We put together a team of macro-, micro- and energy economists to think about the question: what would be the effects on the German economy of a stop of energy imports from Russia?
In short: moderate, especially in combination with the right policy response.
Summary:
- no single study finds deviation of yearly GDP from baseline larger than 5.3%
- no single study finds recession with GDP drop larger than 2.5%
Our review builds heavily on the careful and highly recommended survey by @SVR_Wirtschaft
Of course, any model-based quantitative assessment is necessarily subject to a large degree of uncertainty, both with respect to parameter values and functional form assumptions and in the form of uncertainty about model choice and assumptions (“model uncertainty”).
We nevertheless think that the combined body of work suggests that:
- a recession with year-to-year GDP drop of >5% seems highly unlikely
- a recession with GDP drop of 10 or 15% or even Great Depression-type scenario is completely implausible
As we said many times, these numbers -- GDP deductions of 3% or 5%, or a recession with a 2% GDP drop -- are substantial.
But they do not amount to an economic catastrophe.
In case this wasn't clear and to put it a bit more bluntly: the "completely implausible" scenarios include
- "the loss of millions of jobs" (@Bundeskanzler Scholz)
🤓 Nerd tweet for the heterogeneous-agent macro crowd
You like sequence-space Jacobians? But you also like working in continuous time?
Then I have just the thing for you! 🤓
Two very nice recent papers and some code:
1. René Glawion's very nice continuous-time implementation of the @a_auclert @BardoczyBence Rognlie @ludwigstraub sequence-space method:
- “Sequence-Space Jacobians in Continuous Time”
- GitHub repository with codes papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… github.com/reneglawion/Se…
2. @AdrienBilal and Shlok Goyal's paper on the same topic
- "Some Pleasant Sequence-Space Arithmetic in Continuous Time"
New study on China decoupling using similar approach to our work on the Russian gas cut-off.
Punchline: our results provide a rationale for embarking on gradual de-risking trajectory to avoid a much more costly cold turkey decoupling dictated by geopolitical events
1. Cold-turkey decoupling would be costly: "financial crisis in short-run + Brexit in long-run" is good way of thinking about it. So costly though still not Armageddon.
2. More gradual decoupling or de-risking --> smaller costs because it avoids the most extreme short run losses
So one can view the relatively low economic costs of gradual de-risking as an insurance premium paid to insure against the possibility of large losses and potential political backlash associated with a hard cold-turkey decoupling.
It's about Bob's incredible gift as a writer and his generosity toward his students.
It's the fall of 2009 and I'm a grad student at the University of Chicago. Bob is on my thesis committee.
I've just finished a first draft of my job market paper with which I will be applying for assistant professor jobs. I've put *a ton* of work into the paper and I'm pretty happy with it overall. I email it to Bob asking whether he could take a look, hoping for some verbal comments
Below is what it looked like at the time.
A day later Bob emails me back saying "Come by my office, I've got some minor comments."