Ranking CEAs

Tino Sanandaji ranks CEAs by their academic accomplishments.  The ranking is based on the total citations of the three members on the Council.

The ERP

CEA Chair Christy Romer blogs about the new Economic Report of the President.  She also provides the link to the report itself.

One of my former staff at the CEA takes note of this sentence:

This past year, the Council has been blessed with staff of a caliber not seen since the glory days of the CEA in the 1960s, when future Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow were senior economists and James Tobin was a member.

Really? I am impressed with the current CEA staff as well, but this seems a bit of an overstatement. I wonder who on the current staff is expected to win a Nobel prize.

I am proud of the staff I put together when I was CEA chair, and I am sure other CEA chairmen are as well.  Yet I would venture a guess that the post-1960s peak in the caliber of the CEA came in 1982-83.  I was a junior staffer then, along with University of Chicago economist John Cochrane, but put that aside.  Martin Feldstein was the chair, and the senior staff included Larry Summers and Paul Krugman.  That makes three winners of the John Bates Clark Award--a feat that, I suspect, has not been repeated since.

Here is a project for some ambitious blogger: Go to old ERPs, which list the CEA members and staff, and collate them with data on citations.  That would provide one way to judge objectively (albeit imperfectly) the quality of CEA economists over time.

Update: Here.

Become an Ec 10 Section Leader

Interested in an exciting teaching opportunity?  Become a section leader for ec 10, the introductory economics course at Harvard College. 

The job is open to PhD candidates in economics, master's students in public policy, business, and related fields, and law students.  The only requirements are a good training in economics and a desire to share your passion about the field with some of the best undergraduates on the planet.  Past ec 10 section leaders have included NEC Director Larry Summers, Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh, and CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, as well as the humble proprietor of this blog.

Click here to learn more.  (Access to this link available only to members of the Harvard community.)

Imperfect Information and Aggregate Supply

I have posted a new paper, which Ricardo Reis and I have prepared for the new Handbook of Monetary Economics.  Warning: For econonerds only.

Reading the Budget's Footnotes

From the Commitee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

The Administration is taking two tax provisions from the 2009 stimulus bill -- expansions of the child tax credit and the EITC -- and claiming them as part of the "current policy" Bush tax cuts. And they are doing something similar for Pell grants: assuming that they will receive sufficient funding to pay out the maximum grant level set in the stimulus bill.

The Administration didn't inherit these policies, they created them. And worse, still, they created them as explicitly temporary, under a stimulus bill which they claimed was meant only to help bring us out of this recession.

Yet the White House wants to continue these policies, and they don't want to pay for them. So what do they do? They hide these policies in their baseline, in the hopes that they won't have to.

Austan Goolsbee on The Daily Show

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