Yesterday I compared real private GDP in cycles. Today I would like to look at  real business fixed investment. If you listened to CNBC — otherwise known as the Republican Propaganda Channel — or the campaign claims you would think that all the uncertainty created by Obama was destroying business confidence and that real business […]

One of my favorite paper presentations ever was by Daniel Parent, who is a good enough reason in himself for pending Labor Economists to apply to HEC. He was trying to present data on income inequalities in the Financial Services industry and was forced to note—all right, I asked—that they didn’t have the data to […]

I had an informal discussion with a manager in an MBS IT area last month. Just a general conversation about the field and the data people check.  He mentioned FICO scores and I noted that I’m not fond of using them to evaluate a mortgage, especially for first-time homebuyers. Part of this is simple: it’s […]

Robert Waldmann Robert Barro wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The substance of the op-ed is to report an estimate of the Fiscal multiplier 0.8 which is less than one. Thus, according to Barro, a stimulus will partially crowd out of investment, consumption or net exports and not just reduced leisure. Paul Krugman […]