NBER WP by Wang, Wei, Yu, and Zhu:
Continue readingRecession Indicators Reported as of 1/19/2019
I focus on the series highlighted by the NBER’s business cycle dating committee (BCDC).
Continue readingUS Recession Probability – Term Spread+EPU Model
Laurent Ferrara asks what’s the probability of a US recession in 12 months if one augments an utterly standard 10yr-3mo term structure model with US economic policy uncertainty (EPU) as measured by Baker, Bloom and Davis…
Continue readingIs California in Recession? (Part XIII)
December employment figures are out. Time to re-evaluate this assessment from a year ago in Political Calculations that California was in recession.
Continue readingGoing by these [household survey based labor market] measures, it would appear that recession has arrived in California, which is partially borne out by state level GDP data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. [text as accessed on 12/27/2017]
Today’s Event Study Example
Seldom do we see such market moving data.
Continue readingIf You Pay Inordinate Attention to the State Level Unemployment Series
You should start looking at the state level household employment series; (the unemployment rate is calculated using this variable). Here is Wisconsin’s, as of today’s release.
Continue readingPredictIt on Whether the Federal Government Will Be Closed on 1/18 (or later…)
Policy Uncertainty and the Term Spread over the Government Closure
Elevated on the first, up then down on the second.
Continue reading“Agent Orange: Trump, Soft Power, and Exports”
That’s the title of a new paper by Andy Rose:
A country’s exports rise when its leadership is approved by other countries. I show this using a standard gravity model of bilateral exports, a panel of data from 2006 through 2017, and an annual Gallup survey which asks people in up to 157 countries whether they approve of the job performance of the leadership of China, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Holding other things constant, a country’s exports are higher if its leadership is approved by the importer; ‘soft power’ promotes exports. The soft power effect is statistically and economically significant; a one percent increase in leadership approval raises exports by around two-thirds of a percent. This effect is reasonably robust, and different measures of soft power deliver similar results. I conservatively estimate that the >20 percentage point decline in foreign approval of American leadership between 2016 (the final year of Obama’s presidency) and 2017 (Trump’s first year) lowered American exports by at least $3 billion.
Ungated version here.
Adding Insult to Injury
Mr. Trump considers redirecting funds committed to rebuilding Puerto Rico toward the building of the Wall. From WaPo:
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