In Conversations with Economists (h/t Kevin Quinn at Econospeak), James Tobin refers to LBJ having made “a mistake” in “raising taxes to pay for the Viet Nam War.” Google Desktop can’t find the line of reasoning behind that in any of Tobin’s papers that have survived my migrating possibly-non-OCR PDFs over about six computers. Anyone […]

By Spencer In the industrial production report this morning February manufacturing output was reported to drop 0.8%. On the surface this looks bearish. But hours worked in manufacturing also fell 2.0% in February. Consequently, manufacturing productivity rose 1.2% in February. The smoothed three month growth rate of estimated productivity is 0.1% and the year over […]

Tilman Tacke & Robert J. Waldmann Do health outcomes not only depend on an individual’s absolute level of income, but also on their relative income position within a society? We use infant mortality as a heath status indicator and find a significant and positive link between infant mortality and income inequality using cross-national data for […]

rdan Baseline Scenario adds their thoughts to the trade policy debate: A fundamental principle that we all hold dear is: in industrialized countries, with relatively high income levels, the government can’t be completely out to lunch. After all, we reason, there are democratic processes, watchdogs of various kinds, and we can safely delegate monitoring of […]

by Bruce Webb 1997 II.F62007 II.D7Each year the Trustees of Social Security provide a graphic representation of the results of the three alternative projections: Low Cost, Intermediate Cost, and High Cost represented by results I, II, III respectively. And the overall shape of the graph didn’t vary much from 1997 to 2007 (other selected years […]

Robert Waldmann playing faux naif again (except it’s not faux). What is the point of bundling securities into a special purpose entity and issuing debt tranches with various levels of seniority and issuing (or keeping) an equity tranche which doesn’t promise a fixed payment ? This was a very profitable operation until recently. How could […]

I promise to try posting more this weekend, but this one is just too good to pass up. Since most people don’t know it beyond three to six digits, today, 14 March (14.03)—er, oops, March 14 (3.14)—has been officially designated “Pi Day.” Ten Republicans voted against the (purely symbolic) designation: Chaffetz Flake Heller Johnson (IL) […]

by Divorced one like Bush So you have been reading about the southern GOP’ers that are refusing parts of the stimulus money. Something about being true to their crede. Well, we here in RIland have a GOP governor who is doing one better. He want the money! The problem is in how he plans to […]

Robert Waldmann In this post below , I note that I find Brad DeLong’s analogy between the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble and the stimulus plan unconvincing. The post is poorly written, but the point is that in fresh water models rapid technological progress is very different from a demand shock, and, so, if one […]