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Policy Notes No. 5
Deflation Worries
For the first time since the 1930s, many worry that the world’s economy faces the prospect of deflation—accompanied by massive job losses—on a global scale. In a rather hopeful sign, policymakers from Euroland to Japan to America all seem to recognize the threat that falling prices pose to markets. Given the singleminded pursuit of deflationary […] -
Working Paper No. 391
Aggregate Demand, Conflict, and Capacity in the Inflationary Process
The dominant view relating to unemployment and inflation is that inflation will be constant at a level of unemployment (the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, NAIRU) determined on the supply side of the economy (and in the labor market in particular). Further, the economy will tend to converge to (or oscillate around) that level of […] -
Working Paper No. 390
Savings of Entrepreneurs
Previous work on entrepreneurship and wealth has documented that entrepreneurial households are wealthier and have higher wealth mobility. However, the literature has not paid attention to the components of wealth change. Furthermore, endogeneity problems in the measurement of the interaction between saving rates and entrepreneurship are not well addressed.In this paper, by reexamining the relationship […] -
Working Paper No. 389
Do Workers with Low Lifetime Earnings Really Have Low Earnings Every Year?
When it comes to retirement income policy, there is a general perception that workers have full 40-year working careers before retiring. Further, it is generally assumed that workers with low lifetime earnings have low earnings in each year during a normal working career. The basic research question is why do some workers have low lifetime […] -
Working Paper No. 388
Inflation Targeting
Since the early 1990s, a number of countries have adopted Inflation Targeting (IT) in an effort to reduce inflation. Most literature has praised IT as a superior framework of monetary policy. We suggest that IT is a major policy prescription closely associated with the New Consensus Macroeconomics (NCM). Focusing mainly on the IT aspects of […] -
Working Paper No. 387
Measures of the Real GDP of US Trading Partners
This paper provides the details of the construction of new quarterly measures of the real GDPs of the 36 trading partners that are taken into consideration by the Federal Reserve in its "broad exchange rate" indexes. These new measures have some important advantages. First, they allow the construction of various income aggregates and sub-aggregates, which […] -
Working Paper No. 386
Household Wealth, Public Consumption, and Economic Well-Being in the United States
*Preliminary draft. Please do not quote or cite without permission. Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants–household wealth and public consumption–in the context of the United States. Our […] -
Report No. 3
Report September 2003
The slowdown in economic growth and rising unemployment in the euro area have revealed serious fault lines in the stability and growth pact governing the zone’s macroeconomic policies. In an editorial, Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer state that the pact threatens to become an “instability and no growth pact,” with the thrust of fiscal and […] -
Only fiscal activism has the power to counter recession, because central banks are impotent
Copyright 2003 The Financial Times Limited (London, England) Friday, August 29, 2003; Financial Times; USA Edition; Letters to the Editor Sir, Martin Feldstein (“Fiscal activism would speed a recovery,” August 26) is clearly correct to argue that fiscal activism should be used under current economic circumstances. He is, though, incorrect to suggest that monetary policy […] -
Europe’s imposed stability, now it has to create growth
The slowdown in economic growth and rising unemployment in the euro area, with major economies slipping into recession, have revealed serious faultlines in the stability and growth pact governing the euro area’s macroeconomic policies. The pact dictates that budget deficits must not exceed 3% of GDP, with a requirement budgets are in balance or surplus […] -
Policy Notes No. 4
Pushing Germany Off the Cliff Edge
Germany’s fiscal crisis cannot be attributed to unification per se; it arose as a consequence of ill-guided macroeconomic policies pursued in response to that event. Many structural problems that popped up along the way were mere symptoms of persistent macroeconomic mismanagement and protracted stagnation. Since Germany provided the blueprint for Europe’s stability-oriented macroeconomic policy regime, […] -
Press Release
Germany’s Deflationary Fiscal and Monetary Policies, Modeled by the EU, Threaten European and Global Growth