Public Lecture – James Smith (RAND)

On the 15th of October 2009, UCD will award the Ulysses medal to Professor James Smith, former head of the Labour and Population Centre at RAND and two-time recipient of the National Institute of Aging Merit Award. Professor Smith’s lecture will take place in the Conway Lecture Theatre in the UCD Conway Institute at 4pm. The title of the lecture is “Effects of Childhood Mental and Physical Health on Adult Socioeconomic Status”. There will be coffee both before and after the lecture. Those wishing to attend, please rsvp to geary@ucd.ie

Further details of Professor’s Smiths work are available on the webpages below.

http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/smith_james_p.html
http://ideas.repec.org/e/psm28.html

Global Imbalances and the Financial Crisis

Obstfeld and Rogoff have a new paper on this important topic.

First-Year Grad Student Wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Greg Mankiw has scooped a pre-release of next week’s announcement.

The collapse in trade: things worth looking at

Menzie Chinn argues that there has been a structural break here. In other words, the decline in world trade can’t simply be explained by falling income: something more is going on. Amiti and Weinstein provide very interesting Japanese evidence in favour of the view that the something more is trade finance.

Stiglitz on Internal Devaluation

Today’s Irish Times carries an interview with Joseph Stligitz.  A striking element is his advocacy of a uniform cut in wages and prices (the internal devaluation option), as the substitute for the nominal devaluation strategy that has been pursued by several countries with independent currencies.  He also highlights the importance of fairness in pursuing this option. While he does not describe in detail how this can be achieved, my own work has advocated a twin-track strategy:   wage reductions, coupled with more vigorous pro-competition policies to ensure that wage cuts are not simply absorbed into higher markups.