At the recent NBER ISOM conference, Andy Rose presented a paper entitled Flexing Your Muscles: Effects of Abandoning Fixed Exchange Rates for Greater Flexibility, coauthored with Barry Eichengreen, following up on this 2010 paper, evaluating the effects of flexing (VoxEU post here).
For purposes of this short paper we examine a
comprehensive data set covering over 200 countries and territories since 1957. …
Higher oil prices slowed the economy in the first half of this year. But I don’t expect things to get a whole lot worse.
This week I attended a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on quantitative easing. The purpose of the conference, as explained by Bank President James Bullard in his opening remarks, was to answer Stanford Professor John Taylor’s challenge to provide research of real-time usefulness to policy makers. The conference featured analyses by 5 different research teams of the effects of recent quantitative easing measures adopted in the United States and United Kingdom.
Or, a weblog post for the benefit of those unable to read beyond a technical paper’s abstract, a clarification of what exactly Romer and Romer (2010) found regarding the impact of tax increases on tax revenues. This note is inspired by Econbrowser reader Ricardo (who also goes under the monikers of RicardoZ, Dick, and DickF) who inaccurately (but with inexplicable confidence) characterizes the Romer and Romer findings regarding tax changes in my last post’s comments:
Some quick links to recent analyses of health care costs, oil price shocks, and forecasting commodity prices.
(With updates)
From WSJ Washington Wire:
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said the market impact of failing to raise the $14.29 trillion debt ceiling by Aug. 2 could become severe by late July.
With commodity prices exhibiting wide fluctations over the past few years, it’s no wonder that many are interested in determining what procedure best forecasts. A recent New York Fed blog post by Jan Groen and Paolo Pesenti tackles this issue. In a horse race between various economic, time series, and futures-based approaches…
there is no obvious winner. Information from large panels of global economic variables can help, but their forecasting properties are by no means overwhelming. It all depends on the choice of the specific index and the forecasting horizon. …
The International Energy Agency announced on Thursday that its 28 member countries had agreed to release 60 million barrels from their combined strategic stockpiles. The U.S. plans to contribute half of this total, all in the form of sweet crude. Thirty million barrels represents about 10% of the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve of 293 million barrels of sweet crude oil, and about 4% of the entire 727 million barrels stockpiled in the U.S. SPR.
From the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal yesterday (h/t TPM):
Gov. Scott Walker has called off plans to sign the 2011-’13 budget bill at a private Green Bay-area company run by an executive with eight felony convictions, a spokesman announced today.
Or more on China-U.S. exchange rate pass through
Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal illustrated the conflicted nature of American views regarding real yuan appreciation. The front page article by Hilsenrath, Burkitt and Holmes argued “Change in China Hits U.S. Purse”. On the back page of the C section was a countering article, “No appreciation for the rising yuan”, by Orlik, that noted the moderate impact on prices of imported goods from China.