Macro Musings

This week I was a guest on David Beckworth’s Macro Musings podcast. We discussed my policy brief on the labor standard as well as monetary policy more generally. Here is a link for those interested.

Updates

A couple of updates:

• The topic of this month’s Cato Unbound is J.P. Koning’s proposal for the U.S. to issue a large denomination “supernote” and to tax that note as a way of punishing illegal activity. I will be contributing to the discussion this month along with James McAndrews and Will Luther. You can read J.P.’s lead essay here. The response essays will be linked below the lead essay. My response essay will appear next week.
• My paper with Alex Salter and Brian Albrecht entitled “Preventing Plunder: Military Technology, Capital Accumulation, and Economic Growth” has been accepted at the Journal of Macroeconomics. I think that this paper is based on a really interesting idea (biased, I know). The basic idea is that military technology is a limiting factor for economic growth. We also suggest that both economic growth (at least to some degree) and state capacity could be driven by this common factor.