Just finished teaching growth to grad students. Wrote 13 lectures worth of material. 50% theory, 50% empirical. It is available here:
eml.berkeley.edu/~jsteinsson/te…
Hope others find it useful.
Jon Steinsson
1,202 posts
Jon Steinsson
@JonSteinsson
Economics Professor at UC Berkeley
Joined June 2012
- Been teaching growth. Looks to me like we are on the verge of eradicating extreme poverty in the world. Quite an achievement! And yet the system that has brought this change is so unpopular as to be on the verge of being overthrown. It’s a weird world we live in.
- I just heard that 1st year PhD students in Econ at MIT no longer need to take a full year of macro. This should be a wakeup call for macro, lest this turn into a new trend. Some (perhaps controversial) thoughts. 1/
- Germans, the French, and Italians work much less than Americans. Why? Prescott famously argued that this was due to high taxes in Europe. Really? Let’s kick the tires a little on this controversial idea. 1/N
- Perhaps not a popular opinion, but I think the Fed deserves a lot of praise for its policy over the past 18 months. This is really starting to seem like a soft landing. If this continues, it will be a major achievement. Major.
- Inflation is falling while the unemployment rate is 3.4% and falling (slowly). Pretty remarkable.
- Macro is really awful on gender diversity. In top 10 econ departments there are 68 men in macro and only 7 women. Ratio is lower for juniors than seniors: 18 junior men, versus 1 junior woman.
- Weekly hours worked per worker in the U.S. have been falling steadily for 200 years. This suggests that income effects on labor supply are stronger than substitution effects. 1/5
- There seems to be a widespread confusion in the crypto world that fixed supply in the short run is a desirable feature for a currency. This is totally wrong. Fixed supply leads to wildly fluctuating prices if there are money demand shocks. 1/4
- Curious when growth began? Turns out productivity growth in England began in 1600, almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Check out my new paper: eml.berkeley.edu/~jsteinsson/pa… Joint with Paul Bouscasse and @eminakamura2 1/8
- I want to take a moment to defend calibration. A common critique of macro by non-macro people centers on the supposed lack of scientific rigor associated with calibration of models. 1/10
- It is widely believed that good monetary policy must satisfy the “Taylor Principle” (i.e., that nominal interest rates should rise more than one-for-one with inflation). In important cases, I think this is a misconception. 1/
- Japan is a puzzle. It seems R = 1 (approx) throughout, even in February. Why? Most commentators avoid discussing Japan. It wold be very valuable to understand Japan. Anecdote: I was in Japan in February. Everyone (everyone) was wearing a mask.
- It is remarkable how utterly we economists have failed to convince others that rent control is a bad policy. Our rhetoric has traditionally relied heavily on the logic of theory. I think we need to rely more on evidence.