美国经济会因次贷风波而衰退吗

次贷风波后弱于预期水平的美国最新经济数据加剧了市场担忧,美国经济“衰退论”大量涌现．这种极端化观点最大的弊病在于混淆了短期波动和长期趋势。结合美国经济结构特征、演化历史和最新变化,本文认为美国经济在长期内进入衰退的可能性较小,最根本的原因在于关国消费并没有出现长期萎靡的趋势,而具有易变性的投资放缓很可能是造成短期GDP增长率下降的重要因素,影响力相对较小且本身波动较大的净出口则不可能对美国长期经济增长造成较大打击。     

Residential investment and recession predictability

We assess the importance of residential investment for the prediction of economic recessions for an unbalanced panel of 12 OECD countries over the period 1960Q1–2014Q4. Our approach is to estimate various probit models with different leading indicators and evaluate their relative prediction accuracies using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve as our forecasting performance metric. We document that residential investment contains information that is useful for predicting recessions both in-sample and out-of-sample. This result is robust to adding typical leading indicators, such as the term spread, stock prices, consumer confidence surveys and oil prices. It is shown that residential investment is particularly useful for the prediction of recessions for countries with high home-ownership rates. Finally, in a separate exercise for the US, we show that the predictive ability of residential investment is — in a broad sense — robust to employing real-time data.     

Consumption in the shadow of unemployment

By how much do employed households reduce their consumption when the aggregate unemployment rate rises? In Spain during the Great Recession a one point increase in the unemployment rate was related to a strong reduction in household consumption of more than 0.7% per equivalent adult. This reduction is consistent with forward-looking agents responding to downward revisions of their expectations on future income growth rates: the shadow of unemployment. Using consumption panel data that include information on physical quantities we show that the drop in consumption expenditure was truly a reduction in quantities, and not a switch to cheaper alternatives.     

Cross-country evidence on the quality of private sector fiscal forecasts

This paper provides evidence of the quality of private sector forecasts of the budget balance between 1993 and 2009 for a sample of 29 countries, grouped into advanced and emerging countries. We find large differences across the two groups: forecasts for advanced economies are much more accurate than for emerging economies and much less subject to a bias towards optimism (i.e. they are less likely to forecast a bigger budget balance than the realization). Forecasts for both groups, however, exhibit a tendency toward forecast smoothing: forecasts are revised slowly so that revisions to forecasts can be systematically predicted based on past revisions. This tendency proves costly around turning points in the economy when the budget balance moves sharply but the corresponding forecasts only adjust very slowly to the reality of the situation.     

Causes and Cures of the Great Recession

The Great Recession was not a failure of free markets. Rather it was a classic example of the undesirable unintended consequences of government intervention, both through expansionary monetary policy and misguided attempts to bolster the housing market in the USA. Getting government out of banking is the best way to end the disastrous boom and bust cycles that have characterised the last century and a half.     

论后金融危机时代我国的对外贸易现状和宏观经济政策

2008年以来,世界性的经济危机从美国席卷全世界。在经济危机中,中国的对外贸易大受打击。2009年,在各国经济扶持和促进政策的作用下,世界经济状况逐渐有所好转。中国在这期间通过扩大内需等方式保持了经济的平稳快速增长。在危机之后,新的形势和新的变化为我国的对外贸易提供了新的机遇和挑战,也对我国的对外贸易政策提出了新的要求。     

Impact of the Great Recession on unemployed and NEET individuals’ labour market transitions in Ireland

The impact that the Great Recession has had on countries’ labour markets has been well documented. In Ireland, the contraction in economic activity that took place resulted in the country's overall unemployment rate increasing from 4.6% in 2006 to 15% in 2012. The country's youth unemployment rate rose from 9.9% to 33% over the same time period, while the proportion of NEETs increased from 10.1% in 2006 to 18.7% in 2012. Policymakers are aware of the unemployment rates of young and prime-aged people as well as the NEETs rate. However, little is known about these groups’ profiles, whether their profiles have changed since the recession and also their labour market transition patterns pre and post the Great Recession. Given the importance of this information in the design of effective activation measures to assist unemployed and NEET individuals, this paper examines each of these issues in turn. Overall, the study found for all three groups examined that the rate of transition to employment fell dramatically between 2006 and 2011. The analysis showed that the drop in the groups’ transition rates was not due to changes in the underlying sub-group population structures but to changes in the external environment that resulted in the impact of possessing certain characteristics changing over the recession. For example, education and nationality have become more important in finding a job in Ireland over the course of the recession, while there has been a fall in the scarring impact of unemployment durations.     

Teaching Economics in the Schools: A Review of Survey Findings

The authors review and contrast the findings of a 1981 national survey of economic education at the precollege level and 15 state surveys conducted at about the same time. The picture that emerges is disturbing: instruction in economics tends to be minimal (or nonexistent) for many students, and teacher training in economics is limited. Curriculum structure, teacher training, and the development and use of materials are interrelated problems facing economic education.     

Symposium: Youth labour market and the “Great Recession”

The financial crisis of 2007–2008, followed by the “Great Recession” and the additional sovereign debt crisis in some peripheral countries of the Eurozone, resulted in huge and persistent effects on European youth labour markets. Theoretical and empirical investigations on this topic are still scarce compared with the importance of the topic and the consequent economic, social and policy implications. This paper consists of a very short introduction to a symposium that contributes to filling that gap. A multifaceted picture emerges with major policy implications for the three levels of government (European, national and regional/local) in order to reduce youth unemployment and the NEET phenomenon.     

Flexible recession: the temporary staffing industry and mediated work in the United States

The evolution of the temporary staffing industry (TSI) in theUS is examined, with particular reference to the structuralfunctions of temporary work during the boom of the 1990s, the‘flexible’ recession of 2001, and the subsequent‘jobless’ recovery. It is argued that the TSI isincreasingly playing a systemic, macroregulatory role in theUS labour market, where it now accounts for a disproportionateshare of the costs of labour-market adjustment. The developmentpath of the TSI is closely intertwined with the wider restructuringof the US economy, where it has assumed a significant presenceas a purveyor of low-cost, flexibly mediated labour.