I’ve just finished a new paper on Oil prices, exhaustible resources, and economic growth, which explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. Below I reproduce the paper’s summary of the history of oil production from individual U.S. regions.
The Real American Jobs Act: Dealing with the Threat from Farm Dust Regulation (Really!)
When I click on the link on the website for The Real American Jobs Act (officially, “Jobs Through Growth Act”), this is what I get:
Could monetary policy mitigate the real effects of oil shocks?
Michael Levi (hat tip:Marginal Revolution) and Jeremy Kahn are among those who recently rediscovered some earlier research by Ben Bernanke and others that concluded that the economic downturns that followed historical oil price shocks could have been avoided if the Fed had followed a more expansionary monetary policy at the time. Here I call attention to some subsequent research that took another look at their evidence and reached a different conclusion.
Wealth Inequality: A Time Series Plot
Dismissing the plots of income inequality in previous posts [0] (related posts [1] [2]), an Econbrowser reader asks:
“Do you concur that measures of the wealth distribution have been mostly quiescent since the 1970s and that the distribution of wealth is more even today than it was in the 1940s (the peak for the US modern era)?”
Well, I think that this is an interesting question, and so I went a-searching for data. This is what I found, which led to my answer of “no”.
Sargent and Sims
I’m a little late getting to this (by standards of cyberspace time anyway), but I wanted to comment on Monday’s announcement about the Nobel prize in economics.
Crowding Out Watch, Again
I thought my March post on crowding out would be my last for a while, but the latest data are startling enough so that I wanted to post this graph of ten year real interest rates. Just for all those people who were worrying about big jumps in rates with government borrowing.
The World Close to Stall Speed
Or at least OECD plus China *, on the basis of the OECD’s Composite Leading Indicators for August 2011:
On China: Global Impact, Domestic Costs, Hard Landing, and the RMB As an International Currency
A new book on China (and Asia) in the global economy, the costs of the Chinese currency regime, the prospects for a Chinese hard landing, and can China save the day if the US and euro area go into recession. Plus, the prospects for the RMB as a key international currency.
A new book — Asia and China in the World Economy, edited by Yin-Wong Cheung (UCSC and HK City U) and Guonan Ma (BIS).
Is another U.S. recession a ‘done deal’?
Today we’re pleased to feature a guest contribution from Michael Dueker, chief economist at Russell Investments and formerly an assistant vice president in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Dueker is also a member of the Blue Chip forecasting panel. Econbrowser readers may remember that in February 2008 Dueker correctly predicted the onset of the current recession, using a model-based forecast. In a depths-of-recession piece from December 2008, he predicted in this forum that the recession would last until July or August of 2009, but that employment growth would not resume until March of 2010. We asked Mike to share the latest macroeconomic predictions from the Dueker Business Cycle Index model, subject to the disclaimer that the content does not constitute investment advice or projections of the stock market or any specific investment.
IMF Book Forum: Lost Decades
A Book Forum on our book, Lost Decades will take place on October 14th, in Washington, DC.