Ec 10 Guest Lectures

Above are the seven guest lecturers for ec 10 this spring. How many do you recognize?  A first-class econonerd would recognize them all.

Hint: Their initials are MF, GG, AA, AS, JS, JS, and LS.

Price Theory Summer Camp

This seems like a great opportunity for econ grad students.

The One Percent, Updated

Piketty and Saez have updated their famous one-percent graph to 2013.  It is above. (Click on graphic to enlarge.)

One thing that commentators sometimes fail to notice is that the big increase in the one percent's income share came between 1980 and 2000. Since 2000, it has fluctuated but without much of a trend.  Why, then, are we all talking about income inequality only now? I am not sure. One hypothesis is that we don't worry about inequality when everyone is doing well. Another hypothesis is that we now have a president with a political ideology that sees inequality as especially pernicious.

The 2014 Employment Boom

Why did employment grow by about 3 million in 2014?  Here is the answer from a new paper:

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47 weeks across U.S. states at the beginning of December 2013 were abruptly cut to zero. To achieve identification we use the fact that this policy change was exogenous to cross-sectional differences across U.S. states and we exploit a policy discontinuity at state borders. We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut.

Lazear on Wage Stagnation

Eddie writes:

The share of the private workforce employed in the BLS-defined industries “financial activities” and “hospitals” decreased by about 5% between 2010 and 2014. Jobs in these industries pay 29% and 24%, respectively, above the economy mean. Because a smaller share of labor is working those high-wage industries, the typical job in the economy is now lower-paying than in 2010.... 

So what accounts for the relative decline in jobs in high-wage hospitals and finance? One obvious possibility is increased regulation. The Affordable Care Act for hospitals and Dodd-Frank for finance both passed in 2010, the year real wages began to decline.

The Rise of Economists

Justin Wolfers documents:

in recent years around one in 100 [New York Times] articles mentions the term “economist,” ....Far fewer articles mention the terms historian or psychologist, while sociologists, anthropologists and demographers rarely rate a mention.

The most fiscally responsible country

As seen by Larry Kotlikoff.