Crowding Out Watch, Continued
The end of the semester has arrived, and as I prepared my last lecture, I checked to see how the government deficits had impacted yields. Real yields were pretty much as they were when the semester began in January.
Heritage Assesses the Ever-Expanding Ever-Centralizing Federal Government Sector
In a graphically interesting discussion of the April employment situation release, James Sherk and Salim Furth write:
R&D and benchmark revisions of GDP for Robinson Crusoe
Beginning with the third quarter of this year, the BEA plans to report the U.S. GDP and national income accounts on a new basis. One of the purposes of the change is to better reflect the importance of intellectual capital and technological innovation in the modern economy. These changes are expected to cause the reported value of GDP to be about 3% higher than when calculated under the present system. I have been thinking about how I would explain these changes to an undergraduate economics class, and this is what I came up with.
Trend and Nonlinear Cyclical Employment Dynamics
How much of the US employment shortfall is due to trend factors?
Links for 2013-05-01
Quick links to a few items I found of interest:
- The Congressional Budget Office has prepared informative slides summarizing the U.S. fiscal situation (via Business Insider)
- Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers referee the Reinhart-Rogoff debate (via Free Exchange)
- Herndon, Ash, and Pollin appear to have been using faulty data for New Zealand
- Bill McBride reviews the U.S. decline in vehicle miles driven
- China’s oil imports are down relative to this point last year (via Steven Kopits)
Unconventional Monetary Policy Effects on the Exchange Rate at the ZLB
The descent of interest rates to near zero in the advanced economies has prompted something of a rethink of how monetary policy can affect exchange rates.
A Message from the 2013Q1 Advance Release
The contributions of Reinhart and Rogoff
With all the heated discussions of the last two weeks, it is important to keep perspective on which issues are in dispute and which are not. Let me state plainly something on which I think we ought to be agreed: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is a valuable work of scholarship that continues to deserve study and praise from any thinking person. Here I review some of my reasons for saying that.
Another mediocre GDP report: is this the new normal?
The BEA released today its estimate of 2013 first-quarter real GDP, which grew at a 2.5% annual rate from the previous quarter. That’s below the average 3.1% growth rate since World War II, but better than the 2.1% average since the recovery began in 2009:Q3.