Reinhart, Carmen, (2016), “What’s New About Today’s Low Interest Rates?”, Project Syndicate, 28 July A day seldom passes without articles appearing in the financial press pondering why interest rates have remained so low for so long. This is one of those articles. So let’s start by clarifying whose and which interest rates are low and what is and isn’t novel or unprecedented. Interest rates in emerging and developing countries are importantly affected …Read More

Krueger, Dirk, Mitman, Kurt, Perri, Fabrizio, (2016), “On the Distribution of the Welfare Losses of Large Recessions”, Centre for Economic Policy Research, July How big are the welfare losses from severe economic downturns, such as the U.S. Great Recession? How are those losses distributed across the population? In this paper we answer these questions using a canonical business cycle model featuring household income and wealth heterogeneity that matches micro data from …Read More

Rossi, Barbara, Sekhposyan, Tatevik, Soupre, Mattheiu, (2016), “Understanding the Sources of Macroeconomic Uncertainty”, Center for Economic Policy Research, July We propose a decomposition to distinguish between Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity) and risk, where the first measures the uncertainty about the probability distribution generating the data, while the second measures uncertainty about the odds of the outcomes when the probability distribution is known. We use the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) density forecasts …Read More

Spence, Michael, (2016), “Growth in a Time of Disruption”, Project Syndicate, 27 July Developing countries are facing major obstacles – many of which they have little to no control over – to achieving sustained high growth. Beyond the headwinds generated by slow advanced-economy growth and abnormal post-crisis monetary and financial conditions, there are the disruptive impacts of digital technology, which are set to erode developing economies’ comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufacturing …Read More

Marzinotto, Benedicta, (2016), “How income inequality affects euro area current account imbalances”, LSE Europpblog, 27 July Since the late 2000s financial crisis, a great deal of attention has been focused on the issue of how inequality affects the lives of citizens. But can inequality also explain some of the macroeconomic trends present in European countries? Benedicta Marzinotto writes on the link between inequality and current account imbalances in the Eurozone. Using …Read More