Plain Sense Economics

So, this is cool. As reported in the Freakonomics blog, Google has a feature that allows users to correlate public patterns with search term usage. You supply data, such as initial unemployment claims, and Google will evaluate which search phrases best correlate with the data provided. Justin Wolfers reports,
I fed in the weekly numbers on [...]

Prof. Mankiw gave us a nice reminder of structural unemployment on Monday. From his post…
As my colleague Erik Hurst and his co-authors have shown, states that had the largest rise in construction as a share of GDP in 2000-2006 tended to have had the greatest contraction in that industry in 2006-2009. These [...]

At about the 6th or 7th week of my Principles of Macroeconomics class we have a kind of broad (though not deep) understanding of how the economy works, how we measure it, and some of the things government does to influence it. We’ve learned about fiscal policy and monetary policy; we have a rough idea [...]

With a hat tip to Economix for this reference, economics staff at the Federal Reserve District Bank in Dallas have compared employment, unemployment and related measures in our current recession to those of earlier recessions and depressions. Here is an important, chilling graph from the report. One consolation is that later graphs show that the [...]

This is a supplement to our discussion, in Principles of Macroeconomics, about unemployment.
In this piece, by Univ. of Oregon professor Mark Thoma, you will find a review of the three kinds of unemployment and a discussion of what “normal” or “natural” employment is.
Will There be a “New Normal” for Unemployment?
Thoma also writes in his very [...]

Data on job losses suggest that more men are losing their jobs than women. One result is that women now are almost half of the civilian labor force – a significant gain from a couple of decades ago. I followed a trail from the Economix blog to this article posted by the Center for American [...]

This chart from Time/CNN’s blog “Curious Capitalist” shows job losses for recessions dating back to 1974. You have to look carefully, but the light blue line is our current recession, dated as starting Dec. ‘07. We are approaching the percent job loss seen in the early 80s.
The other interesting line shows what happened in our [...]