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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Institutional Economics (S. Kirchner)
Stephen Kirchner
I have a piece in The Conversation arguing that the relative decline of manufacturing is a sign of economic progress:
The manufacturing share of developed economies has been in decline for decades. But that does not mean that manufacturing output has been declining in an absolute sense. Far from it. ...
Republican academics are associated with less egalitarian grading outcomes.
From a new NBER Working Paper:
Doubling an MEP’s salary increases the probability of running for reelection by 23 percentage points and increases the logarithm of the number of parties that field a candidate by 29 percent of a standard deviation. A salary increase has no discernible impact on absenteeism ...
Martin Feldstein writing in Foreign Affairs in 1997, demonstrating that the euro crisis was entirely foreseeable:
If EMU does come into existence, as now seems increasingly likely, it will change the political character of Europe in ways that could lead to conflicts in Europe and confrontations with the United States.
The ...
A useful thought experiment from Robert Hetzel:
The institutional fact that makes a liquidity trap an irrelevant academic construct is the unlimited ability of the central bank to create money. One can make this point in an irrefutable manner by noting that the logical conclusion to unlimited open-market purchases is ...
I have an op-ed in Online Opinion marking the 20th anniversary of Fightback:
Twenty years ago this November, the Liberal-National Party coalition released Fightback, the most comprehensive and market-oriented policy platform ever taken to a federal election. Conventional wisdom holds that Fightback was a political folly that saw the opposition ...
South Africa looks to Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board as a model:
THE establishment in SA of a body similar to the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board will be vital in regulating the government’s rules on foreign direct investment and removing uncertainty of the kind around this year’s controversial Walmart-Massmart ...
Treasury’s David Gruen highlights the role of Australia’s macroeconomic policy framework in sustaining the boom:
The Federal Governments of the 1970s were in direct control of all arms of macroeconomic policy, including the value of the exchange rate. When commodity prices were rising strongly, generating boom conditions in parts of ...
My review of Paul Cleary’s book ‘Too Much Luck’ is up at The Conversation. The original review discussion of the role of the exchange rate which unfortunately hit the cutting room floor, but can be found below the fold. The review draws on a monograph by Robert Carling and ...
Business Week reports:
The design of Making Work Pay plays off of mental accounting. One of Thaler’s findings is that people are more likely to spend money that they have filed in their “current income” mental account rather than their “assets” mental account—in other words, they measure their spending against ...