I just read paper The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks by Christina Romer and David Romer. It’s in the June 2010 issue of The American Economic Review (AER), the industry’s top peer-reviewed journal. Being in the AER is a guarantee that the paper is rigorous and… Read more

the data gave no reason for a giddy attack

I’ve seen lots of proposals on how to accelerate our economic recovery, but I haven’t seen any investment tax credit proposals. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven’t seen them. The idea has merit, and now might be a good time to implement it. Business investment has been extraordinarily weak for a long… Read more

David Ricardo, the British economist who died in 1823, gave the world two deep economic insights. The first, the concept of comparative advantage, became economic gospel, used ever since to justify specialization and trade. The second, the concept of Ricardian Equivalence, has become almost as universally accepted. Ricardian Equivalence asserts that only the amount of… Read more

Today’s data releases highlight the challenges facing those who claim we are in a recovery. The December retail sales volume, down 0.3 percent from November, was perhaps the most shocking number to the optimists out there. This was almost a full percentage point below “consensus expectations,” which were for 0.5 percent growth. So much for… Read more

Many economists declared the recession over after the third-quarter GDP release. We at CERF disagreed and pointed out that almost every long recession has had at least one quarter of positive growth during the recession. We also pointed out that many of the reasons for the relatively strong third quarter were temporary. We just didn’t… Read more

Dan started this, but he has some minor surgery today. Kirk and Bill finished it: CERF released its first United States and California forecast last week. The United States and California forecasts are pessimistic relative to consensus. Why? In part, it is because so many forecasters seem to be using a model with a high… Read more

I always figured that the administration would take credit for any eventual economic recovery, but I also figured that they would wait for the recovery. Wrong. Cristina Romer, perhaps buoyed by yesterday’s GDP release and today’s job data, says that the stimulus is working.

The Bureau of Economic Activity’s recent release of their initial estimate of the United States second quarter GDP growth implied that the U.S. economy had improved dramatically.  Economic growth was still negative, but it had improved from -6.4 in the 1st quarter to -1.0 percent in the 2nd quarter.  This growth rate is close enough… Read more