People who know more than I do are discussing the rational expectations revolution and the division of macroeconomics into hostile fresh-water and salt-water schools of thought. I am very favorably impressed by this post by Simon Wren-Lewis which you should probably just read. ).

by New Deal democrat The implications of the child care cost crush for median household income and “shadow unemployment” The other day I showed that there is compelling evidence that the primary reason for the long term decline in the Labor Force Participation Rate in the 25 – 54 age range is the increasing real […]

The recent stock market fall appears to be in reaction to weakness in foreign economies, not domestic developments in the US.     One measure to watch is world trade. from December to May world trade volume fell -3.4%. Interestingly, in the first five months of the 1971 decline trade fell -3.5%, essentially the same […]

Last week I made a presentation to the Colorado Assessors Association on tax increment financing (TIF) subsidies. With the organization’s permission, I am sharing the PowerPoint presentation for my talk, as well as adding this introduction. The talk begins by putting TIF in the context of subsidies generally. As a subsidy, TIF is subject to […]

by New Deal democrat Do rising child care costs & stagnant wages explain the decline in the Labor Force Participation Rate ? What is driving the long term decline, shown in the graph below, in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) among prime working age adults, ages 25-54? A couple of weeks ago I wrote […]

by Joseph Joyce Greece’s Missing Drivers of Growth Analyses and discussions of Greece’s economic situation usually begin—and often end—with its fiscal policy. The policies mandated by the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have undoubtedly resulted in a severe contraction that will continue for at least this […]

Monthly Budget Review for July 2015 Bolding mine: The federal government’s budget deficit amounted to $463 billion for the first 10 months of fiscal year 2015, CBO estimates. That deficit was $2 billion larger than the one recorded during the same period last year. If not for shifts in the timing of certain payments (which […]

This is important. Amazingly, socialist Sweden attempted radical partial privatization of its schools with about one fourth of students now attending publicly financed privately managed schools (roughly charter schools). This daring reform was followed by a dramatic decline in scores on the PISA international standardized test including the largest decline in math scores of all […]

I will try again to answer Larry Summers’s question “”What wouldn’t be a Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium model?” I won’t present a formal macroeconomic model in a blog but will try to describe what I might do if I got down to work. I think the first step back to not DSGE starts with the simplest standard […]

In Which I Try to Answer a Question asked by Larry Summers as a Joke The LSE held a discussion on Reconstructing Macroeconomics. Brad DeLong posted a transcript , the video is here. Larry Summers opened with a joke Larry Summers: You know I was tempted to blast off at Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium models. That is, […]