From Economic Policy Journal:
And I mean rips.
Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi put together a paper attempting to justify Keynesian interventions in the economy. The paper is so flawed that I seriously doubt an economics grad student would get any grade higher than a C on the paper.
Here's John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Schultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution, with his take on the Blinder-Zandi paper.
Yesterday the New York Times published an article about simulations of the effects of fiscal stimulus packages and financial interventions using an old Keynesian model. The simulations were reported in an unpublished working paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi. I offered a short quote for the article saying simply that the reported results were completely different from my own empirical work on the policy responses to the crisis.
I have now had a chance to read the paper and have more to say. First, I do not think the paper tells us anything about the impact of these policies. It simply runs the policies through a model (Zandi’s model) and reports what the model says would happen. It does not look at what actually happened, and it does not look at other models, only Zandi’s own model.
I have explained the defects with this type of exercise many times, most recently in testimony at a July 1, 2010 House Budget Committee hearing where Zandi also appeared. I showed that the results are entirely dependent on the model: old Keynesian models (such as Zandi’s model) show large effects and new Keynesian models show small effects. So there is nothing new in the fiscal stimulus part of this paper.
Second, I looked at how they assessed the impact of the financial market interventions. Again they do not directly assess the interventions. They just simulate the model with and without the interventions. They say that they have equations in the model which include the financial interventions as variables, but they do not report the size or significance of the coefficients or how they obtained them.
Third, the working paper makes no mention of previously published papers in the literature which get different results. It is rather standard in research to provide a literature review and to explain why the results are different from previous published papers....MORE
