The Medium Run
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A Study of Paul A. Samuelson's Economics
Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. A Study of Paul A. Samuelson's Econol11ics: Making Economics Accessible to Students A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics at Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand. Leanne Marie Smith July 2000 Abstract Paul A. Samuelson is the founder of the modem introductory economics textbook. His textbook Economics has become a classic, and the yardstick of introductory economics textbooks. What is said to distinguish economics from the other social sciences is the development of a textbook tradition. The textbook presents the fundamental paradigms of the discipline, these gradually evolve over time as puzzles emerge, and solutions are found or suggested. The textbook is central to the dissemination of the principles of a discipline. Economics has, and does contribute to the education of students, and advances economic literacy and understanding in society. It provided a common economic language for students. Systematic analysis and research into introductory textbooks is relatively recent. The contribution that textbooks play in portraying a discipline and its evolution has been undervalued and under-researched. Specifically, applying bibliographical and textual analysis to textbook writing in economics, examining a single introductory economics textbook and its successive editions through time is new. When it is considered that an economics textbook is more than a disseminator of information, but a physical object with specific content, presented in a particular way, it changes the way a researcher looks at that textbook. -
Econ 753 Syllabus
Economics 753: Applied Econometrics – Fall 2017 Monday/Wednesday 9:05–10:30 am & Lab Monday 10:30-11:30 Gordon Hall 303-304 Michael Ash, [email protected] 306 Crotty, Office hours: Tue 10-11:30; Wed 10:30-12 Robert Pollin, [email protected] 313 Gordon, 577-0819, Office Hours: Tue 2-4 or by appt. http://courses.umass.edu/econ753 http://courses.umass.edu/econ753/econ753.pdf COURSE SYLLABUS “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”—Karl Marx The purpose of this course is to help you become comfortable and creative as empirical economic researchers. We will therefore introduce a series of econometric techniques and models by observing life in the trenches, i.e., working through how practitioners have approached econometric problems and built models as a vehicle for addressing substantive questions. We also put stress on communicating econometric results and descriptive statistics in ways that are illuminating, persuasive, and rigorous. But we will also ask the question: what does it mean to be rigorous with econometrics and with statistics in general? Indeed, early in the course, we will even address so basic a methodological question as that raised by John Maynard Keynes himself in the infancy of econometrics—whether the entire enterprise was worth pursuing. Finally, in the course of your studying and then doing real-world econometrics, we aim to get you to become comfortable, and perhaps even proficient, in least one major statistical software package and with manipulating data sets. -
Rolling the DICE: William Nordhaus's Dubious Case for a Carbon
SUBSCRIBE NOW AND RECEIVE CRISIS AND LEVIATHAN* FREE! “The Independent Review does not accept “The Independent Review is pronouncements of government officials nor the excellent.” conventional wisdom at face value.” —GARY BECKER, Noble Laureate —JOHN R. MACARTHUR, Publisher, Harper’s in Economic Sciences Subscribe to The Independent Review and receive a free book of your choice* such as the 25th Anniversary Edition of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Founding Editor Robert Higgs. This quarterly journal, guided by co-editors Christopher J. Coyne, and Michael C. Munger, and Robert M. Whaples offers leading-edge insights on today’s most critical issues in economics, healthcare, education, law, history, political science, philosophy, and sociology. Thought-provoking and educational, The Independent Review is blazing the way toward informed debate! Student? Educator? Journalist? Business or civic leader? Engaged citizen? This journal is for YOU! *Order today for more FREE book options Perfect for students or anyone on the go! The Independent Review is available on mobile devices or tablets: iOS devices, Amazon Kindle Fire, or Android through Magzter. INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE, 100 SWAN WAY, OAKLAND, CA 94621 • 800-927-8733 • [email protected] PROMO CODE IRA1703 Rolling the DICE William Nordhaus’s Dubious Case for a Carbon Tax F ROBERT P. M URPHY he 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underscores the public’s growing aware- T ness of and concern about anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Many climatologists and other relevant scientists claim that emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from human activity will lead to increases in the earth’s temperature, which in turn will spell potentially catastrophic hardship for future generations. -
Deep Crises and Reform: What Have We Learned? / Michael Bruno
DI RECTIONS I N DEVELOPM ENT Deep Crises Public Disclosure Authorized and Reformn What Have We Learned? MICHAEL BRUNO Public Disclosure Authorized N i1j'' i- W 0 1 Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized DIRECTIONS IN DEVELOPMENT Deep Crises and Reform What Have We Learned? Michael Bruno The World Bank Washington, D.C. © 1996 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ THE WORLD BANK 1818 H Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20433 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing September 1996 The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this study are entirely those of the author and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affil- iated organizations, or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent. Michael Bruno is senior vice president and chief economist, Development Economics. This booklet draws heavily on work done jointly with William Easterly. For useful dis- cussions and comments on an earlier draft the author is grateful to Masood Ahmed, Mark Baird, Mario Blejer, William Easterly, Carol Graham, Christine Jones, Yair Mundlak, Dani Rodrik, Deborah Wetzel, and Holger Wolf. The author is also indebted to Paulo Vieira da Cunha, who commented extensively on an earlier draft and helped with the editing of the final draft. Giuseppe larossi provided valuable research assis- tance. The booklet was edited by Paul Holtz and Bruce Ross-Larson and laid out by Christian Perez, all with American Writing Corporation. A slightly different version of the paper on which this booklet is based will be published in Daniel Cohen, ed., Trade, Payments, and Debt, Macmillan, forthcoming. -
Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods
Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods William D. Nordhaus Yale University1 May 5, 2005 A commemorative essay for Paul Samuelson ________________________________________________________ It is both easy and hard to write an essay commemorating Paul Samuelson’s contributions to economics. Easy, because he has created so much of modern economics that you could write on virtually anything – stabilization policy, economic growth, international trade, welfare economics, or just about any topic that caught your fancy. Hard, because, like Buridan’s ass, you could easily procrastinate forever in deciding which of the many treasures of his ideas to draw from. In the end, I chose to draw from Paul’s writings on public goods. In two and one-half pages, he reshaped the way economists and political philosophers think about the distinction between private goods and public goods.2 Once those concepts are learned, we can never again forget why the allocational questions for bread are fundamentally different from those of lighthouses. I will focus on an important example of this topic, and one that poses particularly thorny practical 1 The author is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. 2 Paul Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 4, Nov. 1954, pp. 387-389. - 1 - issues, which is the case of global public goods. A brief intellectual history of the concepts is appended. What great blessings or scourges have befallen humanity? Consider issues as disparate as greenhouse warming and ozone depletion, the Internet and William Shakespeare, terrorism and money laundering, the discovery of antibiotics and nuclear proliferation. -
Jeffrey D. Sachs CV
CURRICULUM VITAE JEFFREY D. SACHS Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University 475 Riverside Drive Interchurch Suite 1040 New York, NY 10115 Email: [email protected] Telephone: 212-870-2762 DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1954 MARITAL STATUS Married to Dr. Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, Pediatrician and Public Health Practitioner EDUCATION Ph.D., June 1980 Harvard Department of Economics, Cambridge, MA. Dissertation: "Factor Costs and Aggregate Supply in the Open Economy" Thesis Advisor, Martin Feldstein Junior Fellow, 1978-1980 Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, MA. M.A., Economics, June 1978 Harvard Department of Economics, Cambridge, MA. B.A., Economics, June 1976 Harvard College, Cambridge, MA., summa cum laude CURRENT POSITIONS University Professor, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. President, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, New York, N.Y. SDG Advocate under Secretary General António Guterres, United Nations Distinguished Fellow, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) 1 Co-Founder and Director, Millennium Promise Alliance Founder and Co-Chair, SDSN USA Founder, 1 Million CHWs Campaign Director, Millennium Villages Project Economic Advisor to governments in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA Member, Brookings Panel of Economists, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC Co-Chair, Asian Economic Panel of Economists Editorial Board Member, Journal of Government and Economics PREVIOUS POSITIONS Director, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2012-2019 Chair, SDSN USA Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, 2016-2018 Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, 2002-2016 Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University, 2002-2016 Special Advisor to U.N. -
The Role of Models and Probabilities in the Monetary Policy Process
1017-01 BPEA/Sims 12/30/02 14:48 Page 1 CHRISTOPHER A. SIMS Princeton University The Role of Models and Probabilities in the Monetary Policy Process This is a paper on the way data relate to decisionmaking in central banks. One component of the paper is based on a series of interviews with staff members and a few policy committee members of four central banks: the Swedish Riksbank, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of England, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. These interviews focused on the policy process and sought to determine how forecasts were made, how uncertainty was characterized and handled, and what role formal economic models played in the process at each central bank. In each of the four central banks, “subjective” forecasting, based on data analysis by sectoral “experts,” plays an important role. At the Federal Reserve, a seventeen-year record of model-based forecasts can be com- pared with a longer record of subjective forecasts, and a second compo- nent of this paper is an analysis of these records. Two of the central banks—the Riksbank and the Bank of England— have explicit inflation-targeting policies that require them to set quantita- tive targets for inflation and to publish, several times a year, their forecasts of inflation. A third component of the paper discusses the effects of such a policy regime on the policy process and on the role of models within it. The large models in use in central banks today grew out of a first generation of large models that were thought to be founded on the statisti- cal theory of simultaneous-equations models. -
Political Business Cycles 40 Years After Nordhaus Eric Dubois
Political Business Cycles 40 Years after Nordhaus Eric Dubois To cite this version: Eric Dubois. Political Business Cycles 40 Years after Nordhaus. Public Choice, Springer Verlag, 2016, 166 (1-2), pp.235-259. 10.1007/s11127-016-0313-z. hal-01291401 HAL Id: hal-01291401 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01291401 Submitted on 21 Mar 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Political Business Cycles 40 Years after Nordhaus Eric Dubois1 Abstract: The aim of this article is to survey the huge literature that has emerged in the last four decades following Nordhaus’s (1975) publication on political business cycles (PBCs). I first propose some developments in history of thought to examine the context in which this ground-breaking contribution saw the light of the day. I also present a simplified version of Nordhaus’s model to highlight his key results. I detail some early critiques of this model and the fields of investigations to which they gave birth. I then focus on the institutional context and examine its influence on political business cycles, the actual research agenda. Finally, I derive some paths for future research. -
Nber Working Paper Series the Idea of Antipoverty
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE IDEA OF ANTIPOVERTY POLICY Martin Ravallion Working Paper 19210 http://www.nber.org/papers/w19210 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 July 2013 For comments the author thanks Robert Allen, Tony Atkinson, Pranab Bardhan, Francois Bourguignon, Denis Cogneau, Sam Fleischacker, Pedro Gete, Karla Hoff, Ravi Kanbur, Charles Kenny, Sylvie Lambert, Peter Lindert, Will Martin, Alice Mesnard, Branko Milanovic, Johan Mistiaen, Thomas Pogge, Gilles Postel-Vinay, John Rust, Agnar Sandmo, Amartya Sen, Dominique van de Walle and participants at presentations at the World Bank, the Midwest International Economic Development Conference at the University of Wisconsin Madison, the Paris School of Economics, the Canadian Economics Association and the 12th Nordic Conference on Development Economics. The paper’s title owes a debt to Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (1984), The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2013 by Martin Ravallion. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Idea of Antipoverty Policy Martin Ravallion NBER Working Paper No. 19210 July 2013 JEL No. B1,B2,I38 ABSTRACT How did we come to think that eliminating poverty is a legitimate goal for public policy? What types of policies have emerged in the hope of attaining that goal? The last 200 years have witnessed a dramatic change in thinking about poverty. -
Political Business Cycle and Economic Instability - Literature Review
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Tiganas, Claudiu-Gabriel; Peptine, Claudiu Article Political Business Cycle and Economic Instability - Literature Review CES Working Papers Provided in Cooperation with: Centre for European Studies, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Suggested Citation: Tiganas, Claudiu-Gabriel; Peptine, Claudiu (2012) : Political Business Cycle and Economic Instability - Literature Review, CES Working Papers, ISSN 2067-7693, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Centre for European Studies, Iasi, Vol. 4, Iss. 4, pp. 853-865 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/198221 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend -
1017-04 BPEA/Nordhaus 12/30/02 15:01 Page 211
1017-04 BPEA/Nordhaus 12/30/02 15:01 Page 211 WILLIAM D. NORDHAUS Yale University Productivity Growth and the New Economy What, another paper on the new economy? When financial markets are raking through the debris of $8 trillion in lost equity value, and “.com” is a reviled four-symbol word, a paper on the impact of the new economy on productivity would seem as welcome as an analysis of the role of whales in the lighting revolution. In fact, the new economy (or, more precisely, information technolo- gies) continues to raise important puzzles about productivity growth. Variations in productivity growth have proved to be one of the most durable puzzles in macroeconomics. After a period of rapid growth fol- lowing World War II, productivity stagnated in the early 1970s. There was no shortage of explanations offered, including rising energy prices, high and unpredictable inflation, rising tax rates, growing government, burdensome environmental and health regulation, declining research and development, deteriorating labor skills, depleted possibilities for inven- tion, and societal laziness.1 Yet these explanations seemed increasingly inadequate as inflation fell, tax rates were cut, regulatory burdens stabi- lized, government’s share of output fell, research and development and patents granted grew sharply, real energy prices fell back to pre-1973 lev- els, and a burst of invention in the new economy and other sectors fueled an investment boom in the 1990s. The productivity slowdown puzzle of the 1980s evolved into the Solow paradox of the early 1990s: computers were everywhere except in the The author is grateful for comments from Ray Fair, Robert Yuskavage, and members of the Brookings Panel. -
The Economic Costs of a War in Iraq
cepr CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND POLICY RESEARCH Briefing Paper The Economic Costs of a War in Iraq: The Negative Scenario By Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot1 December 9, 2002 CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND POLICY RESEARCH 1621 CONNECTICUT AVE., NW, SUITE 500 • WASHINGTON , D.C. 20009 • (202) 293-5380 • <WWW.CEPR.NET> • EMAIL: [email protected] 1 Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot are co-Directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Simone Baribeau, Andrea Blatchford, Debayani Kar, Todd Tucker, John Schmitt, and Jefferson Beck provided helpful research and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This paper examines the potential economic costs of a war with Iraq in a scenario in which the war is not over quickly. It follows loosely from the negative scenario developed in a recent study by William Nordhaus. The paper discusses several ways in which a war can impose large economic costs, that have not been seriously considered in policy debates to date. The paper notes that: 1) Nordhaus’ estimate of GDP loss in a negative war outcome, implies a loss of 1.6 million jobs in 2003 and 2004. It implies that the economy will have an average of 300,000 fewer jobs over the next seven years (2005-2011), as it gradually recovers from a war-related oil shock. Nordhaus’ estimate of the immediate impact of a war-related oil price shock is comparable to the high-end estimates of the job loss in the United States that would result from implementing a Kyoto-type agreement restricting the emission of greenhouse gases.