Economics

In celebration of Richard Thaler's prize lecture for his 2017 Nobel prize, we interviewed two of his best co-authors -- Hersh Shefrin and Shlomo Benartzi -- to discuss the future of behavioral economics.

In this installment of the interview, Professor Mian explains the major findings in his recent research paper "Household Debt and Business Cycles World Wide" and the important implications of that paper.

Olivier Blanchard a list of things that macroeconomists normally agreed on and need no further discussions.

“The money helicopter has arrived,” Claire Jones writes in her FT Alphaville post, citing Hong Kong Finance Secretary’s announcement of a handout of HKD...

A story about three economists agree with the prevailing consensus that the Phillips Curve of the US is flattened in the last few decades on the one hand; and dispute the idea that the Phillips Curve is dead on the other.

The Federal Reserve is expected to cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points this week. This has been the baseline market assumption since Chairman Jerome Powell's speech at Jackson Hole, in which he proclaimed, “the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance." The question is, how many dissenting votes will Powell face in this meeting?

In this installment, we continue our discussion with Prof. Charles Calomiris, Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School. The topic of this installment is the missing role of politics in economics models of banking crises. We also discussed if Calomiris thinks macroeconomics has a similar problem.

A spread of over 3.5 percentage points between US and Hong Kong Interest rate persisted for close to two months and so far arbitrage has failed to close the gap, leading to discussion of whether Hong Kong's Linked Exchange System is failing. This article, however, will explore some technical factors behind this interesting interest rate gap.

In a recent IMF working paper "Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts: The Case of IMF Growth Projections", economist Klaus-Peter Hellwig examined IMF's World Economic Forecasts (WEO) and check if the forecast model suffer from the problem of overfitting.

HKD tends to be on the strong side (closer to HKD 7.75 per USD) when the interest rate differential is positive (HIBOR > LIBOR).