This title was written by Noah Smith in a recent Bloomberg column. He makes a lot good points which readers of this blog, focused on manufacturing, are already familiar. Manufacturing output isn't really booming. I would stress that, despite that trade is a big reason for why manufacturing isn't so...
Raise Rates to Raise Inflation
That's what Stephen Williamson is still arguing."recent data is consistent with the view that persistently low nominal interest rates do not increase inflation - this just makes inflation low. If a central bank is persistently undershooting its inflation target, the solution - the neo-Fisherian...
Is Academia Biased Against Stars?
David Card and Stefano DellaVigna recently came out with a working paper which says yes.The (abbreviated) abstract:We study editorial decision-making using anonymized submission data for four leadingeconomics journals......
Corporations in the Age of Inequality: A Skeptic's Take
Nick Bloom contributes an article to the Harvard Business Review: "Corporations in the Age of Inequality". It's also an interesting read, based on his "Firming Up Inequality" paper, which I also recommend. The story of inequality they tell is also one which is essentially technology based (IT and outsourcing),...
The Saga of Currency Unions and Trade
One of the first full papers I wrote was on currency unions and trade. I was taking Alan Taylor's field course at UC Davis, which was essentially and Open-Economy Macro History course, and the famous Glick/Rose findings that currency unions double trade was on the syllabus. Not to be outdone, Robert...
Robots and Inequality: A Skeptic's Take
Paul Krugman presents "Robot Geometry" based on Ryan Avent's "Productivity Paradox". It's more-or-less the skill-biased technological change hypothesis, repackaged. Technology makes workers more productive, which reduces...
The Myth and Reality of Manufacturing in America
That's the title of a small pamphlet on manufacturing by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devaraj which argues that "Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth..."However, the accounting exercise they conduct to get that number contains a...
Fear Not - The Chain Will Split But BTC is still the longest chain.
Update 28/7/2017Looks like we will have a split. I am on the Satoshi chain that is the chain without Segwit.As we are very close on the inevitable activation and mining of the first Bitcoin Unlimited block there is great fear and trepidation among the community that the event will result in a chain...
There is a huge hole in Trump's promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs
That's the title of an article from Business Insider.There is much I like about these articles. This one is better than most, as it at least plots data. However, I don't quite understand why they focus on robots and productivity gains, rather than the slowdown in the growth of real manufacturing output....
Links to Two Short Essays on Monetary Policy, One Good, One Bad
First, new FOMC member Neil Kashkari tells us why he dissented on this week's interest rate hike. It's a great essay. I laughed at "over the past five years, 100 percent of the medium-term inflation forecasts (midpoints) in the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections have been too high: We...
A Quick Argument Why Not to Raise Interest Rates
I teach today, so this will be quick. Why am I opposed to raising interest rates?First, I should mention this is a debate which we've had before. When the Fed decided to leave it's balance sheet unchanged for all of 2009...
A Policy Proposal for US Manufacturing, and the Economy: Don't Raise the Federal Funds Rate
Doug Irwin shared a nice article in the WSJ which makes a nice point that trade deficits, by themselves, don't imply that trade is unfair. It's a good article. Here is one part: The Trump team is correct in believing that sometimes trade imbalances reflect government tampering, though in the...
The Peso has recovered. Good news for the future of NAFTA...
With the US dollar already a bit overvalued, and the US stock market also looking richly valued by historical measures, I need something to invest in each month. Thus, I decided to have a look at LT government bonds in Mexico,...
The Real Exchange Rate and China's Savings
I attended the Forum for Research in Empirical International Trade (FREIT) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia this past week. Marc Muendler and I were debating the source of China's excess savings, over and above its high level of investment. China's high savings rate could have multiple causes (e.g., lack of...
Robots on an Assembly Line...
Mercedes A Class Production LineYou'll notice, not a lot of human workers. When you see this, you might think -- "Aha! It's not foreigners who have taken our jobs, but robots." However, increases in productivity are not a new development for US manufacturing. In fact, labor productivity growth has been...
Boligspekulantene er nyttige
Finansdepartementets svar på galopperende boligpriser er å sette hindringer i veien for nye boligprosjekter. Boligprisene stiger fordi det bygges for få boliger. Dette er finansdepartementet forståelig nok bekymret for....
On Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science
Stephen Hsu has a nice blog post on this topic. He writes about this common pattern:1. Study reports results which reinforce the dominant, politically correct, narrative.2. Study is widely cited in other academic work, lionized in the popular press, and used to advance real world agendas.3. Study fails...
How to read and write csv using jackson library
The sample code below demonstrates how we can read a csv file into an array of objects. Also it writes an array of objects into csv.To use don't forget to include in your pom.xml <dependency> <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat</groupId> <artifactId>jackson-dataformat-csv</artifactId>...
WSJ Article on Trump's Fed Vacancies
Given the importance of monetary policy, I've been waiting for signs about who Trump will appoint to the Fed. The media gave Obama's Fed picks very little attention. In Geithner's bio, which was largely about Obama administration economic policy, he didn't even mention Obama's Fed choices. He didn't...
Yes, Monetary Policy Works in a Liquidity Trap, and Fiscal Stimulus Stimulates
Here's a nice short article in VoxEU by Benoit Mojon showing the decoupling of US and Euro interest rates after the Taper Tantrum, and the increase in US interest rates after the US election of Donald Trump raised likelihood...
Ranking of Economists, by # of Twitter Followers
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.twitter.html1.Krugman, Paul R.26372032.Stiglitz, Joseph E.1770983.Wolfers, Justin1243124.Brynjolfsson, Erik1233075.Easterly, William944466.Shiller, Robert J.918797.Summers, Lawrence H.852708.Gaviria, Alejandro842299.Bernanke, Ben S.8239710.Ricciardi, Victor7848611.Basu,...
