Political Calculations makes some more ([1], [2]) elementary errors with chained quantities, to arrive at incorrect — and misleading — measures of real GDP excluding government consumption and investment.
Heckuva Job, Nigel!
UK PMI collapses. Term spread moves toward inversion.
Wisconsin Employment: Five and a Half Years of Governor Walker
Wisconsin nonfarm payroll (NFP) employment is 63.2 thousand below what historical correlations with national employment would imply.
“Central Banks at a Crossroads: What Can We Learn from History?”
That’s the title of a book commissioned by the Norges Bank on the bicentennial of the Bank’s founding, and edited by Michael D. Bordo, Øyvind Eitrheim, Marc Flandreau and Jan F. Qvigstad (published by Cambridge University Press). Here’s the table of contents:
Guest Contribution: “Brexit, Trump, and Workers Left Behind”
Today, we are pleased to present a guest column 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. This is an extended version of a column appearing at Project Syndicate, July 13.
Helicopter money
Despite aggressive actions by central banks, many of the world’s economies are still stagnating and facing new shocks, leading to renewed calls for helicopter money as a serious policy prescription for countries like Japan and the U.K.. And, if things go badly, maybe the United States?
Continue reading
On Kansas: Mendacity by Misdirection
Do shocks to agriculture and aircraft really explain Kansas’s dismal economic performance? If only one looked at Kansas GDP, would Kansas look just terrific?
Decomposing Changes in Term Spreads around the World
Guest Contribution: “Importer and Exporter Market Share in Exchange Rate Pass-Through”
Today we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Michael Devereux at the University of British Columbia and Wei Dong and Ben Tomlin at the Bank of Canada. The views expressed below are those of the authors and do not represent those of the Bank of Canada. This post is based on a revised version of this paper.
The Seattle Minimum Wage Increase: Disaster or Not?
Dark warnings were voiced in the wake of the passage of the minimum wage ordinance. “Seattle’s Minimum-Wage Hike Is Sure to End in Disaster”. “Seattle sees fallout from $15 minimum wage” In an early — and widely debunked — assessment, Mark J. Perry writes “New evidence suggests that Seattle’s ‘radical experiment’ might be a model for the rest of the nation not to follow”.