UNDERSTANDING ECONOMICS The American Economy

The U.S. economy works through the laws of supply and demand. Learn the causes of recession by understanding gross domestic product and the laws of For example, President Obama's economic stimulus package was his idea, but.
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Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak document that, after a period of high and relatively stable internal mobility from to , interstate migration declined by half in recent years, from 3 percent to 1. High rates of internal mobility in the midth century were prompted, in part, by specific migration flows, including black migration out of the rural South and Dust Bowl migration from the Great Plains. Collins and Wanamaker create linked census datasets of black and white southern migrants observed in and and find that migrants who moved within or outside the South showed few signs of being positively selected.

Boustan argues that the migrants themselves gained tremendously — more than doubling their earnings by moving to the North — but the new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black-white wage convergence in northern labor markets. Furthermore, many white households responded to black in-migration by relocating to the suburbs. Internal mobility both across and within regions contributed to a dramatic rise in residential racial segregation in the United States from to By , the high levels of racial segregation that characterize U.

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Trevon Logan and John Parman have developed a new measure of racial segregation that exploits the complete digitized census manuscripts of and and the fact that census enumerators tended to survey neighboring households in order. Allison Shertzer and Randall Walsh develop a panel dataset following neighborhoods at the decadal level in the 10 largest northern cities from to Shertzer, Tate Twinam, and Walsh document that municipal zoning codes, first introduced in the s, were used to direct high-density development toward black neighborhoods, further entrenching patterns of residential segregation.


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Several recent studies revisit the Great Depression, bringing new data and methods to bear on longstanding questions and often offering comparisons with the more recent downturn. Public bond markets collapsed in the early years of the Depression, constraining the ability of firms with debt coming due to finance their operations. Thus, firms in the same market and subject to similar shocks may have been differentially affected by the Depression depending on the size and maturity structure of their preexisting debt. To study the effect of firms' ability to obtain credit in the early s, Efraim Benmelech, Carola Frydman, and Dimitris Papanikolaou build a dataset that includes the value and maturity of large industrial firms' long-term debt.

Firms at the 90th percentile of the distribution of firms by the total amount of debt reaching maturity cut employment by 5 percent more than firms without maturing debt. The effect of financial frictions on employment was especially strong in areas where commercial banks failed, since this curtailed firms' ability to substitute bank loans for bonds.

In the aggregate, financial frictions appear to have caused large declines in employment in large firms during the Depression, with effects that may have been two to five times larger than in the Great Recession. Banking crises are a central theme in the economics of the Great Depression, and yet there is still much to learn about how the banking system's distress spread geographically and was communicated to the real economy.

Kris Mitchener and Gary Richardson closely examine the pyramidal structure of the interbank deposit network to understand how, during banking panics, heavy withdrawals by banks transmitted distress through balance-sheet effects and reduced lending prior to the bank holiday of The researchers compare the role of bank distress during the Depression with the role of sharp reductions in lending by "shadow banks" in In a related paper, Jon Cohen, Kinda Cheryl Hachem, and Richardson focus on "relationship lending," in which commercial banks and businesses have a long-term relationship that provides banks with substantial information about the quality of borrowers.

Shifting from studies of the descent into Depression to studies of the recovery, Joshua Hausman, Paul Rhode, and Johannes Wieland investigate how the dollar's devaluation in boosted the agricultural sector and thereby yielded significantly positive macroeconomic effects.

How synchronised are US and global business cycles?

The empirical connection is revealed in the geographic pattern of demand for automobiles in the spring of , when farming areas had large increases in demand. This may reflect the relatively high marginal propensity to consume among farmers who were heavily burdened with debt prior to devaluation and disproportionately benefited from the policy change. The researchers caution that in other settings — modern Japan, for example — redistribution through devaluation could have unintended consequences by redistributing income away from groups with relatively high marginal propensities to consume.

Price Fishback has been a key scholar in the area. His summary of the vast literature about the New Deal provides an appreciation for the multiplicity of programs and goals in play. Some programs worked at cross-purposes and others had unintended consequences, for better or worse. Old Age Assistance OAA was one of several important social insurance programs implemented during the s. Daniel Fetter and Lee Lockwood exploit the full-count census of population to measure how this program affected older men's labor supply. Using variation across states in program generosity, they find clear labor supply effects of the OAA program.


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  • They report that OAA reduced the labor force participation rate of to year-old men by 5. They add, however, that the social welfare costs of the work disincentives were small. In related work, Fetter studies how state-level variation in the design of the OAA program influenced payments to the elderly and the fraction of the elderly that received program support. The New Deal greatly increased federal and state involvement. Using variation across states in requirements for local funding, Fetter finds that shifting funding responsibility from localities to states increased payments per elderly person, primarily by raising the number of benefit recipients.

    The results suggest that if states had not taken on some funding responsibility for the federal match, OAA recipiency would have been far lower than it was — 5 percent rather than 22 percent of the elderly. Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, will succeed her, becoming co-directors of the program beginning July The highest rates per 1, live births in were about e. Goldin, "Watersheds in Infant Mortality: Severnini, "Canary in a Coal Mine: Severnini, "Pollution, Infectious Disease, and Mortality: Tarr, "Coal, Smoke, and Death: Eriksson, "A Nation of Immigrants: Waldinger, "German-Jewish Emigres and U.

    Qian, "Migrants and the Making of America: Wozniak, "Declining Migration within the U. Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Princeton University Press, Applied Economics , 8 3 , July , pp. Richardson, "Relationship Lending and the Great Depression: Wieland, "Recovery from the Great Depression: He is also the Mitsui Professor of Economics at M. Development of the American Economy. Economic Fluctuations and Growth. International Finance and Macroeconomics.

    The Development of the American Economy Program

    International Trade and Investment. Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. The Women Working Longer Project. Illinois Workplace Wellness Study. This partly reflects the strength of global trade and financial linkages of the US economy with the rest of the world, but also that global shocks drive common cyclical fluctuations. This was particularly the case at the time of the Global Crisis. It is not a new phenomenon, however.

    Although the four recessions the global economy experienced since , , , and were driven by many problems in many places, they all overlapped with severe recessions in the US Kose and Terrones Although it is difficult to establish empirically whether the US economy leads business and financial cycle turning points in other economies, recent research indicates that the US appears to influence the timing and duration of recessions in many major economies Francis et al. Average share of years in which business cycles in the US and all economies were in the same phase.

    A higher share suggests more synchronization between two countries. A surge in US growth — whether due to expansionary fiscal policies or other reasons — could provide a significant boost to the global economy. Shocks to the US economy transmit to the rest of the world through three main channels. Estimates indicate that a percentage-point increase in US growth could boost growth in advanced economies by 0. Investment could respond even more strongly. A boost to investment could come for instance from fiscal stimulus measures — but the effect would largely depend on the circumstances of the implementation of these measures, including the amount of remaining economic slack, the response of monetary policy, and the adjustment of household and business expectations to the prospect of higher deficit and debt levels.

    Economy of the United States

    A faster tightening of US monetary policy than previously expected could, for instance, lead to sudden increases in borrowing costs, currency pressures, financial market volatility, and capital outflows for more vulnerable emerging market and developing economies. Even in the absence of actual policy changes, heightened uncertainty driven by financial market volatility or ambiguity about the direction and scope of US policies could discourage investment both in the US and in the rest of the world. Haver, Bloomberg, World Bank estimates.

    Growth spillovers are based on a Bayesian vector autoregression model. Vector autoregressions were estimated for QQ2 with two lags.

    The Development of the American Economy Program

    Important as the US is to the global economy, the US economy is also affected by its trade and financial linkages with the rest of the world. Global economic developments play an important role in driving activity and financial markets in the US. US multinationals account for a large share of US output and labour productivity growth, and their presence in financial markets is large.

    In turn, foreign multinationals operating in the US provide a large share of US employment and exports Figure 3. Much of the global value chain activity is conducted through US multinational corporations and their affiliates abroad. Overall, one-quarter of US exports represents US value added embedded in other countries' exports. This interconnectedness is an important source of spillovers between the US and the global economy. As a result, growth setbacks originating in other economies, or policy changes affecting market access of US companies, can have detrimental effects on the US.

    These effects are particularly noticeable in the more globally integrated manufacturing sector Figure 3. Bureau of Economic Analysis, World Bank estimates. Share of multinational corporations in US sales, exports and imports of goods and employment. Vertical lines indicate 16thth percentile confidence bands. Vector autoregression models are estimated for QQ2 with four lags. Given its size and the strength of its ties with the global economy, shocks to the US economy are transmitted globally through many channels.

    On the one hand, an acceleration in US growth could be expected to have positive effects for the rest of the world, if not counterbalanced by increased trade barriers or an unexpected tightening of global financing conditions. On the other hand, persistent policy uncertainty could hamper growth throughout the global economy, and could have particularly adverse effects on investment growth in emerging market and developing economies, which have already showed weakness in recent years World Bank The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are entirely those of the authors.

    They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Smooth Sailing or Stormy Waters? World Bank, Washington, DC. Louis Review 97 2: White House Council of Economic Advisers. World Bank , Spillovers and Weak Growth: Global Economic Prospects January , Washington.

    International finance Macroeconomic policy.