Interesting papers at the NBER Summer Institute 2016

Check out the program or this non-representative pick of papers that caught my eye:

• In the Corporate Finance session we get a piece by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi and Emil Verner:

  An increase in the household debt to GDP ratio in the medium run predicts lower subsequent GDP growth, higher unemployment, and negative growth forecasting errors in a panel of 30 countries from 1960 to 2012.

• Also this (pdf) paper by Sydney Ludvigson, Sai Ma and Serena Ng in the Forecasting & Empirical Methods session looks good:

  […] we find that sharply higher uncertainty about real economic activity in recessions is fully an endogenous response to other shocks that cause business cycle fluctuations, while uncertainty about financial markets is a likely source of the fluctuations.

• This piece by Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, Davide Malacrino and Luigi Pistaferri in the Aggregate Implications of Micro Consumption Behavior session is interesting:

  Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth. Fourth, returns have an individual permanent component that explains almost 20% of the variation.

• Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro and Matt Taddy present a paper in the Political Economy session:

  Partisanship [in US politics] was low and roughly constant from 1873 to the early 1990s, then increased dramatically in subsequent years.

Claudia Sahm offers good comments:

Recessions are almost by definition a time of instability, and it is hard to trace down the roots of instability in models that largely assume it away. I am a big fan of belief shocks, I don’t think we can fully understand recession/recovery without appealing to shifts in expectations. And yet, I have no idea how you cleanly, credibly separate beliefs from credit supply.