Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

NBER generally gets it right

Brad DeLong suggested a bit before the U.S. election that there was virtually no non-political reason for NBER not to admit the United States was in a recession.* A little late, but they generally got it right. As Floyd Norris notes: The National Bureau of Economic Research said today that the current recession began a […]

Not Just Developing Countries

The most interesting presentation I saw at the AEA last January was Maccini and Yang’s discussion of the effect of rainfall on the health and growth of Indonesian babies.* It was subsequently discussed as an NBER working paper** by Jason Shafrin, and the thing that made it most interesting is that Maccini and Yang found […]