wasteful gift giving. The best you can hope to do with a $10 gift, he argued, is to duplicate a $10 purchase the recipient would have made for him or herself. Chances are you’ll overspend.
He ...
If, as still seems likely, Mitt Romney becomes the nominee of the Republican Party, then the US presidential campaign in 2012 will consist of a competition between two men with very different preparations for the job: one, a political organizer who found a home in law schools; the other, a ...
Nobel lectures in economics can be something of an anticlimax. It takes thirty or forty years to win the prize, often in collision with some prevailing orthodoxy. Eventually comes a day of exhilaration, followed by two months of polishing a paper whose kernel may have been tucked away in a ...
Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon ...
What makes the Occupy Wall Street episode so interesting is that it’s the first development in quite a while to signal a longing for profoundly different times. This was not just a matter of its inception — a significant improvement of methods that were first employed to organize the street ...