Evan Soltas

I have been doing some reading for my undergraduate thesis, which looks at the role of credit-supply shocks in the Spain during its housing boom and bust, and I came across some interesting thoughts from Bob Hall. Commenting on research by Alan Auerbach...

This piece from David Wasserman is, in my view, one of the most interesting perspectives on the role that racism and xenophobia are playing in the 2016 Republican primary. Wasserman:
If Donald Trump somehow falls three delegates short of reaching the magic 1,237 delegates needed for the Republican nomination, he may be haunted by an obscure outcome from the primary voting in Illinois on Tuesday. There’s clear evidence that Trump...

Paul Krugman writes:
The Sanders win defied all the polls, and nobody really knows why. But a widespread guess is that his attacks on trade agreements resonated with a broader audience than his attacks on Wall Street; and this message was especially powerful in Michigan...

Matt Klein circulated this nice graph from Renaissance Macro on Twitter, and he suggested that we might infer from it that productivity growth responds to cyclical conditions.
Since this argument has been getting a lot of airtime recently—from Jared Bernstein and Gerald Friedman, to name two examples—I wanted to explain why I think we should be skeptical about this piece of evidence and others like it, and to explain what...