Ben Moll Profile picture
Mar 7, 2022 13 tweets 8 min read Read on X
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.

1/
Worth emphasizing: the -3% GNE loss number is an extremely conservative upper bound.

Using the more reasonable @DBaqaee-Farhi model, we obtain numbers that are an order of magnitude lower.

But this is a hard counterfactual to predict so we wanted to be conservative.

3/
Just realized the link above was to the German version. Here’s the English one econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkp…
Replication materials for our results are here benjaminmoll.com/RussianGas_Rep…
We've gotten a lot of questions whether and to what extent our model features production chains and cascades.

The most recent appendix discusses this more clearly:

benjaminmoll.com/RussianGas_App… Image
We review the many other high-quality studies assessing effects of an import stop on German economy

benjaminmoll.com/RussianGas_Lit…

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% Image
Our review builds heavily on the careful and highly recommended survey by @SVR_Wirtschaft Image
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”). ImageImage
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 Image
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)

- "mass unemployment and poverty" (Habeck)

spiegel.de/politik/olaf-s…

theguardian.com/world/2022/mar… ImageImage
Regarding lost jobs, the largest number is ~500,000 (1% increase of unemployment rate from 5% to 6%) predicted by GD gemeinschaftsdiagnose.de/wp-content/upl…

Of course a large number but not "millions." And it could probably be substantially reduced with standard policy measures (Kurzarbeit etc) ImageImage

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More from @ben_moll

Jun 28, 2024
How should we tax capital gains due to rising asset prices? On realization? On accrual? Or should we perhaps tax wealth?

The existing public finance literature has a big hole making it unsuitable for thinking about these issues: it doesn't model asset prices!

🧵 on a new paper: Image
We “put the ‘finance’ into ‘public finance’”, meaning that we study optimal redistributive taxation with changing asset prices.

Joint work with Mark Aguiar and @Florian_Scheuer

Paper here:

Slides here: benjaminmoll.com/PFPF/
benjaminmoll.com/PFPF_slides/
This is important because there have been a number of recent policy proposals to tax wealth or unrealized capital gains

Just 3 days ago @gabriel_zucman made one for @g20org

When does that make sense?

Read 24 tweets
Apr 29, 2024
🤓 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: Image
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…
Image
2. @AdrienBilal and Shlok Goyal's paper on the same topic
- "Some Pleasant Sequence-Space Arithmetic in Continuous Time"

Pleasant indeed 😃 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Image
Read 5 tweets
Dec 14, 2023
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

Here is why:
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.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 28, 2023
"The Power of Substitution: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect" with @MSchularick and @GeorgZachmann

Presentation tomorrow at 11:30am ET at @BrookingsEcon conference. Live stream brookings.edu/events/bpea-fa…

Draft: brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…

Slides: benjaminmoll.com/GGGD_slides/ Image
This is another follow-up on our "What If?" paper with @BachmannRudi @DBaqaee @christianbaye13 @kuhnmo @andreasloeschel @APeichl #KarenPittel.

Now with a systematic analysis how Germany blunted Putin's energy weapon.

This twitter thread of mine collecting concrete cases of substitution and demand reduction now also has a permanent home in the paper's appendix 😃

Image
Read 6 tweets
Jul 11, 2023
I taught a new undergraduate macroeconomics course @LSEEcon. Goals:

1. *Modern* macro = microfoundations rather than IS-LM

2. Simple enough that undergrads get it

3. But still end up somewhere reasonably close to research frontier

All materials here https://t.co/58z85Oa53hbenjaminmoll.com/lectures/


Course description here

In case it's useful, e.g. for your own teaching: .zip file with all .tex files and figures etc so you can edit these notes yourself https://t.co/XJLQ2EB9fh https://t.co/2o08czNH8cbenjaminmoll.com/Syllabus_EC2B1…
benjaminmoll.com/EC2B1_Lecture_…
One thing I really enjoyed was to see how much of modern macro you can do with static or two-period models!

For example, check out my static (! 😃) Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model

https://t.co/CYjsKdvafLbenjaminmoll.com/Lecture10_EC2B…
Read 9 tweets
May 16, 2023
Here is my little Bob Lucas anecdote.

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." Image
Read 15 tweets

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