Hilary W. Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Douglas Almond made a genuinely important contribution to the debate on the effects of social welfare programs in this NBER working paper/revised manuscript “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net” They took advantage of a natural experiment to estimate the long run effects of access to […]

This quote is right up there with the great Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Matthew Yglesias opens his recent post with it. I don’t know if he coined it, but if so, A Huge Kudos. It’s utterly and painfully true. A deservedly iconic statement. Here’s what […]

I put together a video on the natural real interest rate. There is not one single natural real rate. It is like what Steve Waldman said… “The word natural is always used to hide the constructed context in which an outcome occurs…” The natural real interest rate goes lower, as policy tries to push real […]

Today’s must-read Seattle Times article by Carol M. Ostrom and Amy Snow Landa (interactive graphic here and comparison table here) prompts me to write about a huge problem with American health insurance that I’ve been banging against quite personally in recent months. Excerpts below give an idea what an important article this is. My thoughts: Insurers are actively eliminating must-have hospitals from their networks, […]

by Mike Kimel Previewing Blinder and Watson (2015) Via James Hamilton at Econbrowser, I read about this paper by Blinder and Watson. From their abstract: The U.S. economy has performed better when the President of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including […]

First “two Keynesian” is a phrase which only I use. It means a new Keynesian model with two periods the present and next period and forever after when the economy is in steady state. I recently noticed that Krugman’s models, which are much simpler than models I can think up and which have clarified my […]

Mike Sankowski has been banging his spoon on the high chair about this forever. And rightly so. Repeat after Mike. And keep repeating it to anyone who will listen. The “higher-corporate-profits = jobs” meme is perhaps the most pernicious falsehood in political economics. How Business Owners Think For almost ten years I was co-founder and […]

Larry Summers’ recent speech (and Paul Krugman’s paean to it) have brought the issue of secular, decades-long stagnation to the front of the econoblogosphere agenda. Tyler Cowen, of course, made it prominent some time ago. But he posited a tech cause: we’ve picked the low-hanging innovation fruit. Summers, Krugman, et. al. suggest that policies and […]

I really shouldn’t comment on Simon Wren_lewis’s defence of rational expectations until I have calmed down, but I can’t help muself. I will try to stick to FRED, that is data. Wren-Lewis argues that it is reasonable for macroeconomists to assume rational expectations since the practical alternatives are rational expectations or naive expectations. However most […]

What the —! Well it occured to me, and not for the first time, that a lot of people really don’t understand my Social Security project and particularly what even some of my friends and allies think is a narrow focus on the nuts, bolts and numbers of Social Security financial reporting. It seems to […]