Is There a Predictive Power in Market Power?

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I think that you can't these macro measures of market power are limited and problematic. We knew that the first time we published them at the council of economic advisers. The question is, like anything else in economics, does it have predictive power? Does it explain something? Does it work? And it does seem associated with things like profitability,. In some of the aggregate models, it matches features of the data like the rise in the return to capital relative to the safe rate of return on treasuries. So, you know, is this going to work for every sector? No. I think i'm an economic realist. Given the apparent end of the saving clat from asia,...

Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020.

Tyler credits Jason Furman’s intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama thanks to a call from Joe Stiglitz while still in grad school. His perspective is as idiosyncratic as his career trajectory, seeing the world of economic policy as a series of complex tradeoffs rather than something reducible to oversimplified political slogans.

Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he’s skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he’s more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he’s a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.

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Recorded January 16th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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