The Unassuming Economist

January 28 at 12 pm
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/98397311321?pwd=K5i4ya1afU1JbJDJ87YRnpDgP7wjyG.1

 Last year, the U.S. economy ended up with about 2 % income growth and about 2½ % inflation. What are the expectations for this year? Should we expect (1) resilience (broadly similar performance to 2025), (2) stagflation (slower income growth, higher inflation – say, due the impact of tariffs) or (3) recession (a decline in income, say due to the bursting of an AI bubble)?

Hear the views of:

• Jason Furman, Harvard professor and former CEA chair;
• Torsten Slok, chief economist, Apollo Management;
• Peter Coy, former Businessweek and New York Times columnist;
• Betsey Stevenson, Michigan professor and former CEA member and chief economist, Department of Labor.

All are welcome to attend. Zoom link given above.

Johns Hopkins University offers an online Master of Science program in applied economics that typically takes students one to two years to complete.

The university scored well in our methodology primarily thanks to a high graduation rate (95%) and high median annual earnings among alumni 10 years after graduation ($87,555). Johns Hopkins also maintains the lowest student-to-faculty ratio (6-to-1) out of the 10 schools ranked here.

See the link here: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/education/science/best-online-masters-in-economics/

This is the second in a special series of posts in which I take stock of some of the main activities of my long 40-year career. In the first one, I shared some reflections on my profiles of famous economists. A convenient link to all my profiles and interviews can be found here.  In this post, I discuss the performance  to date of my 2019 book, “Confronting inequality: How Societies Can Achieve inclusive Growth” (Columbia University Press).

• The book was published in January 2019, just before the annual meeting of economists in Atlanta. the IMF did an impromptu book launch as part of the party that many institutions organize at the annual meetings. Later that month, thanks to Adam Posen, there was a major launch event at the Peterson Institute. The discussants were Heather Boushey (the link is to her excellent presentation) and Jason Furman. Jason’s thought-provoking  PowerPoint from the event is available too. Two other memorable presentations were at Florida State University and at the New School for Social Research, organized by Willi Semmler and featuring a discussion of the book by the great Dani Rodrik. For personal reasons, I then took a break from book launch events and only resumed them in 2020, when invited by James Foster of GW’s International Institute of Economic Policy. The book has nearly 150 citations on Google Scholar.
• In additional to the praise and recognition in these professional settings, it has been gratifying to get praise from lay readers on Goodreads and on Amazon. In 2024, I watched as the book climbed the ranks on Amazon , going all the way to #14 in the Income Inequality category.

• The book has been successful as a textbook (complemented by a more standard text like Jones and Vollrath) in courses on Economic Growth at a couple of institutions. And according to World Cat, more than 300 copies are sitting at institutional libraries around the world.

From a paper by Harold Glenn A. Valera, Cymon Kayle Lubangco, and Mark J. Holmes:

“We propose a new measure of revisions to consumer inflation expectations using repeated cross-sections rather than requiring panel data. We calculate the value of group average expectations in a prior period as a proxy for what an individual’s expectations might have been using micro data in the Philippines for Q1 2010 to Q2 2024. In contrast to existing mixed evidence, the resulting revisions show sensitivity to price changes in 14 food and energy goods. The equivalence testing finds that the group-based coefficients are valid, as they are: (a) different from an overall sample average-based revision results with Philippine data and (b) similar to rotating panel-based revision results using data from the Michigan Survey of US households. Using Philippine data, we also provide new evidence of significant effects of a firm’s frequency of price changes on expectation revisions.”

From a paper by Borivoje D. Krušković:

“Many central banks adopted inflation targeting under pressure from the IMF. Adoption of inflation targeting happened on pretty favourable macroeconomic terms whose distinctive features were the absence of supply shocks, low budget deficit and foreign currency access. It was a ‘period conducive to price stability’ with inflation on a downward trajectory in many countries, especially developed ones, even before the introduction of inflation targeting. That could have contributed to efficiency of inflation targeting considering other monetary strategies. The most widely used model in designinig monetary policy under inflation targeting is a macroeconomic model of a small open economy from the group New Keynesian model. The results of the econometric analysis in this paper show that inflation targeting is an inefficient monetary strategy in the face of negative supply shocks (financial crises, pandemic, rising energy prices, tariffs), as it leads to rising interest rates, falling GDP, and rising unemployment. The results of the econometric analysis in this paper show that inflation targeting is an inefficient monetary strategy in the face of negative supply shocks (financial crisis, pandemic, rising energy prices, tariffs, etc.), which leads to rising interest rates, falling GDP, rising unemployment, and ultimately to an “inflationary pandemic”.