This graph of Kansas employment during the Brownback years is suggestive.
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Time Series Evidence on the Minimum Wage Impact in Minnesota vs. Wisconsin
- Is the partial derivative of fast food employment with respect to the minimum wage negative? Maybe, maybe not.
- Does a higher minimum wage decrease young adult employment? Maybe, maybe not.
- Does a higher minimum wage raise fast food restaurant prices? Not noticeably.
These conclusions (reported in this working paper written by Louis Johnston and me) stand in contrast to those obtained by Noah Williams, and reported in this CROWE Policy Brief.
Scenes from Artemisia: An Opera of Passion, Betrayal and Art
This Saturday, the Center for Contemporary Opera presents scenes from an opera composed by Laura Schwendinger, libretto by Ginger Strand.
Mass Shooting Casualties through 28 October
Regression 1982q4-2018q3:
f = -18.52 + 0.028pop + 5.182trump
Adj.R2 = 0.18, N = 144, DW = 2.07, bold denotes significance at 10% msl using HAC robust standard errors.
Where f denotes mass shooting fatalities, pop is population in millions, trump is a dummy variable for Trump administration.
One can interpret this as follows: a Trump administration quarter is associated with 5.2 greater fatalities from mass shootings, or 20.8 on an annualized basis. (Over 1982q4-16q4, the average frequency per quarter is 4.876). Inclusion of a deterministic time trend yields a negative coefficient on population, and a trump coefficient (4.093) significant at 11% msl.
Strong GDP growth, weak fundamentals
The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that U.S. real GDP grew at a 3.5% annual rate in the third quarter. That’s the second quarter in a row that the number has come in above the 3.1% average for the U.S. economy over the last 70 years, and is well above the 2.2% average rate since the recovery from the Great Recession began
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Guest Contribution: “China’s Q3 GDP Reportedly Slowed to 6.5%. Or Is It 6.4%?”
Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Private Nonfarm Payroll Employment Growth in US and Wisconsin (Not Pretty!)
Figure 1: US private nonfarm payroll employment (dark blue), and Wisconsin (red), both in logs, normalized to 2017M01. Source: BLS, DWD, author’s calculations.
The Fed: Drumpffeind
So sayeth Donald Trump today. From FoxBusiness:
“My biggest threat is the Fed,” Trump said on Tuesday during an interview with FOX Business’ Trish Regan. “Because the Fed is raising rates too fast, and it’s too independent,” he complained.
Trump: “I think the Fed has gone crazy”
Implicitly, Trump is saying John Taylor is crazy, since the original Taylor rule would imply even faster rises in the Fed funds rate (I am inferring from Professor Taylor’s discussion of neutral rates. Below I plot the implied Fed funds rate, assuming no interest rate smoothing, the Laubach-Williams one-sided estimate of the real natural rate, and a target variable of 4 quarter PCE inflation.
I’m Already Tired of Winning: MidWest Ag Trade Edition
A reader alerts me – from CNBC, indications farmers are going to take a hit, as export volume drops off a cliff.
United States tariffs are beginning to take their toll on farmers and the storage, shipping and freight operations they need to move their crops to market.
In North Dakota, soybeans from 2017 are still in storage after China pulled its contracts. Of the 15.9 million bushels left from that year’s crop, 12.1 million bushels are sitting in grain elevators. That is an increase of 68 percent.