Barack Obama v. His Economic Advisers

By: Pejman Yousefzadeh (Diary)  |  January 12th at 01:27 AM  | 

It bears remembering that prior to hitching their stars to the Obama wagon, the economic advisers the President-elect chose took direct issue with many of the items in the expected stimulus package the incoming Administration is going to try to pass through Congress: For example, giving more federal aid to states, one of Obama’s proposals, falls in the “medium” range of cost-effectiveness and carries much | Read More »

Dear Christina Romer

By: Pejman Yousefzadeh (Diary)  |  January 9th at 01:48 AM  | 

Please speak truth to power: . . . President-elect Obama’s candidate for chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, herself a Keynesian, has done research that undercuts the Keynesian view of good fiscal policy. Some of this research is in a March 2007 paper, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks,” co-authored with her husband, | Read More »

In Which I Am Amused

By: Pejman Yousefzadeh (Diary)  |  November 29th at 02:00 AM  | 

Consider the following commentary concerning the incoming Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer: She burst into the economic scene with her doctoral dissertation that fundamentally changed how economists viewed the Great Depression. Economics data indicated that the business cycle before the Great Depression was much more volatile than the economy after World War II. Economists widely assumed the data demonstrated the success | Read More »