Or, counterfactuals, yet again.
Or, rejoinder to Casey Mulligan, Joseph Lawler, david, tim kemper and others.
From the WSJ March survey survey of forecasters, the results indicate that instead of the 0.15% growth rate recorded in 09Q4 y/y growth, the growth rate would have been -0.93%. For 2010Q4 Q4/Q4 growth, they forecast 3% growth, and in the absence of the ARRA, they would have predicted 2.2% growth.
If you’re both a very faithful and a very passive Econbrowser reader, for two years now you’ve sat on the sidelines while you watched other, equally faithful but less passive readers participate in the world-famous Econbrowser NCAA Tournament Challenge, in which brave souls pretend they can predict a significant number of the winners of the games of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. If so, here’s your third chance to sit on the sidelines again, or maybe even to participate this time.
University of Leeds Professor Joyce Dargay and New York University Professor Dermot Gately have a new research paper suggesting that projections from the DOE, IEA, and OPEC are underestimating the challenges ahead for meeting world oil demand.
And a quantitative comparison to previous reconciliation measures.
The CBO and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have updated cost estimates for H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as it was passed by the Senate on December 24, 2009. The figures are here. I’ve incorporated the new estimates into the bar chart first reported in this March 1st post.
From a Dallas Fed Letter by Jian Wang:
Durable goods represent a moderate share of the economy in most industrial countries — in the U.S., for example, they accounted for 23.6 percent of real GDP in 2008. However, durable goods make up a large share of international trade. In the U.S., they accounted for more than 60 percent of trade in goods (excluding energy products) in 2008. The figure is 70 percent on average for the OECD countries, according to several studies.
Political pressure seems to be mounting for yuan appreciation. [0] Figure 1 depicts the stability in the USD/CNY nominal exchange rate over the past year.
On Friday I joined fellow blogger Mark Thoma (and a good many other economists) at a very interesting conference on financial markets held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Here I share some ideas I expressed at the conference about the directions I feel this research ought to go.
Russ Roberts writes:
Menzie Chinn invokes the CBO “estimates” to argue against those who say the stimulus didn’t work. Did the stimulus help turn the economy around and create jobs? I’m skeptical on logical grounds but I confess that I do not have strong empirical evidence on my side.
But those who defend the stimulus have no empirical support either…
The Financial Report of the United States Government, 2009 was released last week. Perusing the tables, one encounters the gigantic new, unfunded entitlement enacted in 2003, namely Medicare Part D.
What do current financial indicators tell us about where the economy is headed?