Tag: roundup

Must-reads: January 4, 2016

Posted on January 4, 2016January 5, 2016 by Brad DeLong

• Stan Fischer: Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Zero Lower Bound I: “Are We Moving Toward a World With a Permanently Lower Long-Run Equilibrium Real Interest Rate?…” :: Very disappointing to me that both nominal GDP targeting and price path level targeting appear to be completely off of Stan Fischer’s radar
• Thomas Piketty: Capital, Predistribution and Redistribution
• Matthew Yglesias: 2015: The Year Congress Started Working Again

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• Tim Duy: A Look Ahead Into 2016
• Kaushik Basu: The World Economy’s Labor Pains
• Joel Mokyr (2010): The Contribution of Economic History to the Study of Innovation and Technical Change, in Bronwyn Hall and Nate Rosenberg (2010), The Handbook of the Economics of Innovation (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 11-50.

Must-reads: January 2, 2016

Posted on January 2, 2016January 3, 2016 by Brad DeLong

• Olivier Blanchard et al.: Macro Effects of Capital Inflows: Capital Type Matters
• Leigh Gallagher: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man’s Fight to Fix the American Dream
• George Evans and Bruce McGough: The Neo-Fisherian View and the Macro Learning Approach
• David Deming: The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market

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• Mark Thoma: Economist’s View: On Pareto Optimality
• Rich Yeselson: Why the 2010s Are Reminiscent of the 1920s
• Felix Salmon: “This is wrong. Medallion prices are the equity cushion which protect cab-driver incomes.”

Must-reads: December 30, 2015

Posted on December 30, 2015January 1, 2016 by Brad DeLong

• Mark Thoma: On Summers: My Views and the Fed’s Views on Secular Stagnation: “The Fed’s job would have been, and will be a lot easier if fiscal policy makers would help. I disagree with Charles Plosser’s view on monetary policy, but I have some sympathy for the view that many people have come to expect too much from monetary policy…”
• Noah Smith: Don’t Blame “Uncertainty” for the Slow Recovery
• William Nordhaus (2004): Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement
• Roger E.A. Farmer: Global Sunspots and Asset Prices in a Monetary Economy
• Roger Fouquet and Stephen Broadberry: Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline: “Rather than being stagnant, pre-nineteenth century European economies experienced a great deal of change…” :: How rapidly would one anticipate that the Malthusian scissors would work, anyway?

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• Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen: For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions

Must-reads: December 28, 2015

Posted on December 28, 2015December 28, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore: The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History: “While liberals of the 70s and 80s waited for a return to… the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of… the ‘interregnum between Gilded Ages’…” :: From “The Defining Moment” to “The Long Exception”…
• Bloomberg View: Congress Should Care About the IMF
• Matthew Yglesias: Seattle Shows San Francisco and New York How to Fix the Housing Crisis: “A high level of construction ensures that the homeland of Microsoft and Amazon remains substantially cheaper than the Bay Area homeland of Apple and Google.”

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• Barry Ritholtz: Bah humbug to ridiculous year-end financial advice
• Richard Mayhew: The morality of waiting for a pony
• Peter Singer: Federally Supported Innovations: 22 Examples of Major Technological Advances that Stem from Federal Research Support

Must-reads: December 23, 2015

Posted on December 23, 2015December 23, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Ria Misra: You Can Barely Even See Yosemite’s Largest Glacier Anymore
• Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz: The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care: “These [Medicare and private insurance cost] maps look nothing alike…” :: What risks does the departure of David Leonhardt from The Upshot create for it?
• Jonathan Chait: Sorry, Conservatives, Obamacare Is Still Working: “Ross Douthat’s Sunday column, as it so often does, offers the least unreasonable iteration of the deranged state of conservative thinking…” :: Ross Douthat not understand that the “Cadillac Tax” is an essential part of every single Republican ObamaCare replacement plan?

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• Patrick Flavin: State Medicaid Expansion and Citizens’ Quality of Life
• Paul Krugman (1992): The Rich, the Right, and the Facts: Deconstructing the Inequality Debate
• Paul Krugman and Olivier Blanchard: Saving the World Economy
• Larry Summers: Low Real Rates, Secular Stagnation, and the Future of Stabilization Policy
• Dylan Matthews: Study: Food stamps do much more to fight poverty than we thought
• John Quiggin: Piketty and the Australian Exception
• Paul Krugman: Finn de Siecle

Must-reads: December 22, 2015

Posted on December 22, 2015December 23, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Jeffrey Sparshott: Where the Jobless Rate Is 2.3%, Here’s What Happened to Wages
• Danny Yagan: Capital Tax Reform and the Real Economy: The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut
• Paul Krugman (2014): The Limits of Purely Monetary Policies
• Paul Krugman (2014): The Simple Analytics of Monetary Impotence

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• Walter Frick: Understanding the Debate Over Inequality, Skills, and the Rise of the 1%
• Sumana Harihareswara: The Uses Of History in Hamilton: An American Musical
• Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Narayana Kocherlakota

Must-reads: December 21, 2015

Posted on December 21, 2015December 23, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Simon Wren-Lewis: The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism and Austerity: “Central banks therefore played a crucial role in the failure of the K[nowledge ]T[ransmission ]M[echanism in 2010.” :: A good wrestle with a very tough intellectual problem by the truly excellent Simon Wren-Lewis
• William McChesney Martin (1958): Discussion: “That would indeed be a great feather in its cap and ultimately its success would be great…” :: And if the Federal Reserve System were to adopt bad policies in the hope of preserving its political independence, its political independence is already lost…
• Joshua M Brown: The Woes of the Asset Managers: “Goldman is going slash-and-burn for factor investing market share with a pricing structure that rivals what State Street, Schwab, Vanguard and BlackRock are charging for plain vanilla index exposure…” :: Passive diversified portfolios with an eye toward overweighting factors that have historically offered high returns is what nearly all investors *should be doing.*
• Dean Baker: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: “[My] argument on rents is important because… it means that there is nothing intrinsic to capitalism that led to this rapid rise in inequality…” :: I think Piketty would say that Baker is wrong here…

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• Andrew Gelman: A Replication in Economics: Does “Genetic Distance” to the US Predict Development?
• Inequality Media

Must-reads: December 18, 2015

Posted on December 18, 2015December 23, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Sutirtha Bagchi and Jan Svejnar: Does wealth inequality matter for growth?: “The relationship between politically connected wealth inequality and economic growth is negative, while politically unconnected wealth inequality… [has] no significant relationship.”
• Josh Barro: Sorry, but Your Favorite Company Can’t Be Your Friend: “Companies try to blur the lines, insinuating themselves into your friend zone…” :: It’s not companies that are trying to blur the lines, so much as pro-market ideologues (and I mean that of the extremely-smart Josh Barro in the *nicest possible way) trying to draw lines that cannot be sharply drawn…*
• Henry Farrell: Piketty, in Three Parts: “Piketty[‘s]… data… confound[s]… previous… wisdom that we didn’t need to worry about inequality. This makes a vast and important social phenomenon… visible, salient and socially undeniable…” :: the best precis of Piketty as both sociological phenomenon and political actor I have yet seen…
• Paul Krugman (1999): Thinking About the Liquidity Trap: “fiscal stimulus… [is only] a way of buying time… [absent] assumptions that are at the very least rather speculative…” :: How very closely Krugman’s fiscal-policy analysis then tracks Rogoff’s analysis today…

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• Josh Marshall: Introducing the Unicornstitution
• Miles Kimball: Does the Fed Really Want 2% Inflation?

Must-reads: December 17, 2015

Posted on December 17, 2015December 23, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Robert P. Brenner (2001): The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism: “The medieval and early modern Northern and Southern Netherlands… [were] the most highly urbanized and commercialized regions in Europe…”
• Duncan Weldon: Are the Robots Taking Enough Jobs?: “[Without] big increases in… labour-saving technology… slower growth and… greater share[s] of… incomes… to support the retired…” :: I find myself, more and more, wanting substantive integrated studies of…productivity…
• Rachel Lukasz and Thomas D Smith: Secular Drivers of the Global Real Interest Rate: “Slowing global growth… demographic forces, higher inequality and to a lesser extent the glut of precautionary saving… falling relative price of capital, lower public investment, and… an increase in the spread between risk-free and actual interest rates…” :: What the weights should be on these five possible cures… is not clear to me.

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• Carola Binder: Rewriting the Rules of the Federal Reserve for Broad and Stable Growth
• Tim Duy: As Expected

Pre-Federal Reserve Liftoff Lollapalooza Must-Reads: December 15, 2015

Posted on December 15, 2015December 15, 2015 by Brad DeLong

• Peter Newcomb (2013): Fed Hawks Worry about Threat of Inflation: “Two top Federal Reserve policymakers expressed discomfort on Thursday with the U.S. central bank’s easy monetary policy…”
• Jeff Spross: Don’t do it, Fed! It’s a trap!: “The first thing is for voters, activists, and politicians to treat monetary policy with the seriousness it deserves…” :: How much of the current diversion between the views of Yellen and Summers is due to the drip-drip-drip of banking-sector opinions?
• Matthew Yglesias: This week, the US government will take action to slow the economy and prevent wage growth: “for an African-American population that will enjoy a double-scale version of any drop in the unemployment rate, the stakes remain quite high. The same is true of other kinds of vulnerable populations…”
• Neil Irwin: Yellen Blinks on Interest Rates: “The cost of waiting… to ensure that the economy continues to perform the way… models predict… [is] low…” As Stanley Fischer did not say, if the Fed raises interest rates when the odds are still only 60-40 that it should, it is not probably but definitely raising them too early
• Tim Duy: Makes You Wonder What The Fed Is Thinking: “And so into the darkness we go.” :: The extremely-thoughtful Tim Duy is… genuinely frightened…
• Jared Bernstein: Will Inflation Really Snap Back Once “Temporary Factors” Abate?: “I noted the Fed’s theory of the case as to why inflation isn’t accelerating…” :: With model uncertainty, a rational optimizing policymaker would keep interest rates at zero for considerably longer…
• Jon Faust: Liftoff? And then…: “The Fed’s policy projections going into the December FOMC last year showed a year-end 2015 median federal funds rate of about 1.5%…” :: I find this from Jon Faust inadequate, mostly because if its failure to make even a bow in the direction of asymmetric risks…
• Harriett Torry and Jon Hilsenrath: Lesson for Fed: Higher Interest Rates Haven’t Been Sticking: “The Bank of Israel, under Stanley Fischer, who is now the Fed’s vice chairman, was among the first to move…” :: Much better to wait until you are sure that you will not have to return to zero in short order…
• Robin Wigglesworth: How the US Federal Reserve Intends to Raise Rates: “Buckle up. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006…” :: how will it use its tools?… It has taken off the private market will be very interesting to watch.
• Financial Times: The Federal Reserve May Be Jumping the Gun: “Just because it seems inevitable does not mean it is a good idea…” :: The only wrong thing I see is the statement that “it would probably be more disruptive if the Fed sat on its hands”…

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• Martin Wolf: The Paris climate change summit is one small step for humankind