Documents Bluedorn, John C. 5 results

"We revisit the conventional view that output fluctuates around a stable trend by analyzing professional long-term forecasts for 38 advanced and emerging market economies. If transitory deviations around a trend dominate output fluctuations, then forecasters should not change their long-term output level forecasts following an unexpected change in current period output. By contrast, an analysis of Consensus Economics forecasts since 1989 suggest that output forecasts are super-persistent—an unexpected 1 percent upward revision in current period output typically translates into a revision of ten year-ahead forecasted output by about 2 percent in both advanced and emerging markets. Drawing upon evidence from the behavior of forecast errors, the persistence of actual output is typically weaker than forecasters expect, but still consistent with output shocks normally having large and permanent level effects."

"The world is in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing Great Lockdown has pushed many countries into deep recessions—worse than during the 2008–09 global financial crisis. In response, governments and central banks all over the world have introduced strong discretionary (one-off and specific) fiscal and monetary measures to counteract the economic fallout caused by the spread of the coronavirus. Existing automatic stabilizers (such as income-based taxes and unemployment and household benefits), which differ across countries, have generally operated freely, providing some further cushion..."

"Early evidence on the pandemic's effects pointed to women's employment falling disproportionately, leading observers to call a “she-cession.” This paper documents the extent and persistence of this phenomenon in a quarterly sample of 38 advanced and emerging market economies. We show that there is a large degree of heterogeneity across countries, with over half to two-thirds exhibiting larger declines in women's than men's employment rates. These gender differences in COVID-19's effects are typically short-lived, lasting only a quarter or two on average. We also show that she-cessions are strongly related to COVID-19's impacts on gender shares in employment within sectors."

"We assess the supply-side effects on European Union (EU) economic activity if Russian gas imports were to suddenly cease. Unlike other studies, we account for the global scope of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. In the absence of frictions, an open-economy, multi-sector general equilibrium model suggests that the adverse economic impact on the EU shrinks five-fold if integration with the global LNG market is considered. While greater integration provides a buffer for the EU through trade, the flip side is that other LNG importers (such as Japan, South Korea, and Pakistan) see adverse effects from higher prices."

"How often have wage-price spirals occurred, and what has happened in their aftermath? We investigate this by creating a database of past wage-price spirals among a wide set of advanced economies going back to the 1960s. We define a wage-price spiral as an episode where at least three out of four consecutive quarters saw accelerating consumer prices and rising nominal wages. Perhaps surprisingly, only a small minority of such episodes were followed by sustained acceleration in wages and prices. Instead, inflation and nominal wage growth tended to stabilize, leaving real wage growth broadly unchanged. A decomposition of wage dynamics using a wage Phillips curve suggests that nominal wage growth normally stabilizes at levels that are consistent with observed inflation and labor market tightness. When focusing on episodes that mimic the recent pattern of falling real wages and tightening labor markets, declining inflation and nominal wage growth increases tended to follow – thus allowing real wages to catch up. We conclude that an acceleration of nominal wages should not necessarily be seen as a sign that a wage-price spiral is taking hold."