Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures: Latest Estimates

Econbrowser readers will know that I’ve long been interested in how derivatives like futures predict commodity prices. An early paper on energy futures, coauthored with my former CEA colleagues Michael LeBlanc and Oli Coibion, was summarized in this 2006 post (paper here). Recently, Oli Cobion and I have updated and expanded our examination, to incorporate for the most recent data, account for GARCH effects, alloow for time variation, and to try to explain why there has been time variation in the deviations in the unbiasedness proposition.

 

From the abstract to our paper:

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“Export or Die”

From today’s Economist, Greg Ip writes:

America’s economic transformation will require businesses to rely less on selling to Americans and more on selling abroad…. The emphasis will be on high-value products and services rather than on labour-intensive items such as furniture and clothing.

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Does Unemployment Insurance Necessarily Raise the Unemployment Rate and Decrease Employment?

Some analysts (e.g., most recently Professor Mulligan) have stressed the disincentive effects of unemployment insurance on the unemployment rate and the level of employment. I think it useful to consider the offsetting effects arising from various effects, and hence distinguishing between the two variables. In my view, the impact of UI is more complicated than it would seem at first glance, with UI potentially increasing employment while concurrently increasing the unemployment rate. In addition, according to newer research, even if UI extends unemployment duration, it still might be welfare-enhancing. In other words, some researchers appear to have had their worldview frozen in 1990.

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A Still Relevant GAO Classic: Floating Exchange Rates in an Interdependent World and “Overvaluation”

Following up on my misalignment post from Tuesday, here’s a volume compiled by the GAO when it was the General Accounting Office containing a symposium on exchange rates. The symposium took place in the midst of currency overvaluation: “Floating Exchange Rates in an Interdependent World”. The authors included Richard Cooper, Stanley Black, Rudiger Dornbusch, Jeffrey Frankel, and Jacob Frenkel.

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Policy Analysis in DSGEs

A few weeks ago [0], I wished for a comparative survey of the properties of many macro models, along the lines of the Brookings comparison project of the early 1980’s. I got part of my wish (at least in part), in the form of a (very cool!) comparison of key policy agency dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, in Effects of Fiscal Stimulus in Structural Models (h/t Mark Thoma).

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The Mason-Dixon Line in Health Care Reform: Economists Edition

The WSJ Real Time Economics blog has posted the letters for and against the health care reform bill winding through Congress. The most interesting thing about the lists of signatories is the geographical divide. It was so interesting, I did a fast tabulation (so, don’t quote me on it), and what one finds is that of the list in favor, only 2 of 41 economists are affiliated with institutions in the South (defined using the most restrictive definition in this Wikipedia page — so to be completely accurate, I haven’t used the actual Mason-Dixon line). Of the 131 signatories to the against letter, 40 are affiliated with institutions in the South, i.e., essentially 30% of the total. A list of affiliations is below:

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