Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Farmer and Fiscal

Continuing on the theme of interesting and useful contributions by macroeconomists writing on blogs, John Quiggin is an economist based between the US and Australia, and along with some co-bloggers organises a blog called Crooked Timber. He's also well known for a book called Zombie Economics, where he looks at ideas that we might think are way past their sell-by date yet persist.

The day before yesterday he blogged on the current state of macro with regard the effectiveness of fiscal policy (part of a series on big macroeconomic issues - well worth reading the others too). He requested views from a particular kind of macroeconomist, ones who work on what are called DSGE models (particular kinds of theoretical models at the forefront of research in macroeconomics), and he got at least two responses - one from Simon Wren-Lewis, who I flagged up yesterday, but also one from Roger Farmer.

The particular point about Roger I'd like to make is that while he is based at a US university, UCLA, he will be visiting the Bank of England in the coming year, and in fact at the end of April he'll be in Birmingham for a conference being organised by John Fender, Christoph Goertz and myself. As you'll learn from his contribution on fiscal policy, he is very good at explaining things well. He's written a number of very important contributions to theoretical macroeconomics. I'd highly recommend a read of what he has to say about fiscal policy - it'll be handy for when we get there later in term.

No comments:

Post a Comment