Eoin Treacy's view

China’s African financial engagement, real exchange rates and trade between China and Africa 

In the last decade China’s trade with Africa increased faster than its overall foreign trade. 
  
IMF: Conventional and Insidious Macroeconomic Balance-Sheet Crises 
  
This paper describes the anatomy of two types of balance-sheet macroeconomic crises. Conventional balance-sheet crises are triggered by external imbalances and balance sheet vulnerabilities. They typically occur after capital inflows have led to a substantial build up of foreign currency exposure. Insidious crises are triggered by internal imbalances and balance sheet vulnerabilities. They occur in high-growth economies when an initially equilibrating shift in relative prices and resources and credit in favor of the nontraded sector overshoots equilibrium. The paper argues that policymakers are now better able to forestall conventional crises, but they are much less capable of early detection and avoidance of insidious crises. 

Fed: “Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects” 

The evidence we present in this paper suggests that much of the steep decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 owes to ongoing structural influences that are pushing down the participation rate rather than a pronounced cyclical weakness related to potential job seekers’ discouragement about the weak state of the labor market. Most prominently, the ongoing aging of the baby-boom generation into ages with traditionally lower attachment to the labor force can, by itself, account for nearly half of the decline. 
  
Krueger: The Evolution of Rotation Group Bias: Will the Real Unemployment Rate Please Stand Up? 

This paper documents that rotation group bias — the tendency for labor force statistics to vary systematically by month in sample in labor force surveys — in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has worsened considerably over time. The estimated unemployment rate for earlier rotation groups has grown sharply relative to the unemployment rate for later rotation groups; both should be nationally representative samples. The rise in rotation group bias is driven by a growing tendency for respondents to report job search in earlier rotations relative to later rotations. We investigate explanations for the change in bias. We find that rotation group bias increased discretely after the 1994 CPS redesign and that rising nonresponse is likely a significant contributor. Survey nonresponse increased after the redesign, and subsequently trended upward, mirroring the time pattern of rotation group bias. Consistent with this explanation, there is only a small increase in rotation group bias for households that responded in all eight interviews. An analysis of rotation group bias in Canada and the U.K. reveal no rotation group bias in Canada and a modest and declining bias in the U.K. There is not a “Heisenberg Principle” of rotation group bias, whereby the bias is an inherent feature of repeated interviewing. We explore alternative weightings of the unemployment rate by rotation group and find that, despite the rise in rotation group bias, the official unemployment does no worse than these other measures in predicting alternative measures of economic slack or fitting key macroeconomic relationships.