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Dec 3, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Sanjay Patnaik |Jón Steinsson |Conor Walsh
The clean energy transition has quietly pushed ahead in recent decades, with solar and wind energy accounting for almost 15% of total U.S. energy production in February 2024. The benefits of this transition on climate change have been celebrated, but less acknowledged have been the potential economic benefits.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Alan Auerbach |Janice Eberly |William G. Gale |Jón Steinsson
Fiscal deficit projections are used by policymakers to understand the trajectory of U.S. debt. Between 1984 and 2003, Congress was responsive to these projections, raising taxes and cutting spending when projections showed that the deficit would grow. However, since 2004, fiscal policy has ceased being responsive to debt projections regardless of the party in power.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
aei.org | R. Glenn Hubbard |Doug Elmendorf |Wendy Edelberg |Janice Eberly
When Congress considers legislation, nonpartisan agencies provide estimates of the law’s potential economic effects to policymakers, a process known as “scoring.” In recent decades, analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation have developed models that incorporate complex feedback effects, going beyond conventional scoring techniques.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Wendy Edelberg |Douglas W. Elmendorf |R. Glenn Hubbard
When Congress considers legislation, nonpartisan agencies provide estimates of the law’s potential economic effects to policymakers, a process known as “scoring.” In recent decades, analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation have developed models that incorporate complex feedback effects, going beyond conventional scoring techniques.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Benjamin H. Harris |Oleg Itskhoki |Elina Ribakova
Since 2022, Western nations have emplaced a number of sanctions against Russia in response to the war in Ukraine. Policymakers and pundits have debated the efficacy of these measures, but this debate is belied by a deeper question: What does it mean for sanctions to “work”? In new BPEA research, Oleg Itskhoki of Harvard and Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics explore fundamental questions of the theory and practice of sanctions in the Russia context.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Pascal Michaillat |Louise Sheiner |Jón Steinsson
The full-employment rate of unemployment may seem like a contradiction, but in fact, economists have long understood that some unemployment is necessary. In their new paper, Pascal Michaillat of UC Santa Cruz and Saez of the University of California, Berkeley present a new formula for identifying the efficient rate of unemployment in the U.S. and find that the labor market has been inefficiently slack for most of the last century.
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Carol Graham |Stephen Kissler |Jón Steinsson
As COVID-19 swept across the globe, many nations, including the U.S., struggled to define a cohesive public health strategy to prevent the spread of the disease. However, in spite of the lack of a clear plan, improvised strategies of behavioral changes—e.g., masking, social distancing—slowed transmission until a vaccine could be developed.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Samuel Hanson |Jón Steinsson |Daniel K. Tarullo
The failure of three mid-sized banks in March 2023—three of the four largest bank failures in history—shook financial markets and could’ve spread to other banks if regulators hadn’t stepped in. Two on-going trends in finance contributed to these failures: an increase in uninsured deposits and the migration of business lending to non-banks.
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May 22, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Donald Kohn |Jón Steinsson |Pierre Yared
Most advanced economies enjoyed a long period of low, stable inflation prior to 2021, with inflation in the U.S. actually running below the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target for much of the 2010s. This stability was driven in part by factors external to monetary policy, including downward price and wage pressures from globalization and de-unionization.
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May 8, 2024 | 
brookings.edu | Janice Eberly |Ben Harris |Stefanie Stantcheva |Jón Steinsson
Many indicators suggest that the U.S. economy is thriving, yet Americans continue to have a negative overall economic outlook. Stubbornly high inflation has played a significant role in this negative sentiment among consumers, even as wage growth has caught up with the rate of inflation. In a new study, “Why do we dislike inflation?” Stefanie Stantcheva fielded a survey to explore how Americans experience inflation and why they have such strong feelings about it.
