Category Archives: here and there

How to get an academic job in economics

It’s that time of year again when our graduate students present seminars based on their dissertations in preparation for flying around the country trying to get an academic job. So I thought as a public service I’d call attention to this instructional video from the faculty at the University of Wisconsin on what new Ph.D.’s can expect when they give their first job talk.

Regimes in macroeconomics

For academic researchers who are readers of this blog (and I know you’re lurking out there), I wanted to call attention to my new paper on Macroeconomic Regimes and Regime Shifts:

Many economic time series exhibit dramatic breaks associated with events such as economic recessions, financial panics, and currency crises. Such changes in regime may arise from tipping points or other nonlinear dynamics and are core to some of the most important questions in macroeconomics. This chapter surveys the literature on regime changes. Section 1 begins with an interpretation of the move of an economy into and out of recession as an example of a change in regime and introduces some of the basic tools for analyzing such phenomena. Section 2 provides a detailed overview of econometric methods that are appropriate for time series that are subject to changes in regime. Section 3 summarizes the ways in which changes in regime can be incorporated into theoretical economic models and briefly reviews applications in a number of areas of macroeconomics.

More on Piketty

I continue to agree with Paul Krugman that the Financial Times and Tyler Cowen have picked an unlikely battle with Thomas Piketty in trying to claim that wealth inequality in the United Kingdom has been decreasing rather than increasing over the last 40 years; more on this from Carter Price. As for Piketty’s broader claims of century-long trends (to perceive which the French scholar has to dismiss much of the twentieth century as an anomaly), King Banaian’s summary of some of the details in how Piketty misreported the data are troubling.

The core claim of Piketty’s book is that slower economic growth will lead to a huge increase in the capital/income ratio as a consequence of a relation that Piketty described as the “second fundamental law of capitalism”. I earlier explained why Piketty’s law is complete nonsense. Separately, James Galbraith explains why the first “law” as interpreted and applied by Piketty is also highly problematic.

Many of us believe that relatively recent globalization, rather than Piketty’s broad theories or asserted sweeping historical trends, played an important role in growing income inequality within most major developed countries over the last generation. But it should also be noted that this same globalization has also been the key factor in reducing inequality on a global scale in the sense of profoundly raising the standard of living for billions of residents of developing and emerging economies.

UPDATE: I see that Per Krussel and Tony Smith came out with a paper today elaborating on the points I made on Sunday. Hat tips to Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen.