Category Archives: Teaching macroeconomics

Notes on Goolsbee and Lazear Interviewer:  What problems need solving through tax reform Lazear growth rate is way too low growth rate out of recession is low (both recoveries, historical standards) growth related to productivity and related to wages so … Continue reading →

Preliminary Details and Analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from The Tax Foundation Analysis of Final Tax Reform Legislation, Corporate Perspective Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance Good summary of provisions from Cooley LLP

Our whole conference has been about anomalies. Some of those anomalies are pretty fundamental. Why has G.D.P. growth been slow? Why has the labor force participation rate come down so much? Why haven’t we hit 2 percent inflation more quickly? … Continue reading →

Gaby Dorcil called, and who can resist his voice, to ask me to speak on the OPEC decision to limit production and effectuate an increase in oil prices.  Volontiers, of course, though I cringe when I hear my American-inflected French.  … Continue reading →

A student shared a recent oped by Alan Blinder at the WSJ. Andrew, Thanks for sharing! Something like this should be on the final, right? 😉  Actually, this is more about micro-level policies and supply side policies that we have … Continue reading →

The IMF’s 2010 quota and governance reforms have finally become effective and will give emerging markets like BRICS more power and greater say at the lender of last resort. “The conditions for implementing the International Monetary Fund’s 14th General Quota … Continue reading →

Fredrik Wulfsberg’s analysis of Norwegian data suggests it is because when inflation gets higher (i.e. 10-15% range) firms change prices much more frequently, and so presumably this is more confusing for consumers. The main result in this paper is that … Continue reading →

The TFP indexes reveal the dramatic contraction of labor in the farm sector. Agricultural land, a component of capital, also fell steadily, except for a brief cessation in the 1970s, and by 2004 amounted to less than three-quarters of its … Continue reading →

Based on more complete information about recent years, the government also revised last year’s growth rate up slightly to 2.6 percent — the best so far since the severe recession ended in 2009. But that’s still well below the gains … Continue reading →

The results show that during the period 1980–2012, with the exception of Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire productivity growth was not the hardcore of the growth observed in the ECOWAS countries but the growth was driven by factor accumulation. In addition, … Continue reading →

Nice graphic from WSJ.  The source and article worth reading is here.

A short note from the St. Louis Fed suggests that much of the decline is anticipated demographic change and inevitably reversal of the extremely high participation rates in the early 2000s (A Closer Look at the Decline in the Labor … Continue reading →

What the hedge funds can do that individual small investors cannot is constantly harass and nip the heels of Puerto Rico, thus possibly securing higher payment eventually.  Bloomberg summarizes the major suits against Puerto Rico that deal with debt repayment: … Continue reading →