Paul, writing to the church in Corinth (1 Cor. 11:23-26, NRSVue) instructs,

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Luke's gospel provides a similar account of the Lord's supper in 2:14,19-20 (NRSVue):

When the hou

This post is meant as a somewhat brisk introduction to running Monte Carlo simulations in Stata. There are several ways to do this. I'm going to show you the method that I use.

We will write a do-file that runs a regression, stores the regression results, and performs a coverage test. The way this is going to work is that I'll write a comment chain that describes the main steps of the process.

For reference, the final result will look like this:

clear all

program define regsim, rclass
    syntax [, obs(integer 250)]
    
    // setup
    drop _all
    set obs `obs'
    set type double
    
    // data-generating process
    generate e = rno

Original article here.

I'm only going to focus on the first five paragraphs of this article.

The economic role of government

Graeber writes,

Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability.

This claim is silly.

If I open up Greg Mankiw's introductory economics textbook, I see on page 11 that one of the "ten principles of economics" is, governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. Mankiw goes on to discuss efficiency and equity rationales for government intervention in market econ

I know you are all sick to death of MMT stuff, but they did just release a textbook so I'm going to talk about it. To keep this off of the BE Fiat thread, I thought I'd post here.

So there is an MMT book: Macroeconomics by Mitchell, Wray, and Watts.

Marketing:

• Textbook

• PDF link to table of contents, front matter, and first two chapters

• Amazon link ($70, sold out)

Alright, enough marketing.

One thing I like

I want to start with a word of praise.

Since [Cantillon's book from th

I'll be doing these approximately weekly. The plan is to post a paper each Saturday, then post the solution (and a new paper) the following Saturday, and so on. I will try to provide different "levels" of increasing time, difficulty, and/or complexity. Feel free to think up your own extensions as well.

This week we'll start with something simple; think of it as a warm-up. None of the levels are particularly challenging.

The paper

The paper is Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992). This paper writes down two versions of the Solow growth model, derives testable predictions from the model, and tests those predictions using cross-coun

The quantity theory of money (in growth-rate form) makes two predictions about money-income correlations.

1. Over a sufficiently long time horizon, average money growth and average inflation will move together one-for-one. That is, the price level absorbs an increase in the money stock.
2. Over a sufficiently long time horizon, real income growth will be independent of money growth.

Several datasets exist that have collected information on money growth, inflation, and output growth across countries and over time. First, The IMF's International Financial Statistics dataset contains information across countries; a slice of this data was used in a paper by [McC

I want to build a vocabulary for discussing the effects of policy on economic variables of interest.

First, let's look at a graph of real GDP. It has both an upward trend and some cycles around the trend. For today, I am largely going to ignore the cycles, and I am mostly going to talk about the trend. After cleaning out all the cycles, the trend looks like this. We call that whole thing a "level path."

I want you to consider four possible kinds of policy intervention.

1. A policy that is purely temporary takes us temporarily away from the level path, but eventually dies out and we return to the same level path as be

Here are the graphs, updated to 2017.

USA

Sources

All series are monthly.

• 1750 to 1889: Warren and Pearson, Prices, 1933.

• 1860 to 1939: NBER Macrohistory series m04051; FRED code M04051USM324NNBR

• 1913 to 2017: Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI for all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted; FRED code CPIAUCNS

The periods of overlap are critical; they allow us to meld the different series together. First, put each one on the same scale: scale each one so that 1913=100. For the period of overlap itself, we should either use a Tornqvist to meld the series together, or perhaps set up and solve a signal extraction problem. For this post, I'm going to be lazy and use a si

All Nobel Prizes in economics:

N	Year	Name	Contribution area	Lecture title
1	1969	Frisch	Macro-econometrics	From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications
2	1969	Tinbergen	Macro-econometrics	The Use of Models: Experience and Prospects
3	1970	Samuelson	Mathematical Economics	Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics
4	1971	Kuznets	Growth, National Accounts	Modern Economic Growth: Findings and Reflections
5	1972	Hicks	General Equilibrium	The Mainspring of Economic Growth
6	1972	Arrow	General Equilibrium	General Economic Equilibrium
7	1973	Leontief	Input-Output analysis	St

Intro

This list focuses on macroeconomics and international trade. It is designed to be short. Don't complain too much if your favorite book isn't here; for one book to go in, another must be left out.

Books on history of macro thought:

These are largely books on who thought what and when, and why it mattered. Arnon's book takes you through what we can call "pre-macroeconomics" from 1750 to 1900. De Vroey picks up the story with Keynes and takes us to the present; the gap between them means that we lack an account of developments between 1900 and 1930, especially the contributions of Pigou and Irving Fisher. Snowdon and Vane cover the same period as De Vroey and offer an alternati

I'm aiming to keep this one brief. These are a mixture of navel-gazing history-of-thought papers and economic history papers. Business cycle macroeconomics is faddish, perhaps more faddish than any other area of economics, and current events have a way of powerfully shaping the research agenda. So you must read history of thought in the context of economic history. The best example of this blend between HoT and economic history is DeLong's 1997 paper.

Older controversies:

• Samuelson and Solow, "Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy," 1960.
• Friedman, "The Role of Monetary Policy," 1968.
• Modigliani, "The Monetarist Controversy," 1977.
• Tobin, "Stabilization Policy Ten Years After