The Unassuming Economist

At Rice University today, continuing my mission to keep Okun’s Law alive. Art Okun must be smiling down on me. See the presentation here.

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My VoxEU post with Olivier Blanchard and Florence Jaumotte tries to move beyond ritual invocation of the mantra of “labor market flexibility.” We develop the concepts of “micro” and “macro flexibility”; explain why they are needed; what labor market institutions help or hinder micro and macro flexibility; and assess IMF advice against the backdrop of these concepts. The Staff Discussion Note on which our post is based is available here.

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The IMF released a second working paper on the distributional impacts of fiscal consolidation. Like the previous work, this one concludes that “fiscal consolidations are likely to raise inequality through various channels including their effects on unemployment. Spending-based consolidations tend to worsen inequality more significantly, relative to tax-based consolidations.” For more on the IMF’s recent work on fiscal policy, see this presentation at UNICEF.

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I sound like a broken record (young people will not know how a broken record sounds, let alone what a ‘record’ is) but I gave a talk at the New School for Social Research today on how jobs and growth are linked in many countries across the globe. On a personal note: It was difficult not to ‘feel verklempt’ giving a talk at New School–Robert’s Heilbroner’s “The Wordly’s Philosophers” is probably why I became an economist. Read the full article…

In my presentation at UNICEF today I spoke about the impacts of fiscal consolidation (often called “austerity” in the blogosphere) on long-term unemployment, labor’s share of income, and inequality. 

Here’s a link to the paper.

The announcement

The view from the UNICEF conference room Read the full article…