The IFS Green Budget: time for some prudence. The Institute for Fiscal Studies launched its IFS Green Budget 2008 at a half-day conference yesterday. A preview of the official UK Budget due mid-March, it's comprehensive and thought provoking document for anyone with an interest in the state of the UK economy or public finances. Both the full 312 page (3.9Mb) report itself and the PowerPoint presentations from yesterday's seminar are available to download online. You can also download individual chapters. The nine presentations covered: * The economic outlook,...

Rethinking free trade?. Is support for free trade losing ground amongst economists? Business Week Washington bureau chief Jane Sasseen writes of an apparent shift in mood: Economists Rethink Free Trade: ..something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We're not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can't explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more...

Meet the authors.... There may be no such thing as a free lunch - but London has plenty of free public lectures. Readers living in the old dart have the opportunity to hear about two new and - by all acounts - exciting tomes. This Wednesday evening (6 February, 6.30pm) undercover economist and FT blogger Tim Harford is giving a public lecture based on his new book The Logic of Life at the London School of Economics. Event details here. The event is...

Winning American Idol: try to be last. If you are appearing on American Idol or the X-Factor, try to be one of the last to sing. That's the conclusion from a new paper presented at a University of Westminster seminar today. Lionel Page and Katie Page look at an important topic - the evaluation of a sequential order of performances. Their paper, Biases in sequential performance evaluation, a field study on the Idol series (PDF), drew on a large dataset based on the ranking of contestants in...

Globalisation: good for jobs?. Chris Giles summarises a new report on globalisation by the Ifo-affiliated European Economic Advisory Group in today's Financial Times: Globalisation ‘a blessing’ for west Europe Increased trade, outsourcing and offshoring do not create unemployment but boost the number of jobs in advanced economies, a study of European labour markets says on Tuesday. The European Economic Advisory Group...argues that although globalisation can lead to a fall in demand for certain types of skill, it also tends to sweep away job-destroying rigidities...

How China thinks. We know a lot about the Chinese economy - but how do the Chinese think? What do they discuss? Are they all Maoist automatons, or is there a lively debate occurring which Western observors are barely aware of? Veteran think tanker Mark Leonard favours the latter view, which he puts forward at some length in his new book, What does China think? This is also the lead story in the March 2008 issue of Prospect magazine. Leonard makes some inteersting...

Should we kill the king?. Are autocratic leaders an impediment to democratisation? An intriguing question, which some economists have recently sought to answer. A year ago a JPE article by Harvard's Ben Olken on corruption in Indonesia attracted attention for its innovative appproach. The American magazine has a profile of him by Michael Moynihan, Graft Paper, discussing this and other research, including a paper co-written with Northwestern's Ben Jones, Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War (PDF). Moynihan summarises it thus:Olken...

The trouble with Joe. Ever been to a concert or play where the rest of the audience were in raptures, but you weren't? That's been my experience every time I've gone to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak on globalisation in London. Each time I've come away wondering how such a first rate economist can offer up such populist tropes, sloppy reasoning and pessimistic interpretation of the facts. So why do his speeches (and books) make me so queasy? It's not that I disagree with most...

Why people emigrate. Semi-regular blogging service resumes this week with a few posts on migration - still a very topical issue on both sides of the Atlantic. The first paper I'd like to highlight is by the University of Chicago's Jeffrey Grogger, and UCSD's Gordon H. Hanson. Their recent NBER Working Paper No. 13821, Income Maximization and the Selection and Sorting of International Migrants, seeks to explain to what extent selection and sorting account for international migration flows using data on emigrant stocks...

How rural villages have gained from China's great migration. Inter-county migration in China - mostly rural migrants moving to urban areas - increased four-fold during the 1990s, from just over 20 million in 1990 to 79 million by 2000. With what effect? Co-authors Alan de Brauw from the International Food Policy Research Institute and Michigan State University's John Giles examine the impacts this great tide of migration has had on China's rural villages. Their paper, Migrant Labor Markets and the Welfare of Rural Households in the Developing World: Evidence...

Skilled migration boosts innovation. A recent paper by McGill University's Jennifer Hunt to an NBER labour studies programme conference asks whether the increase in foreign-born college graduates has contributed to innovation in the United States. Her paper, How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation? (PDF), finds that it does: In this paper I have demonstrated the important boost to innovation per capita provided by skilled immigration to the United States in 1950-2000. A calculation of the effect of immigration in the 1990-2000 period puts the...

Back again. The very welcome return of Dave Altig's Macroblog last week has prompted me to consider posting again too. Apologies for the protracted absence. My non-virtual life has been rather hectic in recent months. Now that things have settled down a little, I hope to return to semi-regular postings again. It's good to be back.

The credit crunch: what happened?. While Ken 'worst is yet to come' Rogoff is trying his level best to scare global financial markets about the credit crunch, research is now starting to filter through about just what happened last year. A new IMF working paper by Nathaniel Frank, Brenda González-Hermosillo and Heiko Hesse, Transmission of Liquidity Shocks: Evidence from the 2007 Subprime Crisis, does some of the spadework. As they explain, liquidity crisis soon segued into a solvency crisis (think Northern Rock, Bear Sterns):It is...

Austan Goolsbee. The September/October 2008 edition of the MIT Technology Review has a feature by Mark Williams on Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee: Obama's Geek Economist No earth shattering insights, but another reminder of just how Chicago-ist an Obama presidency could be.

Are emerging Asia’s reserves really too high?. Aside from China, no, according to a new IMF working paper by Marta Ruiz-Arranz and Milan Zavadjil. This is in large part an attempt to insure against a repeat of the 1997 Asian currency crisis:The paper has presented evidence that to a large extent explains Asia’s large reserve accumulation since the 1997–98 crisis through the precautionary motive. Current reserve holdings in most of Asia (excluding China) are not seen excessive when compared with levels predicted by a simple model of...