Mark Thoma | |
---|---|
Born | December 15, 1956 |
Academic career | |
Field | Macroeconomics, econometrics |
Institution | University of Oregon |
Alma mater | California State University, Chico (BA) Washington State University (PhD) |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Mark Allen Thoma (born December 15, 1956) is a macroeconomist and econometrician and a professor of economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Oregon. Thoma is best known as a regular columnist for The Fiscal Times through his blog "Economist's View", which Paul Krugman called "the best place by far to keep up with the latest in economic discourse", [1] and as an analyst at CBS MoneyWatch . He is also a regular contributor to EconoMonitor.
Thoma obtained his B.A. from California State University, Chico in 1980, and his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1985. [2] After having been visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California, San Diego in 1986–87, he joined the faculty of the Department of Economics of the University of Oregon in 1987, where he was head of the department from 1995 to 2000 and became full professor in 2010.
Thoma's research focuses on how money impacts the economy. Some of Thoma's earliest work deals with real economic activity as related to a number of variables. In a 1994 paper, he studies the asymmetry between the supply of money in an economy and the distribution of income. [3] He argues that the relationship between the supply of money and income is weakest when real economic activity is at a high, but correlates closely as economic activity declines. In another paper, he concludes that financial variables such as interest rates are not useful as a predictive measure of future economic activity. [4]
Thoma's more controversial work has dealt with the business cycle under different conditions in partisan politics. He first broached the topic in 1991 with an article called Partisan Effects in Economies with Variable Electoral Terms. He contends that in parliamentary governments—which call elections at their leisure—conservative parties are more likely to experience recessions near the end of their terms, while liberal administrations would be likely to experience periods of increasing growth. In a later article, Thoma expands on already existing academic literature which suggests surprise regime changes occur on a regular schedule, forming the basis of a political business cycle. He applies this logic to open economies in order to find that not only is there empirical support for the idea of a political business cycle, but there may yet be more implications for domestic indicators on a partisan basis.
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. It is influenced by a host of factors that sometimes behave erratically and impact production, employment, and inflation.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction that occurs when there is a general decline in economic activity. Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending. This may be triggered by various events, such as a financial crisis, an external trade shock, an adverse supply shock, the bursting of an economic bubble, or a large-scale anthropogenic or natural disaster.
In economics and political science, fiscal policy is the use of government revenue collection and expenditure to influence a country's economy. The use of government revenue expenditures to influence macroeconomic variables developed in reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the previous laissez-faire approach to economic management became unworkable. Fiscal policy is based on the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian economics theorised that government changes in the levels of taxation and government spending influence aggregate demand and the level of economic activity. Fiscal and monetary policy are the key strategies used by a country's government and central bank to advance its economic objectives. The combination of these policies enables these authorities to target inflation and to increase employment. In modern economies, inflation is conventionally considered "healthy" in the range of 2%–3%. Additionally, it is designed to try to keep GDP growth at 2%–3% and the unemployment rate near the natural unemployment rate of 4%–5%. This implies that fiscal policy is used to stabilise the economy over the course of the business cycle.
In economics, the fiscal multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from a change in government spending. More generally, the exogenous spending multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from any autonomous change in spending. When this multiplier exceeds one, the enhanced effect on national income may be called the multiplier effect. The mechanism that can give rise to a multiplier effect is that an initial incremental amount of spending can lead to increased income and hence increased consumption spending, increasing income further and hence further increasing consumption, etc., resulting in an overall increase in national income greater than the initial incremental amount of spending. In other words, an initial change in aggregate demand may cause a change in aggregate output that is a multiple of the initial change.
Within the budgetary process, deficit spending is the amount by which spending exceeds revenue over a particular period of time, also called simply deficit, or budget deficit, the opposite of budget surplus. The term may be applied to the budget of a government, private company, or individual. A central point of controversy in economics, government deficit spending was first identified as a necessary economic tool by John Maynard Keynes in the wake of the Great Depression.
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.
The quantity theory of money is a hypothesis within monetary economics which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, and that the causality runs from money to prices. This implies that the theory potentially explains inflation. It originated in the 16th century and has been proclaimed the oldest surviving theory in economics.
A balanced budget is a budget in which revenues are equal to expenditures. Thus, neither a budget deficit nor a budget surplus exists. More generally, it is a budget that has no budget deficit, but could possibly have a budget surplus. A cyclically balanced budget is a budget that is not necessarily balanced year-to-year but is balanced over the economic cycle, running a surplus in boom years and running a deficit in lean years, with these offsetting over time.
Alvin Harvey Hansen was an American economist who taught at the University of Minnesota and was later a chair professor of economics at Harvard University. Often referred to as "the American Keynes", he was a widely read popular author on economic issues, and an influential advisor to the government on economic policy. Hansen helped create the Council of Economic Advisors and the Social Security system. He is best remembered today for introducing Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s and 40s.
Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor. He is serving as the Robert M. Solow Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Mark Andrew Skousen is an American economist and writer. He currently teaches at Chapman University, where he has been the Doti-Spogli chair in free enterprise at the Argyros School of Business and Economics since 2022.
Alberto Francesco Alesina was an Italian economist who was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University from 2003 until his death in 2020. He was known principally as an economist of politics and culture, and was famed for his usage of economic tools to study social and political issues. He was described as having “almost single-handedly” established the modern field of political economy, and as a likely contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling is a macroeconomic method which is often employed by monetary and fiscal authorities for policy analysis, explaining historical time-series data, as well as future forecasting purposes. DSGE econometric modelling applies general equilibrium theory and microeconomic principles in a tractable manner to postulate economic phenomena, such as economic growth and business cycles, as well as policy effects and market shocks.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism — academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) with neoclassical economics.
In macroeconomics, particularly in the history of economic thought, the Treasury view is the assertion that fiscal policy has no effect on the total amount of economic activity and unemployment, even during times of economic recession. This view was most famously advanced in the 1930s by the staff of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The position can be characterized as:
Any increase in government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of private spending or investment, and thus has no net impact on economic activity.
John Howland Cochrane is an American economist who has served as the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2015. A specialist in financial economics and macroeconomics, he has been a professor of finance and economics by courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2016. From 1994 to 2015, he served as the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Real business-cycle theory is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC theory sees business cycle fluctuations as the efficient response to exogenous changes in the real economic environment. That is, the level of national output necessarily maximizes expected utility, and governments should therefore concentrate on long-run structural policy changes and not intervene through discretionary fiscal or monetary policy designed to actively smooth out economic short-term fluctuations.
Market monetarism is a school of macroeconomics that advocates that central banks use a nominal income target instead of inflation, unemployment, or other measures of economic activity, including in times of demand shocks such as the bursting of the 2000s United States housing bubble and in the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe that money supply or commodity prices such as gold are the optimal guide to intervention. Market monetarists also reject the New Keynesian focus on interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy. Market monetarists prefer a nominal income target due to their twin beliefs that rational expectations are crucial to policy, and that markets react instantly to changes in their expectations about future policy, without the "long and variable lags" postulated by Milton Friedman.
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 is a non-fiction book by American economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, written in response to growing socio-political discourse on the return of economic conditions similar to The Great Depression. The book was first published in 1999 and later updated in 2008 following his Nobel Prize of Economics. The Return of Depression Economics uses Keynesian analysis of past economics crisis, drawing parallels between the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Depression. Krugman challenges orthodox economic notions of restricted government spending, deregulation of markets and the efficient market hypothesis. Krugman offers policy recommendations for the prevention of future financial crises and suggests that policymakers "relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression" and prop up spending and enable broader access to credit.
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