This paper reports three sets of facts: 1) Declines in housing are very good predictors of oncoming recessions in the U.S.; 2) Housing and consumer durables are the most important components of GDP that are soft prior to the official beginnings of recessions, and these two contribute...

Models based on leading indicators suggest that a recession is almost certainly imminent, but Edward Leamer, a prominent econometrician, distrusts the econometrics and argues that the housing slump will be confined to that sector.

Edward Leamer has questions about the Treasury's bailout plan, but the question is: does Secretary Paulson have answers? If not, then Leamer proposes a more direct way to spend $700 billion dollars that attacks the root of the problem--housing price declines: call it "trickle up" economics.

We develop a novel Bayesian pooling technique to estimate aggregate production functions for the previously centrally planned economies (PCPEs) of Eastern Europe and for Western economies, as well as for a group of developing countries. This technique adjusts for the low quality of the PCPE data...