1. From my (undergraduate) Economics 390 “Topics in Macro” midterm:
Consider this statement:
“Borrowing and spending by the public sector will crowd out investment and growth in the private sector.” Paul Ryan, “Path to Prosperity” (April 2012).
1.1 In a standard IS-LM model, where investment spending is given by:
(7’) I = b0 – b2i
Will higher government spending crowd out investment? Use a graph to help explain your answer.
Before 2008, U.S. monetary policy was primarily conducted in terms of a target set by the Federal Reserve for the fed funds rate, which is the interest rate a bank pays to borrow funds overnight from other banks. A large academic literature used the fed funds rate as a summary of monetary policy, looking at its correlations in dynamic regressions with other variables of macroeconomic interest. But the fed funds rate has been stuck near zero for the last 5 years, and will likely be replaced by an alternative policy focus even once we exit the zero lower bound. Economic researchers face not just the difficulty of summarizing what the Fed has been doing in the current and future environment, but also the practical challenge of how to update their historical regressions to try to describe the full set of historical data along with the new experience in a coherent way. Here I describe a new research paper that suggests one solution to these problems.
Yesterday the BEA finally reported GDP numbers for the third quarter, a month later than originally scheduled owing to the earlier shut-down of federal operations. The U.S. economy is estimated to have grown at an annual rate of 2.8%. That’s below the historical average, but better than the previous three quarters.
Raise the Minimum Wage!
In the wake of New Jersey’s raise in the minimum wage,[0] it seems like a good time to re-assess the case for a nationwide increase. Back in the February State of the Union message, President Obama proposed an increase to $9.00 by the end of 2015. Figure 1 places in historical context the proposal.
Still waiting for large, economy-wide job increases from the “shale revolution”
Found this in my inbox this week:
UC has changed the menu of the health care plans
that will be offered in 2014. Most notably, the three currently available PPO
plans (Anthem Blue Cross PPO, Anthem Plus, and Anthem Lumenos) are being
discontinued. They are replaced by Blue Shield Health Savings Plan and UC
Care.
From reader Hans, commenting on the advisability of the reductions in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) expenditures, effective today:
You ax nothing from the recipient and everything from the tax slave…
(Updated with thoughts on “The Food Stamp President”)
From CBPP (10/24):
The 2009 Recovery Act’s temporary boost in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits ends on November 1, 2013, which will mean a benefit cut for each of the nearly 48 million SNAP recipients — 87 percent of whom live in households with children, seniors, or people with disabilities.
Following up on the dollar’s status as an international currency (and how threats of default are not helpful), here is what we know about the dollar’s role as a reserve currency.