Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

I came across this piece on The Atlantic website by Eamonn Fingleton  arguing that Japan's two decade long stagnation is largely a myth. I'm not willing, just yet, to completely go along with his thesis that this myth has been stoked by the Japanese Government to ease political pressure on their export-oriented economic model. (It would certainly be interesting if it were true. It is definitely the case that Japanese companies have become adept at dealing with potential US political pressure, e.g. assembling cars in the US.) However, as a semi-regular visitor to Japan I do find it hard to completely believe the stagnation story. The place just seems so clean and vibrant. If Japan is stagnating, then American cities like Detroit would do well to 'stagnate' also. Anyways, beyond the interesting stats on Japanese trade growth and the improvement in living standards since the 1980s in Eamonn's piece, I've been sceptical of the stagnation story based on official...

I was getting pretty tired of the usual LaTeX Beamer presentation themes (see here for examples). So I decided to create an (unofficial) LaTeX Beamer theme for the LSE. It is based on the BerlinFU  theme and Seth Brown 's Bunsen theme . It's still very much a prototype (the style files need significant cleaning up). But the theme does produce decent presentations (see here for an example). You can find the theme on GitHub here . Please feel free to improve or fork it. Update 11 January 2012: Here is a full example of the theme in action:

Following on from my previous post  about US Federal Reserve inflation forecast errors, I decided to put together a descriptive graph to see if there might be a partisan bias to these forecast erros. Also, given all of the work in the political economy on political business cycles , I wanted to see if forecast errors changed around elections.  (See the  previous post  for what I mean by Fed inflation forecast error.)   So, I have two questions: Have Fed inflation forecast errors been different during Democratic and Republican presidencies? Are Fed inflation forecast errors different for election periods and non-election periods? To answer these questions, I simply made a graph using the same inflation forecast error data as before, but arranged in terms of quarters before a US presidential election (quarters with elections are coded 0). I then coloured the inflation errors by the sitting president's party. Finally, I used  R 's ggplot2 loess ...

I'm putting together some descriptive statistics for a project (with Cassie Grafstrom) on the forecast errors that Federal Reserve staff make. Is there anything systematic about it? Our forecast data are from the Fed's Green Book , which is produced before each FOMC meeting . I've created a graph of quarterly forecast errors (simply Forecasts Made 2 Quarters in Advance - Actual Inflation from the Federal Reserves FRED  database. Also, forecasts are compared to GNP/GDP deflators and chain-type price indexes, based on changes in what inflation indicators the forecasts are trying to measure across time). From this graph it seems like the Fed has gotten much better at forecasting inflation two quarters out. However, this is a bit misleading since the absolute level of inflation varies considerably over this time span. In the early part we have the stagflation period with high inflation. Then from the start of the Volker Fed in 1979 absolute inflation decreased. To deal...