Notable: June 2018

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• G.M. Says New Wave of Trump Tariffs Could Force U.S. Job Cuts By Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times, June 29, 2018
• What’s the Yield Curve? ‘A Powerful Signal of Recessions’ Has Wall Street’s Attention By Matt Phillips, The New York Times, June 25, 2018
• "Typically, when an economy seems in good health, the rate on the longer-term bonds will be higher than short-term ones. The extra interest is to compensate, in part, for the risk that strong economic growth could set off a broad rise in prices, known as inflation. Lately, though, long-term bond yields have been stubbornly slow to rise — which suggests traders are concerned about long-term growth — even as the economy shows plenty of vitality.
  
  At the same time, the Federal Reserve has been raising short-term rates, so the yield curve has been “flattening.” In other words, the gap between short-term interest rates and long-term rates is shrinking."
• Sudden Stops: A Primer on Balance-of-Payments Crises By Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz,  June 25, 2018
• Short of Workers, Fast-Food Restaurants Turn to Robots By Julie Jargon and Eric Morath, The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2018
• Inequalities in household wealth across OECD countries: Evidence from the OECD Wealth Distribution Database by Carlotta Balestra and Richard Tonkin, OECD Statistics Working Papers, June 2018
• Twitter post, @OECD, June 20, 2018
• Thinking About a Trade War (Very Wonkish) By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 17, 2018
• Ten years on, how countries that crashed are faring By Phillip Inman, The Observer, June 16, 2018
• Tax Cuts and Leprechauns (Wonkish) By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 15, 2018
• What to Do When the Labor Market Stops Working for Workers By Alan S. Blinder, The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2018
• How trend-riding Trump is taking credit for the economy he inherited By Jared Bernstein, The Washington Post, June 11, 2018
• E-Commerce Might Help Solve the Mystery of Low Inflation By Patricia Cohen and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, June 11, 2018
• A Trade War Primer By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 3, 2018
• "It seems to me that this might be a good time to write down a brief, non-scholarly primer on how the trading system – and U.S. trade policy within that system – work."

Notable: May 2018

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• India, Buried in Sugar, Tries to Dig Out By Vibhuti Agarwal, The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2018
• My attempt to cut through the fog of our fiscal debate By Jared Bernstein, The Washington Post, May 29, 2018.
• Review: A New Film Investigates the Time America Banned an Entire Race By Mike Hale, The New York Times, May 28, 2018
• "[T]he documentary is centered on the 1882 act of the title, the first American law to restrict the immigration of a particular ethnic group and ban its members from citizenship. ...
  
  [The film] provides a well-documented but not well-known alternate history — a corrective to the national myth of the melting pot.
  
  The filmmakers and their cast of mostly Asian-American historians frame the Exclusion Act as part of a long national narrative of racism, xenophobia, predatory capitalism and political calculation."
• It Saves Lives. It Can Save Money. So Why Aren’t We Spending More on Public Health? By Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt, The New York Times, May 28, 2018
• Income inequality is changing how we think, live, and die By Sean Illing, Vox, May 24, 2018
• A radical proposal to fight poverty in the developing world: tax the rich more than the poor By Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur, Vox, May 24, 2018
• Freeing Econ 101: Beyond the Grasp of the Invisible Hand  By Greg Rosalsky, Behavioral Scientist, May 14, 2018
• Who was Karl Marx?  by DW Documentary, May 5, 2018

Notable: April 2018

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• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac By Joe Light, Bloomberg QuickTake, April 27, 2018
• How the Loss of Union Power Has Hurt American Manufacturing By LOUIS UCHITELLE, The New York Times, APRIL 20, 2018
• Economists still lack a proper understanding of business cycles, The Economist, April 19, 2018
• Hong Kong defends its dollar peg in both directions, The Economist, April 19, 2018
• Parag Pathak, Clark Medalist 2018, American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee, April 2018
• Parag Pathak wins the John Bates Clark Award by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (blog), April 20, 2018
• Marx and modern microeconomics By Samuel Bowles, VoxEU, 21 April 2018
• The Fed’s New Operating Procedures by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), April 5, 2018
• Lessons from “The Profit” by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), April 4, 2018
• Enough already with GDP: Putting growth in its proper perspective By Jared Bernstein, The Washington Post, April 2, 2018

Notable: March 2018

• Escape Artist by Peter J. Walker, FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, MARCH 2018, VOL. 55, NO. 1 [Profile of Angus Deaton]
• Misconceptions about Trade Deficits By Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist (blog), March 30, 2018
• How to Think About Corporate Tax Cuts By JUSTIN WOLFERS, The New York Times, MARCH 30, 2018
• Laplace's Theories of Cognitive Illusions, Heuristics, and Biases By Joshua B. Miller and Andrew Gelman, SSRN Working Paper, March 26, 2018
• What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse By Adam Mann, Wired, June 17, 2014. [Old article seen on March 26, 2018!]
• Tax Cuts and Wages Redux (Slightly Wonkish) By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 25, 2018.
• Trade and the Cities (Wonkish) By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 24, 2018.
• National Accounts Statistics Back Series 2007 (1950-51 to 1999-2000) Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, Government of India, Downloaded on March 25, 2018
• National Accounts Statistics 2017 Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, Government of India, Downloaded on March 25, 2018
• Statistical Year Book India 2018 Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, Government of India, Downloaded on March 25, 2018
• The euro area’s deepening political divide By Ashoka Mody, VoxEU, 21 March 2018
• Financial engineering will not stabilise an unstable euro area By Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji, VoxEU, 19 March 2018
• Sovereign GDP-linked bonds: Rationale and design By Robert Shiller, Jonathan D. Ostry, James Benford, and Mark Joy, VoxEU,16 March 2018
• Noncompete Agreements Take a Toll on the Economy By Noah Smith, Bloomberg View, March 22, 2018.
• Weak productivity growth and monetary policy: A Keynesian growth perspective By Gianluca Benigno and Luca Fornaro, VoxEU, 15 March 2018
• Why History Goes in Circles By Eric Ormsby, The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018 [Review of “Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography” by Robert Irwin.]
• A Billionaire and a Nurse Shouldn’t Pay the Same Fine for Speeding By ALEC SCHIERENBECK, The New York Times, MARCH 15, 2018
• I added an online comment to the article.
• Paul Krugman Explains Trade and Tariffs By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 15, 2018
• Why is free trade good? The Economist, March 14, 2018
• Ten Years After Bear By Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz, Money and Banking (blog), March 12, 2018
• Ten Years After the Bear Stearns Bailout, Nobody Thinks It Would Happen Again By Justin Baer and Ryan Tracy, The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2018
• What Steven Pinker gets wrong about economic inequality — and the Enlightenment By David Lay Williams, The Washington Post, March 11, 2018
• Inflation? Bring It On. Workers Could Actually Benefit. By ISABEL V. SAWHILL, The New York Times, MARCH 9, 2018
• The Real Engine of the Business Cycle By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, Project Syndicate, March 5, 2018
• Trump White House quietly issues report vindicating Obama regulations By David Roberts, Vox, March 6, 2018
• Economic Forecasts with the Yield Curve By Michael D. Bauer and Thomas M. Mertens, FRBSF Economic Letter, March 5, 2018
• The Truth About the SAT and ACT By Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett, The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2018
• Right-to-Work Laws Have Devastated Unions — and Democrats By JAMES FEIGENBAUM, ALEXANDER HERTEL-FERNANDEZ and VANESSA WILLIAMSON, The New York Times, MARCH 8, 2018
• Trump’s tariffs: We’re missing the bigger picture By Jared Bernstein, The Washington Post, March 2, 2018

Notable: February 2018

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• How Low Can Unemployment Really Go? Economists Have No Idea By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2018
• Paroling the Spanish Prisoner (Wonkish) By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 24, 2018
• You Can't Have Denmark Without Danes By Megan McArdle, Bloomberg View, February 23, 2018
• John Stuart Mill: higher happiness By CHRISTOPHER MACLEOD, The Times Literary Supplement, February 13, 2018
• Mindless eating: is there something rotten behind the research? By Pete Etchells and Chris Chambers, The Guardian, 16 Feb 2018
• A storm of retractions, corrections, data irregularities and controversy over duplicate publication are destroying the credibility of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab. It’s time for the university to be open about what’s going on.
• The Tyranny of Convenience By Tim Wu, The New York Times, February 16, 2018
• Why Economists Are Worried About International Trade By N. GREGORY MANKIW, The New York Times, FEB. 16, 2018
• What Can the U.S. Learn From How Other Countries Handle Immigration? By QUOCTRUNG BUI and CAITLIN DICKERSON, The New York Times, FEB. 16, 2018
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac By Joe Light, Bloomberg QuickTake, February 15, 2018
• Rising Interest Rates, but Easier Financial Conditions By Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist (blog), February 15, 2018 [On the Chicago Fed's National Financial Conditions Index]
• India’s Universal Basic Income: Introduction  by Saksham Khosla, Carnegie India, February 14, 2018
• Nudge Policies By Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist (blog), February 14, 2018
• The President’s new budget. Sorry, but attention must be paid. By Jared Bernstein, On the Economy: Jared Bernstein Blog, February 12, 2018
• Economists don’t know when we’re at full employment. Here’s why that’s so important right now. By Jared Bernstein, The Washington Post, February 12, 2018.
• The Enlightenment Is Working By Steven Pinker, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 2018 [Don’t listen to the gloom-sayers. The world has improved by every measure of human flourishing over the past two centuries, and the progress continues.]
• You May Now Kiss the Algorithm By Jo Craven McGinty, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 2018 [On the Gale-Shapley solution to the stable marriage problem.]
• The Era of Fiscal Austerity Is Over. Here’s What Big Deficits Mean for the Economy. By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2018
• The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth By PANKAJ MISHRA, The New York Times Magazine, FEB. 7, 2018
• Nudging grows up (and now has a government job) By Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine, February 1, 2018

Notable: January 2018

• Trump’s tax cuts are worse than fiercest critics claim By Jacob Hacker, The Washington Post, January 30, 2018
• Deficit hawks have flown the coop By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, January 29, 2018
• 'Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis' by Lutz Kilian and Helmut Lütkepohl, preliminary version of the Cambridge University Press book, 2017
• The Financial Times's 404 page is an ingenious, hilarious introduction to major concepts in economic theory By Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, January 26, 2018
• Time Consistency: A Primer By Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz, Money and Banking (blog), January 29, 2018
• Oxford Review of Economic Policy Volume 34, Issue 1-2, Spring-Summer 2018
• How Blockchain Can End Poverty By Phil Gramm and Hernando de Soto, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2018
• Yup, Rent Control Does More Harm Than Good By Noah Smith, Bloomberg View, January 18, 2018. [Economists put the profession's conventional wisdom to the test, only to discover that it's correct.]
• Income Inequality By Esmé E Deprez, Bloomberg QuickTake, January 19, 2018
• Still Not Convinced You Need a Flu Shot? First, It’s Not All About You By Aaron E. Carroll, The New York Times, January 15, 2018. [Adults also need to get vaccinated to provide herd immunity for others, especially babies and older people.]

Notable: December 2017

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• Venezuela Is Living a Hyperinflation Nightmare By Noah Smith, Bloomberg View, December 19, 2017
• Heretics welcome! Economics needs a new Reformation By Larry Elliott, The Guardian, December 17, 2017. 
• Steve Keen, who has always been good at making the conventional wisdom about the weaknesses of academic economics sound contrarian, has organized a nice stunt: Recalling Martin Luther's protest in Wittenberg 500 years ago, Keen has nailed his "33 Theses" about the parlous state of current academic economics onto a door in the London School of Economics. His "33 Theses" are here: http://www.newweather.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/33-Theses-for-an-Economics-Reformation.pdf. 
• Interview with Anne Case By DOUGLAS CLEMENT, The Region, December 12, 2017 [Princeton economist on the cost of AIDS in South Africa, “deaths of despair” in the U.S. and women in economics.]
• The toll on I-66 hit a high of $44 this morning By Dana Hedgpeth, The Washington Post,  December 14, 2017
• Stronger Labor Unions Could Do a Lot of Good By Noah Smith, BloombergView, December 6, 2017
• The Elusive Benefits of Flexible Exchange Rates By Gita Gopinath, Project Syndicate, December 4, 2017