Debt and Growth - A Response to Reinhart and Rogoff. Reinhart and Rogoff Were Right About New Zealand. Before Peter Jackson chose to film the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films in his native land, New Zealand was mostly known as the small country next to Australia.
Its main exports are milk and meat from pasture-raised sheep, cows and deer. This hasn't prevented a few pastoral islands from playing an outsized role in the controversy surrounding Carmen Reinhart's and Kenneth Rogoff's research into the connection between government indebtedness and economic growth. To briefly recap for the five people who may not have heard, in 2010, Reinhart and Rogoff wrote a short paper called "Growth in a Time of Debt. " It was often cited by deficit doomsayers who favored tax increases and spending cuts, even though the findings didn't actually support those policies. Then, about two weeks ago, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released a paper of their own.
"The exclusions for New Zealand are of particular significance. The Rogoff and Reinhart Controversy: A Summing Up. In one of life’s little ironies, last Friday’s disappointing G.D.P. figures, which reflected a sharp fall in government spending, appeared on the same day that the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an Op-Ed in the Times defending their famous (now infamous) research that conservative politicians around the world had seized upon to justify penny-pinching policies.
Addressing a new paper by three lesser lights of their profession from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which uncovered data omissions, questionable methods of weighting, and elementary coding errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s original work, and which went around the world like a viral video, the Harvard duo dismissed the entire brouhaha as “academic kerfuffle” that hadn’t vitiated their main points.
Really? Even somebody living in a bubble stretching over Harvard Yard would have difficulty believing that. The Marketing of Austerity Policies The Relationship between Debt Levels and Growth. Carmen Reinhart. Carmen M. Reinhart (née Castellanos, born October 7, 1955) is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School.[1] Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.[2] and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland.[3] She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU,[4] and a member of Council on Foreign Relations.
She is also member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association,[5] and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.[6] Early life and career[edit] Research and publication[edit] Personal[edit] Selected publications[edit]