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BlogSeasonal Adjustments Roughly Account for Reported Drop in Unemployment Rate
February 06, 2011 In Friday’s post, I pointed out that unemployment and employment numbers announced by the BLS had apparently been changed greatly by the process of adjusting for typical seasonal changes. These adjustments are meant to account, for example, for the fact that retail business is generally stronger than usual during the holiday season at the end of each [...] Blog -
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Beneath the Surface, Some Disappointing Unemployment Data
February 04, 2011 A note on the unemployment figures released earlier this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), reporting the results of a January survey of U.S. households: The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell from 9.4 percent in December to 9.0 percent last month, a healthy improvement. On the other hand, before seasonal adjustment, the unemployment [...] Blog -
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A New Peek at the Secrets of the Fed?
February 02, 2011 In December, the Levy Institute issued a working paper that asked how the economy might be affected by the seemingly unusual fiscal and monetary policies implemented by the Fed and other central banks since 2008. The authors, Dimitri Papadimitriou and I, used a phrase that is not often spoken in this era by governments and central banks around the world: “monetizing the deficit.” This phrase traditionally describes the [...] Blog -
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Education, earnings and age in the Great Recession
January 27, 2011 Reading the back and forth between Brad deLong and David Leonhardt over the structural versus cyclical nature of unemployment during the Great Recession, a question nagged at me, spurred by this quote from Leonhardt: The data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Thursday gives me a chance to explain why I disagree. In [...] Blog -
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Long-Term Interest Rates Brought Up to Date
January 21, 2011 Last summer, this blogger posted a graph showing the path followed by U.S. long-term interest rates since 1925. There has been some interest in a new and updated graph, especially in light of concerns that bond markets might soon demand higher yields as the economy expanded. One appears above. Reasons for apprehension about a possible [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 650Fiscal Policy: Why Aggregate Demand Management Fails and What to Do about It
January 19, 2011 This paper argues for a fundamental reorientation of fiscal policy, from the current aggregate demand management model to a model that explicitly and directly targets the unemployed. Even though aggregate...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 649
Fiscal Policy Effectiveness: Lessons from the Great Recession
January 18, 2011 This paper reconsiders fiscal policy effectiveness in light of the recent economic crisis. It examines the fiscal policy approach advocated by the economics profession today and the specific policy actions...more Publication -
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The impact of the recession on jobs
January 13, 2011 The Economic Policy Institute has produced an interesting analysis on jobs lost and recovered in U.S. post-war recessions. They show how many months were needed, since the beginning of a recession, to get back to the initial employment level. However, the working population is growing over time, so getting back to the employment level of, [...] Blog -
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Will the U.S. recover lost output and jobs?
January 12, 2011 At the last meeting of the American Economic Association in Denver, Giuseppe Fontana discussed the theoretical arguments on whether the Great Recession will generate a permanent loss in output. He argued that, according to the dominant “New Consensus” theory, output should return to its historical path once the shock has been absorbed. Alternative, heterodox theories, [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 648
Views of European Races among the Research Staff of the US Immigration Commission and the Census Bureau, ca. 1910
January 06, 2011 This paper discusses support for, and opposition to, racial classification of European immigrants among high-level researchers at both the United States Immigration Commission of 1907–11 (the Dillingham Commission) and the...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 647
Money
December 24, 2010 This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods....more Publication -
Working Paper No. 646
A Demographic Base for Ethnic Survival?
December 22, 2010 New data from the IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) project permit an exploration of the demographic basis for ethnic survival across successive generations. I first explore the degree of...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 645
Quantitative Easing and Proposals for Reform of Monetary Policy Operations
December 14, 2010 Beyond its original mission to “furnish an elastic currency” as lender of last resort and manager of the payments system, the Federal Reserve has always been responsible (along with the...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 644
How Rich Countries Became Rich and Why Poor Countries Remain Poor
December 13, 2010 Becoming a rich country requires the ability to produce and export commodities that embody certain characteristics. We classify 779 exported commodities according to two dimensions: (1) sophistication (measured by the...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 643
Modeling Technological Progress and Investment in China
December 07, 2010 Since the early 1990s, the number of papers estimating econometric models and using other quantitative techniques to try to understand different aspects of the Chinese economy has mushroomed. A common...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 642
China in the Global Economy
December 06, 2010 China occupies a unique position among developing countries. Its success in achieving relative stability in the financial sector since the institution of reforms in 1979 has given way to relative...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 641
Disaggregating the Resource Curse
December 02, 2010 The hypothesis of the natural resource curse has captivated the economics profession, and since the mid-1990s has generated a large body of policymaking initiatives aimed at dispelling the curse. In...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 640
he Central Bank “Printing Press”: Boon or Bane?
December 01, 2010 In recent years, the US public debt has grown rapidly, with last fiscal year’s deficit reaching nearly $1.3 trillion. Meanwhile, many of the euro nations with large amounts of public...more Publication -
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Federal Pay Rates Frozen; How High Are They Now?
December 01, 2010 Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that it wants to freeze wages and salaries earned by federal government employees in calendar years 2011 and 2012. Most federal workers might otherwise have received a cost-of-living raise at the start of the new year. There has been some controversy about whether these workers are overpaid. In this post, [...] Blog -
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American-German divide on macroeconomic policy alive and kicking
November 29, 2010 Developments surrounding the recent G-20 summit further underlined some starkly conflicting views among key global policymakers, an important “American-German divide” in matters of macroeconomic policy in particular. Blog -
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Does paying interest on reserves stall growth?
November 18, 2010 In an interesting (pun intended) post (Economist’s View: Interest on Reserves and Inflation) Mark Thoma says that the Fed’s paying banks interest on their reserves does not dampen investment, for two reasons, one on the supply side and one on the demand side. On the supply side of the market for loans, Thoma points out [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 639
US “Quantitative Easing” Is Fracturing the Global Economy
November 18, 2010 The Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing is presented as injecting $600 billion into “the economy.” But instead of getting banks lending to Americans again—households and firms—the money is going abroad, through...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 638
Exports, Capabilities, and Industrial Policy in India
November 17, 2010 An extensive literature argues that India’s manufacturing sector has underperformed, and that the country has failed to industrialize; in particular, it has failed to take advantage of its labor-abundant comparative...more Publication -
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A proposal for an equitable Social Security retirement age
November 16, 2010 This idea first occurred to me while I was in France in September. I marveled that the debate they’re having (complete with effective social mobilization), is about raising the retirement age to 62. The current Social Security retirement age is 67, and the ‘serious’ proposal from Bowles-Simpson is to index it to life expectancy. This [...] Blog