One of the exciting implications for economists of the digitization of everything is the ability to study economic relations and behavior at a level of detail far beyond anything that could have been attempted a decade ago. I’ve earlier called attention here to new measures of inflation obtained from millions of prices posted on the web, new insights into pricing behavior coming from scanner data on individual store transactions, and understanding of consumer behavior based on debit and credit transactions of 25 million Americans. Here I discuss another new study based on smart-phone apps.
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Guest Contribution: “Economists Sign Letter Opposing Trump”
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.
Wisconsin Growth Prospects
At least Kansas makes Wisconsin look good.
Guest Contribution: “Battling Unemployment: A Clear Win for the ‘Cycs'”
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Zidong An (American University) and Prakash Loungani (IMF).
The Trilemma, Nuanced
I’ve just finished up the Mundell-Fleming model in my int’l finance course, and ended the section with a discussion of the “International Trilemma”, also known as “the Impossible Trinity”, which states that a given country can at any given time fully achieve only two out of three objectives of exchange rate stability, monetary autonomy, and financial integration (full capital mobility) at a time.
With a Program of Sufficiently Regressive Tax and Spending Cuts, America Can Be Like Kansas
Figure 1: Log coincident index for Missouri (blue), Kansas (red), and US (black), all 2011M01=0. March 2017 observation implied from leading indices. Source: Philadelphia Fed and author’s calculations.
Update: More on Governor Brownback’s information program, here.
“The Election: Implications for Policy Change?”
That’s the title of an informal panel at the UW La Follette School of Public Affairs on Tuesday. Here are the slides that underpin my presentation.
For now, let the following figure summarize the choices.
Source: “Trump vs Clinton: Polarization & uncertainty,” Research Briefing (Oxford Economics, 19 Sept. 2016) [not online].
The other panelists are Pam Herd, Greg Nemet, Rourke O’Brien, and Tim Smeeding.
Q3 GDP
The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced yesterday that U.S. real GDP grew at a 2.9% annual rate in the second quarter. That’s below the historical average U.S. growth rate of 3.1% per year. Even so, this was the best report in the last two years.
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Guest Contribution: “The Fed and Inequality”
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. A shorter version appeared on October 25th in Project Syndicate.
Recession Watch, October 2016
The 2016Q3 GDP advance figures were released today, indicating a 2.9% growth rate (SAAR), exceeding consensus (Bloomberg 2.5%). Tomorrow, Jim will report on the recession probabilities based upon the advance release (see last quarter’s analysis here). Until then, given all the discussion of recession (e.g. [0], [1]), it seems useful to show a few pictures of where we stand today, and the outlook going forward, given some standard and non-standard indicators.