Today, we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Laurent Ferrara (Professor of International Economics, SKEMA Business School, Paris), and Director, International Institute of Forecasting.
Bleg: Examples of Bad Econometrics to Teach
I’ve been tapped to teach the second course in the statistics/econometrics sequence at the La Follette School. I need examples of excruciatingly bad econometrics to discuss. Please post your suggestions as comments. In 2016, I assigned students to examine the empirical content of “business conditions” indices, like Stephen Moore’s/ALEC Economic Outlook rankings.
How the Manufacturing and Agriculture Credit Saved Wisconsin Manufacturing
Or not.
Figure 1: Manufacturing employment in US (blue), and Wisconsin (red), in logs normalized to 0 in September 2018. Light orange shading denotes Walker administration. Source: BLS, DWD, author’s calculations.
The Wisconsin Manufacturing and Agriculture Credit was fully phased in as of January 2016.
Guest Contribution: “Yet Another Look at the Recent Inversion of the Yield Curve”
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Kim Kowalewski, formerly Senior Adviser in the Macroeconomic Analysis Division of the Congressional Budget Office.
“New Foreign Direct Investment in the United States”
Some people think that foreign direct investment into the United States has surged as confidence in the American economy has risen under Mr. Trump’s administration. The data do not support such a supposition. From BEA:
Making America Great Again (in Indebtedness): Net International Investment Position
NIIP is the difference between US holdings of assets abroad, minus foreign holdings of US assets. Shown below is the ratio of NIIP to GDP.
Business Cycle Indicators, Mid-November
With industrial production continuing its dive in October, we have a mixed picture of economic activity.
More on What Trump Could Have Meant
As I noted in yesterday’s post, in Mr. Trump’s speech at the Economic Club of New York Tuesday, he made a mysterious claim:
What Could Trump Have Possibly Meant?
From Mr. Trump’s speech at the Economic Club of New York yesterday:
…we’ve added nearly $10 trillion of new value to our economy. That’s in a short period of time. Remember, I only use numbers from the time of the election because I can’t go to January 20th. It’s not fair. We picked up tremendous stock market and economic numbers. They actually went wild the day after I won.
Neel Kashkari at Madison: “Kashkari says he takes comfort from yield curve shape”
Should he? FRB Minneapolis Fed President was at UW Madison today, and stated:
“The fact that the yield curve is now uninverted gives me some indication that we have taken the brakes off the economy,”