Clark Center Forum

 

 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statement:

Public school students would receive a higher quality education if they all had the option of taking the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools). 

Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims richly deserve the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences they were awarded this week for their seminal work in the fields of macroeconomics and time series econometrics. I was fortunate to have a front-row seat to observe the development of their path-breaking research. Read article> 

The University of Chicago faculty congratulate our former colleague Tom Sargent and our good friend Chris Sims for their well-deserved Nobel Prize “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”. Nobody is better positioned than Lars Hansen to explain the basis for the award and its significance. Lars has published 3 books […] 

 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statements: A) All else equal, permanently raising the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income by 1 percentage point for those in the top (i.e., currently 35%) tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years. B) The cumulative budget shortfalls in the US over the next 10 years can be reduced by half (or more) purely by increasing the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income for those in the top tax bracket. 

The European debt discussions always paint the alternatives as either bail out countries (really, bail out their bondholders) or break up the euro. In fact, the euro and the European economic union would be stronger if countries can default. For that reason, I advocated letting Greece go a year and a half ago when the […] 

This week's IGM Economic Experts Panel poll statement:

All else equal, the Fed's new plan to increase the maturity of its Treasury holdings will boost expected real GDP growth for calendar year 2012 by at least one percentage point.