Tag Archives: NAIRU

Making policy based on fairy tales.Lars P. Syll’s BlogBusting the NAIRU mythLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Federal Reserve always wants millions of people to be out of work… Put more bluntly, it’s worth at least thinking about what Bernie Sanders would do to mitigate the impact of Jerome Powell. Buffer stock of employed versus buffer stock of unemployed.MarketWatchOpinion: Proposals to guarantee jobs spotlight uncomfortable truth about Fed Steve Goldstein | DC Bureau ChiefSee alsoWhy the Fed should give everyone a checking account Greg Robb | Senior Economics ReporterSee also But the threat...

One quite often runs into arguments that rely on assuming full employment, and then relating that policy decisions. In my view, such arguments are fundamentally weak; we need to refer to actual model results to discuss policy. In this article, I explain why an attempt to apply a NAIRU argument to a Job Guarantee is misguided. The analysis is unusual: instead of discussing a single model, the behaviour of an entire class of reasonable economic models is analysed. This reflects the attitude...

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis wrote "Some thoughts about the Job Guarantee," in which he makes an attempt to analyse a Job Guarantee using the NAIRU concept. The analysis suffers from the well-known defects of NAIRU. In the article, he argues that a Job Guarantee implementation would cause a one-time upward shock to wages. He argues that this is not "acknowledged" by MMT authors, even though it appears this effect is common knowledge to anyone who has read the MMT literature. As a result,...

AbstractThis paper reexamines the forecasting ability of Phillips curves from both an uncon- ditional and conditional perspective by applying the method developed by Giacomini and White (2006). We find that forecasts from our Phillips curve models tend to be unconditionally inferior to those from our univariate forecasting models. Significantly, we also find conditional inferiority, with some exceptions. When we do find improvement, it is asymmetric – Phillips curve forecasts tend to be...