Jui's Class

04/28/2014

Dear students,
Last time I talked about the interpretation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a metaphor of the gold standard. If you are interested (who are not?) in this interpretation, you may want to take a look at the following link. Wish I didn't ruin your childhood!

Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz include treatments of the modern fairy tale (written by L. Frank Baum and first published in 1900) as an allegory or metaphor for the political, economic and social events of America in the 1890s. Scholars have examined four quite different ver…

04/17/2014

Dear students,
In the following please find the graduation speech by Thomas Sargent, the Nobel laureate of 2011, to the 2007 class in Berkeley. Some of you and myself will graduate this year. It is my honor to share his words to you guys.

Economizing.

04/13/2014

Howdy! I have sent you guys our homework 3. Please check your email. As a reminder, out homework 3 will due on April 21.

04/04/2014

Howdy! After the 2nd midterm, many students came to talk to me about the midterm. The concept in the 2nd midterm is definitely harder and more complicated than the one in the 1st midterm. And it seems that lots of you feel that you were not doing very good and want another chance.
I had sent everyone another voluntary assignment. You can choose to do it or not. However, I encourage you to think about the problem I asked. What is credit crunch? And why it was so important?
BTW, I did the evaluation for this class today (Apr. 4, Fri). If you missed the class and still want to do the evaluation for the class and for me, I believe you can talk to Teri in the front office of Dept. of Econ. I will not be around in next semester and I may not get your evaluation. So if you have any advice or suggestion for the class, please let me know. Thanks!

03/21/2014

And I would like to say sorry to you guys. Since you guys turned in your assignments this Wednesday, I am supposed to grade it ASAP and give them back tomorrow. Recently I am kind of busy and I fail to do that. It is my bad.
You will probably get an answer key for the homework this Friday or Saturday for your study for the second midterm. And you will have your homework back on next Monday. As a reminder, our next midterm will be on Mar. 26 (Wed).

03/21/2014

Dear all,
On Wednesday I talked about the recent research by Dr. Sarah Zubairy. In the following link you will find Sarah's paper. Her estimate for the fiscal multiplier is 1.07, which is higher than 1 but far less than the number (e.g., 4) according to the textbook.
I am not saying Sarah's estimate is 100% correct or not. The estimate will depend on the model we use and the assumptions we make. However, you can have a general idea about how economists think about this problem nowadays, and how an academic paper looks like.

© (2014) by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association

03/16/2014

Dear all,
Wish everyone has enjoy your spring break! Tomorrow we will talk about the aggregate expenditure and the output in the short run. It is a rather complicated topic in the macroeconomic class.
Here is another article by Paul Krugman. Wish it will be helpful in our discussion in the future.

January 27, 2009, 9:40 amA Dark Age of macroeconomics (wonkish)Brad DeLong is upset about the stuff coming out of Chicago these days — and understandably so. First Eugene Fama, now John Cochrane, have made the claim that debt-financed government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of pri...

03/03/2014

And here is the article about IS-LM by Paul Krugman. We will not talk about LM until Ch.14 or 15. However, you may want to take a look on the IS part.

It’s a good thing.

03/03/2014

Dear all, I found that I made a mistake when I talked about the "Great Moderation" today. I want to make it clear here.
Figure 10.10 in the textbook showed the fluctuations of real GDP were greater before 1950. As I said, Romer (1989) had pointed out that it might be due to the insufficiency of data in estimating prewar GDP. In the following link you will find the paper by Christina Romer. As a result, I do not fully believe the reasons listed in your textbook about the "relative macroeconmic stability" in 1950 - 2007.
However, the "Great Moderation" usually refers to the period with milder fluctuations between mid-1980 and 2007. You may have notice that in Fig 10.10 that in that period, the fluctuations were really smaller than other time. In my talk sometimes I misused the "relative macroeconmic stability" in 1950 - 2007 and the "Great Moderation" in mid-1980 - 2007.
Briefly speaking, the "relative macroeconmic stability" in 1950 - 2007 was not a thing. It was due to insufficient prewar data. The "Great Moderation" in mid-1980 - 2007 was a thing. I misused these two terms in class. It was my bad.

Downloadable (with restrictions)! Traditional estimates of prewar gross national product (GNP) exaggerate the size of cycles because they are based on the assumption that GNP moves approximately one for one with commodity output valued in producer prices. This paper derives new estimates of GNP for…

02/19/2014

Dear all, today we talked about the production of a simple shirt as an example of the value-added method in measuring GDP. There is an interesting book I would like to recommend you guys. On Friday I will talk more about how a pile of cotton in Texas becomes shirts in China, how they come back to US, and how they become used shirts in countries, e.g., Tanzania.
Pietra Rivoli (2009) "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade", 2nd Edition, Wiley.
http://faculty.msb.edu/rivolip/travelsofatshirt/

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy takes the reader on a fascinating, around-the-world journey to reveal the economic and political lessons from the life story of a simple t-shirt. Over five years, business professor Pietra Rivoli traveled from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory t...

02/03/2014

Dear all, I just sent you guys our first assignment of this class. It is due on Feb. 10. You are also able to find it in my website. If you have any question, please feel free to let me know.

01/31/2014

Dear all, in the following is the full transcript of the 2014 State of the Union address. I would like to talk more on the part about lifting the minimum wage:
"Today the federal minimum wage is worth about twenty percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here. And Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting the minimum wage to $10.10. It's easy to remember: 10.10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers with more money to spend. It does not involve any new bureaucratic program. So join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise. (Cheers, applause.) Give 'em a raise."

President Obama delivered his 2014 State of the Union address on Jan. 28 at the U.S. Capitol.