Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

摘要

Somewhere, Milton Friedman is smiling. Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, has provided an unalloyed Chicago-style explanation for the U.S. economy's poor performance during and immediately after the Great Recession. The conventional wisdom blames this performance on problems in financial markets. Though economists have yet to fully describe the links between finance and the real economy, authors such as Hall (2010) have written that our general ideas about financial crises have meshed pretty well with recent macroeco-nomic data, particularly the collapse in investment in 2008. Additionally, the slow pace of the ensuing recovery is consistent with Reinhart and Rogoff's (2009) finding that severe financial crises are often followed by long periods of economic stagnation. Mulligan disagrees with the financial focus of recent work on the Great Recession. He concedes that financial turmoil may have had a large initial impact on the economy, but he argues that the biggest effect of the financial crisis was that it encouraged an expansion of the social safety net that reduced the return to working. And as any Chicago economist would predict, rational workers have responded to this expansion by working less.