This purchase is available as a free download with your MyC-SPAN account C-SPAN.org offers links to books featured on the C-SPAN networks to make it simpler for viewers to purchase them C-SPAN has agreements with retailers that share a small percentage of your purchase price with our network C-SPAN earns money from your qualifying purchases C-SPAN only receives this revenue if your book purchase is made using the links on this page Any revenue realized from this program goes into a general account to help fund C-SPAN operations Please note that questions regarding fulfillment or issues relating to your book orders should be directed to the Webmaster or administrator of the specific bookseller's site and are their sole responsibility MyC-SPAN users can download four Congressional hearings and proceedings under four hours for free each month There are three ways to set in and out points for a clip: Check your selection with the "Preview Clip" option If you are editing the times of an existing clip you may only set a start and end time within the original clip boundaries my wife and I visited the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods what truly drew us there—since we are both economists—was the desire to stand in the very spot where delegates from forty-four nations laid the groundwork for a new world economic order What emerged from Bretton Woods was a vision of international cooperation grounded in three core pillars: the integration of national economies through trade and capital flows; institutional coordination via the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral organizations; and a stable geopolitical anchor—quietly yet decisively—provided by U.S This architecture has endured for nearly eighty years and its economic legacy is nothing short of extraordinary 61.1 percent of the global population lived on the equivalent of $7 (2024 dollars) or less per day—the threshold widely used to define extreme poverty Never in recorded history have so many escaped poverty so quickly Few nations have benefited more from this system than the United States After living here for nearly three decades I still find the scale of American prosperity staggering advanced economy has experienced faster growth A child born today into an upper-middle-class household in Minneapolis or Atlanta will enjoy life opportunities—educational and technological—that remain inaccessible to all but the most privileged Europeans or Asians This precisely explains why the current direction of U.S At a time when the global economic order faces increasing strain the United States—particularly under its current leadership—is actively disengaging from the very system it established with minimal reflection on what is being lost the United States intends to impose tariffs proportional to the size of its bilateral trade deficit with each trading partner Since no existing economic theory supports this formula (and even more shockingly the formula was misapplied—using an incorrect figure) economists across the political spectrum have been left baffled I can only echo the words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli: “It’s not even wrong.” The policy fails to meet even the most basic threshold of conceptual coherence there is no economic justification for doing so on a country-by-country basis Bilateral trade balances reflect comparative advantages and consumption preferences—not pathologies in need of correction Countries with overall trade surpluses routinely run bilateral deficits with some partners the current account) equals national investment minus national saving This is not a theory but an accounting identity—true by definition If the United States experiences a trade deficit it is because it invests more than it saves current account deficit was 3.3 percent of GDP save 3.3 percent of GDP less than it invested innovative economy with abundant investment opportunities borrows from abroad to finance productive ventures A modest current account deficit is consistent with this dynamic But 3.3 percent may be too high; 1 percent of GDP might better reflect a sustainable balance between opportunity and risk National saving consists of two components: private saving and public saving Public saving represents the difference between tax revenues and government spending the federal budget deficit was 6.3 percent of GDP—a staggering figure for a country at peace and near full employment private sector saved 3 percent more than it invested; the remaining 3.3 percent gap had to be financed by foreign capital—that is wants to reduce its current account deficit to a more sustainable 1 percent of GDP the only path is to reduce the federal budget deficit This should be done anyway—not just to improve the external balance but to safeguard long-term fiscal sustainability A federal deficit of around 2 percent of GDP would probably be sufficient to generate a current account surplus Achieving this requires a mix of higher taxes and lower spending As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has shown it is not remotely large enough to close the deficit The four biggest budget items in the federal budget are Social Security Cutting any of these meaningfully is politically difficult and economically painful tariffs will not generate the needed revenue They would raise only a fraction of what’s required and introduce far greater distortions than more efficient they risk triggering retaliation and undermining the very export sectors we should be promoting What happens when countries avoid this reality and turn to protectionism instead? Economic history has an answer. In the twentieth century, countries like India, Argentina, and Spain embraced autarky had the world’s highest average tariff in the first half of the century Yet its current account deficits persisted Tariffs didn’t solve the problem—they just hurt consumers Because the reduction in imports shifted demand to domestic goods raising pressure on limited resources—without any increase in national saving Real interest rates had to rise to suppress investment and boost saving The result: a current account deficit largely unchanged but a more distorted economy with higher prices and reduced variety This cannot be emphasized enough: trade barriers are economically costly and generate huge misallocation of real resources had high tariffs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still grew rapidly But the best economic historians agree: it would have grown even faster without them America’s potential was so great around 1870 that not even bad policy could fully suppress it—but that is no excuse for repeating past mistakes Economists recognize a few limited cases where tariffs might be justified: during deep recessions to support demand or as strategic tools against countries that abuse trade rules China’s record over the past two decades—industrial subsidies the actions of countries such as Australia and South Korea—let alone the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands While no country has a flawless trade regime—including the U.S.—there is no evidence whatsoever that these partners systematically skew the rules against the U.S As for Peter Navarro’s claim that Europe’s VAT system unfairly disadvantages U.S VAT is a destination-based tax: it applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is rebated on exports the VAT was designed precisely to avoid this bias within the EU free trade zone The persistence of this myth says more about the administration’s lack of basic economic expertise than it does about the facts the trade war risks undermining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency and the status of U.S While a full explanation of how this might unfold is beyond the scope here as it involves a somewhat technical discussion—and the events of the past few days are especially alarming in this regard—it is enough to say that the welfare costs for the United States would be immense and potentially irreversible does face real challenges: a large structural fiscal deficit and unacceptably high poverty in rural areas and disadvantaged urban communities But trade restrictions won’t solve these problems—they’ll make them worse Barriers reduce efficiency and shrink the economic pie It is time to put the adults back in charge of economic policy—those who rely on evidence And the costs of that neglect are becoming painfully clear Note: This article borrows some material from a previous article published in ABC Image by Travel mania and licensed via Adobe Stock Bradford Wilcox raises the question of how divorce hurts and… We will benefit most from the national parks if we can remember their role as… and the sexual revolution is founded upon… 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Sterling Infrastructure (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or "the Company") today announced the appointment of Ronald A as Sterling's interim Principal Financial Officer and Principal Accounting Officer Ballschmiede assumes this position following the departure of Sharon Villaverde to pursue other opportunities Ballschmiede served as Sterling's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer from November 2015 to May 2024 and has held the role of Executive Vice President from 2015 through the present The Company has initiated a formal search process to identify a permanent Chief Financial Officer CEO Remarks "I would like to thank Sharon for her contributions to Sterling over the past year and wish her all the best in her future endeavors," stated Joe Cutillo "We are very pleased that Ron can seamlessly resume the CFO role during the transition period We remain as confident as ever in the opportunities ahead of us and our team's ability to execute at a high level," Mr About Sterling Sterling operates through a variety of subsidiaries within three segments specializing in E-Infrastructure Transportation and Building Solutions in the United States Mid-Atlantic and Rocky Mountain regions and the Pacific Islands E-Infrastructure Solutions provides advanced large-scale site development services for manufacturing Transportation Solutions includes infrastructure and rehabilitation projects for highways Building Solutions includes residential and commercial concrete foundations for single-family and multi-family homes and surveys for new single-family residential builds we are committed to sustainability by operating responsibly to safeguard and improve society's quality of life our customers and our investors – that is The Sterling Way "We build and service the infrastructure that enables our economy to run our people to move and our 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Sterling Infrastructure ContactNoelle Dilts, VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy281-214-0795[email protected] (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or "the Company") today announced that it plans to issue its financial results for the.. (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or "the Company") has published its 2025 Sustainability Report titled Transportation, Trucking & Railroad Construction & Building Personnel Announcements Do not sell or share my personal information: When the Eaton and Palisades fires raged through Los Angeles home of the second-largest school district in the country they took lives and turned thousands of homes to ash Much of the devastation was immediate and visible But some scars will emerge slowly and last for years to come arguing that it would be too costly to add them to classroom rolls disproportionately affecting Hispanic students English-learners and other disadvantaged students schools can help with recovery from the psychological strain that disasters cause a reprieve for students from the stress of the outside world an associate teaching professor at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California Villaverde — a former social worker for Los Angeles Unified School District — is among those who argue that schools need proactive trauma-informed safety protocols more than ever She believes that more approaches to mental health Some students have never needed so much mental health support so obviously as they do now. But with a federal administration fervently slashing expenditures to both education and to disaster preparation and relief In her work helping schools to build more robust mental health services it dawned on Villaverde that it wasn’t enough to train staff to intervene when a student is in the midst of a mental health crisis she wanted to prepare staff within schools to notice earlier when a student is in more mild distress Small events can set off alarm bells for those who have undergone trauma everyday occurrences can set off the fear centers of the brain The sound of a car’s screeching brakes filtering through an open window can cause fear in a student who was in a recent car accident The smell of a janitor burning compost can remind another of a devastating fire After California's recent fires, her organization, Center for Safe and Resilient Schools and Workplaces, trained educators in Pasadena Unified School District, and volunteers from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, in “psychological first aid,” a disaster response adapted for schools to deal with the lingering psychological pain after a tragedy The district had already invested in trauma-informed approaches before the tragedy but the fires pushed them to strengthen their intervention strategies educators are compassionate and want to help students and know when they are struggling it’s difficult to grasp how trauma hinders learning It can lead to a student’s inability to regulate their emotions being mislabeled as behavioral problems Students themselves might not fully comprehend what’s happening inside their heads It’s important for the adults within the school to pause such as giving the student a minute in a corner to soothe the stress response The goal is for students to feel connected with an adult at the school That affords them a chance to calm down before it becomes necessary to bring in school counselors or mental health staff This approach ultimately helps to create a school environment where students feel safe and also minimizes the number of students who end up needing more intensive care Villaverde says that the schools she interacts with increasingly realize the need for proactive mental health care. Absenteeism experts have also suggested that strong relationships are crucial to making sure students continue to show up to class particularly after the rise in chronic absenteeism and student anxiety following the pandemic But it’s unclear how much cash schools around the country will have to pay for trauma-support services in an era when districts are eager to cut costs Since the pandemic, schools have rushed to bring in more mental health professionals But many districts haven’t reached the recommended ratios of school psychologists districts sometimes only provide services in the aftermath of a crisis or to special education students But the shortage is more drastic in some other states For school counselors, it’s similar. Professional organizations recommend that schools have a school counselor for every 250 students, but the national average for 2023-2024 was below that Arizona has one school counselor for every 645 students It’s not that school leaders don’t want to provide mental health services to students Some schools are also still reeling from the decision to rip away deadline extensions on federal pandemic relief funding Even though districts can apply for re-approval for extensions vice president of policy for the nonprofit Collaborative for Academic District budgets show that they have already inked contracts and committed money for student services Federal dollars comprise a seemingly small percentage of the overall K-12 spending yet it is crucial for schools’ ability to offer mental health services since a lot of federal funds are directed at low-income students schools with lots of those students will be most affected School districts are not filling mental health support vacancies and now have to cut professional development the director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists Some states have planned to continue with business as usual despite the uncertainty but others — especially those heavily reliant on federal money — are preparing for the worst It’s even possible that some staff will get cut as districts shuffle to adjust an entire professional development series — available for free to educators and families across South Dakota — was terminated “out of nowhere” following the changes to federal pandemic relief funds With schools seeing greater need for mental health services at the same time students will have reduced access to these services “I hope it’s not a vicious cycle,” Strobach says Daniel Mollenkamp is a reporter for EdSurge Journalism that ignites your curiosity about education EdSurge is an editorially independent project ofand Located on the campus of Stanford University and in Washington the Hoover Institution is the nation’s preeminent research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity Hoover scholars form the Institution’s core and create breakthrough ideas aligned with our mission and ideals What sets Hoover apart from all other policy organizations is its status as a center of scholarly excellence its locus as a forum of scholarly discussion of public policy and its ability to bring the conclusions of this scholarship to a public audience Hoover Education Success Initiative | The Papers Throughout our over one-hundred-year history our work has directly led to policies that have produced greater freedom and opportunity in the United States and the world Hoover scholars offer analysis of current policy challenges and provide solutions on how America can advance freedom Learn more about joining the community of supporters and scholars working together to advance Hoover’s mission and values MyHoover delivers a personalized experience at Hoover.org create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests Watch this video for an overview of MyHoover Don't have an account? 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Contact us Your gift helps advance ideas that promote a free society and Macroeconomics with UPenn Econ Professor Jesus Fernández-Villaverde Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde joins Jon Hartley to discuss the economic history and the future of economic growth dynamic stochastic general equilibrium and vector autoregressive models Jon Hartley and Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde discuss Jesus’s career schools of economic thought and the role of institutions in economic history economic growth (including recent declining GDP growth rates and declining fertility) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) and vector autoregressive (VAR) models >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: What we are trying to say is that the present of Japan is the future of the rest of the world I have written in Britain a lot lately on demographic trends and the biggest demographic trend is the way I always put it: winter Which means that there is going to be this big headwind of decreasing working age populations all across the globe And that will force us to start rethinking about how we actually measure economic performance >> Jon Hartley: This is the Capitalism and Freedom and the 21st Century podcast an official podcast of the Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group where we talk about economics professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania a macroeconomist and frequent visitor to Hoover >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: Thank you How did you first get interested in economics and macroeconomics so I grew up in the 1980s and at that time the Spanish economy was not doing very well So I guess that for some kids who were more or less interested in how his country was going on started thinking about economics and more in particular into macro was natural So one day I decided I wanted to be an economist you did your PhD in Minnesota and your advisor was actually Leo Haney Tell us about your path from growing up in Madrid to Minnesota and getting your PhD there I started trying to read things a little bit more advanced than perhaps the average undergraduate And I bump into the very first textbook that Tom Sarrient brought on macroeconomics I always joke that Tom has written three textbooks in macroeconomics Then this was before the Internet and all these type of things So I wasn't quite aware that Tom had moved what a fascinating place to study macroeconomics It's produced so many famous macroeconomists it's really the home or one of the homes of the rational expectations revolution many others who are part of that and many Nobel Prizes have come out of that and a tremendous amount of influence in terms of how macroeconomic modeling is done Find me a macroeconomic model that's published today that doesn't include some level of micro founded individual agents underline the model You do a lot of work on a number of things I think you're the first to solve DSG models using quantum annealers >> Jon Hartley: You're also the director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets so a few years ago I started to grow a little bit unhappy with the state of undergraduate education in economics I don't think we are doing a very good job at it I think that we go to class and we tell students a lot about Lagrangians and first order conditions and how to solve optimization problems but we don't really give them an economic understanding of what is going on but I think that math must be built on the foundation of understanding the economic intuition And I also was a little bit worried that the students were a little bit separated from things like the historical background of market economies some of the philosophical foundations of market economies and that there was some scope for a center at Penn that could provide some of those courses So I want to talk with my chair and then with the Dean And we have been able to offer a lot of undergraduate courses Some of them I really think are quite cool like economics and philosophy and history of financial markets And we also have a little bit of visitors program I think it has made a big contribution to the undergraduate education at Penn and hopefully to a stream of graduate students and postdocs that help us over there I'm sure many students go into the Penn Economics Department and Wharton as well I want to get a bit into your research and thinking around things starting with growth So you have a recent paper titled the Wealth of Working Nations But you're also taking into account the age of the labor force which varies pretty significantly across countries So that distorts perhaps the size of its working population Or perhaps your GDP per capita figures don't really account for some of that Can you tell us more about that and your other thoughts on demographic trends around aging populations and obviously also declining GDP per capita growth rates across the developed world >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: Of course this research came from a very simple observation you stop the average person in the street and you ask them give me an example of a rich economy that has not been doing very well for the last 10 Chances are that this person reads the financial press at all there are much fewer Japanese of working age now than 25 years ago just because Japan was the first rich economy that witnessed a very Japanese work a little bit longer on average than other people but even when you control for that longer working age there are much fewer Japanese in working age now than 20 years ago and this is research work with Gustavo Ventura at Arizona State and Wenjao one of my former students at Tsinghua University And what happens if you somehow measure GDP in these units of working age population where you try to take account And then turns out to be the case that Japan is doing pretty well over the last 15 years is the country among all the G7 that has grown the fastest It's just that there are fewer Japanese and in comparison other countries that sometimes are argue are doing very well the performance of the United States is not that great And what we are trying to say is that the present of Japan is the future of the rest of the world I have in Britain a lot lately on demographic trends and the biggest demographic trend is the way I always put it even poor and middle income economies are going through a very which means that there is going to be this big headwind of decreasing working age populations all across the globe So I guess one question I have for you when you make this adjustment to GDP per capita and change it to GDP per worker I'm curious you're saying that Japan has been growing faster by that measure even versus the US I guess per worker for getting the growth rates is GDP per worker still much higher for the us Cuz when I think about these GDP per capita trends at least the story that you get from looking at GDP per capita across countries today is that most countries in the developed world Canada and Japan basically haven't had any GDP per capita growth or much GDP per capita growth since the global financial crisis Whereas the US just keeps growing and it's very unique and arguably maybe it's because it has this tech sector that's very unique These tech giants and culture of entrepreneurism really maybe only exists in the US how does that all look when you look at these GDP per worker numbers Since we basically argue that once you look at everything in working age terms or in worker terms there is no big differences in economic growth Western Europe and Japan have not been able to close the gap with respect to the United States And that's what I will bring in all the arguments you make about entrepreneurship and tech and maybe a better business environment because something that economists believe is some idea of technological diffusion that fine You develop some new wonderful technology on Silicon valley you should be able to implement that technology in Italy or in Spain or in Germany do not seem to be able to close the gap with the United States only seem to be more or less keeping up at the same level tells you that there is something deeply wrong with those economies But that's a slightly different story than the story of Japan being stagnated And the second thing that people should really understand is if the US is going to have in 20 30 years the current demographics of Japan very vital and dynamic US economy may not look so vital and so dynamic 20 you can't start thinking about anything else The difference in say GDP per capita between the US and say China is so stark China's maybe 1/7th the GDP per capita of the U.S That's just a massive dispersion growth whereas something even a very bad recession like the Great Recession might be only say a 5% sort of divot in the GDP per capita growth rate I'm curious what your thoughts are on just this issue of I don't think growth and business cycles are totally independent of each other topics of hysteresis where countries essentially never recover from really bad troughs But I guess if we're in a world where say GDP per capita is say flat how we should respond to them if the trend starts mattering a lot more for the cycle very famous papers Britain called the cycle is the trend or the trend is the cycle And it's very apparent I think outside the U.S has this very unique ability to grow out of recessions very quickly in its post war time series But there's been a lot more hysteresis across I think >> Jon Hartley: World outside the US So this is my sophomore year in college and I'm taking intermediate macro and the professor walks in and we were using the textbook back then was Darwin's Fischer I think like page four or page five of that edition had that graph where Dorvus and Fisher draw like a linear trend and then fluctuations around that trend The world basically you have expansions and then you have drops and then you very rarely recover further drops So he says I want you to tear out that page from the book So he actually goes to the first row and there is this girl and I still remember her name but I'm not going to say it here in public and picks the book from the girl and takes the page and in front of all the class actually turns out the page and says I want all of you to do the same all of us very happily took out the book and turned the page apart When you look at many countries really what is happening is that you lose 2 3 points of GDP during a recession and you don't seem to ever recover them And even the US you can argue after the Great Depression 3% of GDP and we have not been able to really recover them I'm going back to the pre financial crisis trend and I think we have more and more evidence these days that the big difference Between at least rich countries is that relatively poorer countries have more of these drops and they just never recover from them I think the US is very peculiar and is more the exception that the norm out there So a lot of what I have done in my own research is trying to understand these links between the business cycle and economic growth in the long run I guess if we end up having declining population growth rates the growth in productivity across countries maybe we would have negative GDP growth rates would become a common phenomenon which seems almost crazy to think growing up in I guess if you grew up in the late 20th century even though growth rates have slowly declined over time from what they were at in the middle of the 20th century at the height of advanced economy productivity booms And we've had productivity booms like in the 90s Do you think that negative GDP growth rates could be the norm in the future on average the US labor productivity has been growing a little bit less than 2% a year 1.7 and working age population grows around 1% in a year So pure accounting 1.8 labor productivity growth plus 0.1 So that means that on average you grow 2.8 When the economy is doing well for whatever the reason maybe the Fed is cooling down the economy 1.8 Now let's think for a second that productivity still grows 1.8 and you will see how this is a heroic assumption But now working age population is falling 1% like in Japan it means that on average you are going to grow 0.8 So as soon as the economy enters into even the mildest recession or the Fed the monetary authority even increases the interest rates just a little bit Now things are going to be probably worse because we know that a lot of technological innovation is done by young people So an economy with a lot of older people keeping a productivity growth of 1.8 is going to be very unlikely So let's suppose that we have productivity growth of only 1.2 and you still have a drop in working age population of 1% It means that your average growth is going to be 0.2 which means that in around 50% of the years you are going to have negative GDP growth You see why thinking about demographics completely changes your scenario of how the world economy or like any advanced economy is going to look like around the year 2050 So we are really entering into a complete different environment very few economies have interiorized that point And the few that have thought about it use the words artificial intelligence because apparently artificial intelligence now is the solution to everything it's very difficult to see the largest economies in the world growing very >> Jon Hartley: It's s amazing in terms of rewriting textbooks you mentioned the textbook that was written by Sam Fisher and Rudi Dornbusch It's funny how a lot of textbooks may need to be rewritten in the future Because I guess there's a couple of definitions of recessions and I think one of the most famous ones is two consecutive negative quarters of GDP growth And if we're in this new period of negative GDP growth quarters happening all the time I think we'll have to revisit what exactly it means to be in a recession >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly >> Jon Hartley: And I guess we'll still have the NBR recession dating committee that's been started and led by Bob Hall for quite some time are gonna have to sort of rethink what recess mean in the context of being in some sort of permanent negative GDP growth periods But perhaps we should be defining things on a GDP per capita basis or maybe GDP per worker basis and negative productivity growth rates in that sense just a bit because you spent a lot of time on models and coming up with new methods for solving them And you've done a lot of really great work on that for listeners that may not be familiar with DSG models versus VAR dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models versus VARs or vector autoregression models How do you see the strengths and weaknesses of DSGE models vs VARs On this podcast we spent a lot of time talking to former central bankers one recurring theme on this podcast seems to be that central bankers don't really seem to find a whole ton of value in DSGEs there's a bit of economic intuition that they have but it turns out that VARs generally produced much better forecasts are still producing these DSGE type models what is the best case in your mind for the DSGE models I guess from both an economic theory standpoint and from just sort of I have written many papers on DSGE models and many papers on VARs I think they have advantages and disadvantages the main advantage of a DSGE model is that it really ties down or discourse or narrative I have also been a little bit involved in economic policy and I'm not going to name any concrete person And let me tell you a simple regression or simple VR that tells you that X will happen if Y occurs first And then two years later they come and they say they really tie down your hands and they force you to think through the whole logic of the system what people forget is that the reduced form of a DSGE model at least when you linearize it is just a vector autoregression It's just a vector autoregression that has a lot of restrictions imposed by theory So if you go to the data and you estimate an unrestricted VR you are going to do a little bit better than when you estimate the restricted VR from the DSE model and especially you lose the ability to run a lot of counterfactuals what I would like to have is a battery of models that will help me to think about all these situations Sometimes you have a nice steak and you want red wine and sometimes you're having a nice fish and you want a light white wine And I think that central bankers and in general policymakers should understand that economics offers a wide many of choices and that really the ability of a great policymaker is to select the right wine pairing for the night >> Jon Hartley: I might be of the view that red wine strictly dominates white wine >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: You are not European so I need to forgive your lack of civilization and I think it's interesting to think about the DSG literature and how much of it is really moved to central banks and finance departments away from macro departments do you have any general thoughts on just sort of macro as a field I feel like there's a lot of folks from certainly the applied micro world who kind of say macro models are kind of the science fiction natural experiments or examples of exogenous shocks estimates from those sorts of studies and plug them into macro models But there's a lot of assumptions even in doing that whether it's external validity and combining all these what are your thoughts on sort of the state of macro in general Are you a believer that empirical macro with better identification is kind of one future path to sort of bring more credibility revolution Jon Steinsson and Emi Nakamura and their students and many others are sort of entering I myself am sort of one of these people as well But I'm curious if you have a sort of take on sort of the future of macro we have not been forceful enough over the last ten years to explain why we also have identification I think that some of the people in the applied micro you don't have identification in that sense And they are weak because they are thinking about identification in a very particular context I don't think they make terribly sense when you're thinking about the aggregate It's inherently very different to think about what is the consequence of that thinking about what are the effects of reducing the class sizes in all high schools of the United States And I think that macro models and macro econometric tools were designed to answer the later where they are interested in the former maybe we don't believe many of your results I don't truly believe a lot of your results either >> Jesus Fernández-Villaverde: And I think that a considerable amount of what is done in applied economics these days which is I think that at this moment in macro we are still digesting the revolution of heterogeneous agents And we are trying to really understand where you want to apply heterogeneous agents and where you want to apply the enormous amount of micro data that we have been accumulating lately I have been working a lot on that over the last 10 15 years and it's still not very clear where we want to be in the balance between a lot of detail and incorporating a lot of important margins of adjustment versus having more stylized models that are a little bit easier to understand I think the field is still evolving and I myself don't have a 100% clear answer of where really the line between parsimony and detail should fall in the long run What I know for sure is that we have so much new data and we have so many good solution methods that this is going to transform the profession over the next ten years you pointed out heterogeneous agents is one big trend in modeling recently I think another recent trend has been trying to maybe relax some of the assumptions around full information There's a lot of folks that work on so-called behavioral macroeconomics And then even going back farther than earlier than that massive battles between sort of the various different schools of thought And many of these sort of crept their way into these policy discussions in public And you sort of had very famously for a long time the sort of so-called Keynesian schools of or maybe old Keynesian schools of Harvard and MIT Versus Milton Friedman and sort of the neoclassical Chicago school later the so-called new classical folks in Chicago and Minnesota where you spent some time and did your PhD I feel like those battles loomed so large for a long time and maybe just at the same time that applied micro folks started to gain a lot of credibility in terms of the much smaller questions that they started answering where do you think those old debates lie now Given that I feel like a lot of the giants of those schools have recently passed I've seen some papers now that try and make empirical cases that sticky wages and sticky prices are kind of the fundamental cause of recessions But I think even some of that evidence is maybe not perfect or somewhat scant argues that productivity shortfalls are the causes of recessions And I think if you look at certain banking crises and tech crises what is your take on sort of schools of thought And how do they influence your own modeling I was always a little bit unhappy about this idea of presenting macro as the struggle between two schools Three schools or I think when I was an undergrad I even read this book about the seven schools of macro because it really gives undergraduates the impression that this is like picking your soccer team that you are either Real Madrid fan or Bayern Munich fan And in fact most people try to look at the data try to look at the theory and try to make a consistent answer My own reading of the situation was that kind of the Minnesota They insisted that you wanted to be very explicit about the micro foundations about how people made decisions about information flows about being sure that general equilibrium restrictions hold while perhaps more of the MIT harbor side warned in terms of substance markets quite often do not clear or output is demand determined some of the older generation start passing away or maybe not yet passing away but at least been a little bit older and retiring from active research The next generation was a little bit less personally invested in some of the more sticky discussions and much more open to think about in constructive cumulative terms This is still the case today that when you go to the market and you read your market papers it's easy to tell if this is a macro person from MIT or a macro person from Chicago but the difference is probably smallest that it has ever been And I think that what we are trying to figure it out is okay and I fully agree with the idea that people don't have full information what is the exchange rate between the US and the Euro I'm going to get it probably perhaps within 5% I'm an economist from Spain living in the US So if there was someone who should know the exchange rate between the Euro and the US dollar we want to think a little bit carefully about how people if people are building their beliefs and people are coming up with rules of thumb we want to be a little bit more constructive that just say no people is silly and make systematic mistakes My impression was always that a lot of behavioral macro was a little bit like that Or let me assume that people make this mistake or have this bias and let's look at the consequences and that's something I have been working on lately let's Imagine that people have very simple learning systems and are using deep neural networks and say well humans actually our brains are just deep neural networks how we learn about that Can we come up with simple rules of thumb given the observations And that gives us a constructive way to work out through these things I think that we are making progress and we are certainly moving forward and I think we are going to see very good work on this area over the next ten years or so >> Jon Hartley: It's interesting cuz I guess behavioral macro is all about how I think a lot of behavioral economics for a long time was just sort of making this point that well people actually don't maybe follow full information rational expectations correctly Which is hard to kind of argue in the sense that you sort of have to argue that one that there isn't some sort of a systematic model out there I guess the sort of new holy grail of I feel like of sort of behavioral economics or behavioral macro as well is how do people systematically make mistakes and what biases or how are people actually thinking I guess in terms of complex systems or you're talking about neural nets but it hasn't been quite enough to just I guess say on the part of Thaler and others will look this is a violation of these past assumptions maybe we just had the utility functions wrong What are the correct or what are the better utility functions And how do you square a lot of micro evidence with our models And I feel like that's still very much an ongoing debate it's amazing in all our ECON 101 textbooks one of the first things we're taught in macro is that there are these different schools of thought And I do wonder how the textbooks will be written in the future given that maybe they matter a bit less But I do think there's some very real world implications of some of these shifts in terms of I think you're right in saying that MIT and Harvard is one the substance of things But I think because of that we only in models tend to care about interest rates or tend to include interest rates So things like monetary aggregates or money are completely withdrawn or non-existent Whereas a lot of people on Wall street for example would like to point out that look at M2Is was rising a lot when we saw inflation in the early 2000 and twenties And even some Minnesota type economists who I know some new classical economists who I know who are still around some older still sort of bemoan that shift in the sense that sure maybe monetary aggregates can't be used as a tool because my demand isn't really predictable but at some level it still explains inflation when you see big jumps in M2 various monetary aggregates >> Jon Hartley: You have thoughts on that as a minister this is interesting that you bring this up because around 2010 there was all this discussion in particular from people in financial markets about how the big monetary expansion at the Fed at the time quantitative easing was to create a lot of inflation And I remember I had an MBS student shouting in my class at Wharton that we were going to have hyperinflation And my thinking at the moment was the very basic fiscal theory of the price level that basically states that you want to think about really the interaction between the fiscal side and the monetary side of policy and that if the fundamental deficits of the future the only thing you are doing is you are switching one type of debt of the public government which is the short term debt that we call money And that was not going to have much an effect In fact there is a very famous paper by Neil Wallace in American economic review either 1981 or 1982 that basically shows an irrelevance theory there will be no inflation over the next 10 years And I think that was a big victory for economic theory and it was a big victory for macroeconomics and anyone who had studied macroeconomics seriously at the time And I remember because I had a few friends in the financial markets and man did I get hate emails like you don't know anything You are typical ex head at the university that don't understand anything whatsoever I'm moving all my investment into inflation protected asset classes And I was telling them there is not going to be any inflation I guess that even by 2019 when we were talking about this 2020 but we are not quite sure why we are unwilling to believe the fiscal theory of the price level think through the logic of the fiscal theory now I guess that there were people who kind of overlearned the lesson You know that old joke that we always generals always fight the last war There is not going to be inflation either now because the argument is completely the opposite The argument is now we are changing structurally the fiscal situation of governments with everything we did around Covid and we are also changing the supply curve of the economy And that's very different from what happened in 2010 the same friends from the financial markets were telling me even if this is not something that macroeconomists are really bragging about I will say that macroeconomics were successful The macroeconomics that you will learn in the standard first year graduate school textbooks was very successful at predicting both the lack of inflation in the early 2010s and inflation in the early 2020s A very different thing is that the type of people that write for the New York Times or the type of people who write for the Wall Street Journal are a very particular subset of the profession are not really up to date on the best economic theories And they say silly things because they are playing a different game They are not playing the game of trying to understand the world I guess like one response that I may have in I partially one of the things I say is fiscal theory One of the things I think I just find a little challenging with fiscal theory is measuring expectations about future deficits You can look at centuries of data and maybe assume that people have unbiased expectations and you can't really follow CBO forecasts just because of their current policy and current law and so forth and don't really reflect what fiscal expectations are And the story that perhaps John Cochrane or Eric Leeper would tell is that one in 2008 and 2009 as someone who's just an empirical macro person I feel like it's a bit of a difficult to measure thing Because when all the central bank was doing was buying up treasuries and swapping them with reserves Whereas what I think was fundamentally different And you also had a stimulus that was very focused on government spending with the ARRA or American Recovery Reinvestment Act Whereas the early 2000s fiscal stimulus was really all about transfers you had this massive uptick in monetary aggregate measures like M2 all this fiscal stimulus was in part going into people's demand deposits So the character of fiscal policy was very very different in the early 2020s versus 2008 I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that even though essentially very similar QE was embarked upon for those listeners who know more about this fiscal theory of the price level I have joke on a few conferences and interviews that I'm a moderate fiscal theory of the price level person in comparison with both Eric and John the pure orthodox fiscal theory of the price level I'm more of a moderate that puts a little bit of fiscal of the fiscal theory of the price level with a little bit of NEO models I also think that issues related with supply and with prices stickiness matter But I think that the explanation you just gave me And that really the only difference between what I tried to say before and the way you put it is more on the emphasis or in the pure rhetorical aspect of in the sense of discourse of how you structure the argument that in the substance people were not going to the restaurant because they didn't want to go to the restaurant And what the Fed is doing is saying well I'm going to take your 30 years bonds How is this changing the issue that I'm worried about the future and that I don't want to save a lot While exactly as you say in 2021 people are not going to the restaurant because they are afraid of COVID people went and start ordering a lot of takeout at DoorDash So I think we were basically saying the same But the point I was trying to say is that if you pick I would say the top 10 macroeconomists in academia in 2010 and in 2020 they probably did a much better job in forecasting inflation not in like the next month But like in the big picture of what was going to happen using a standard tools of economic theory that what the savvy people from the financial markets did And I think we should be proud of it and be brag about it because people are not really getting this point So I think there's still a difference to be made though with I guess like both sort of monetarist and even your sort of old Keynesian Islam like reasoning which is more And where saying that look there were all these transfers today and that's what was causing inflation I mean there were lots of people saying it was all about supply chains and so forth Like a supply curve shifting leftward and a demand or an aggregate demand curve shifting shifting right can produce inflationary conditions together there is still a big difference in terms of just the mechanisms Whereas the IS-LM and Montrose models are very sort of static models >> Jon Hartley: Fiscal theory at the price level is really all about expectations And I still think there's a big difference there But I think that what the fiscal theory of the price level even if you just go back to the very old school of Wallace and Sargent and Wallace and unpleasant monetaristic that both the old Keynesian story and the monetary story miss a fundamental linchpin which is the connection between fiscal and monetary theory and that if you think about just one of them in isolation from the other chances are that you are going to make systematic mistakes in how you think about the world And what the fiscal theory of the price level with all its limitations is telling you really try to think about these two things together and to me a lot of these models are somewhat observationally equivalent So it is really difficult to really distinguish about what central banks have actually been doing too which is these massive QE largely announcements or central bank swap line announcements that seem to have this ability to quell financial panic and provide liquidity to the financial system in moments of panic Which is a bit of a different thing than say causing inflation through these different mechanisms and all that's something that's due in terms of how central banking is done I want to just pivot a little bit to economic history You're working on an economic history book You've done a lot of really great work on things like Fractured Land Hypothesis many other great works of economic history Tell us more about your economic history interest in your forthcoming book I guess I was always a little bit more interested in economic history than macro when I went to college Economic history when I went to college was a little bit boring spent one semester in my freshman year in college learning about the spinning Jenny and the mule and I'm probably getting all these things wrong but about textiles in Yorkshire during the late 18th century So I kind of lost interest in economic history at the time is why did Spain miss the train of industrialization in the 19th century Why then did Spain industrialize in the second half of the 20th century Convergence to the level of the US stagnated by the late 1980s So I was always very concerned about these issues And most of the answers that people were given were loose but not really trying to sit down and thinking about them we started having a new generation of economic history and of course this year the Nobel Prize went to Daron Acemoglu which I'm very happy about precisely because they brought in those big questions back into the center of economics And we can fight a little bit at the margin whether or not the instrument that they use is the right instrument or not the really big issue is why did Japan industrialize and China did not Let's try to work through this and let's try to use the modern tools of economics to work about it this is in some sense what I wanted to do from the beginning So I went and asked to be allowed to teach a class on economic history And I was lucky enough that my dean accepted that proposal and I have been working since then on a book So now last week I was actually at Northwestern and I bumped into Joel Mokir the book is under contract with him for Princeton University Press and he gave me what I think you guys call a dress down He basically told me what is happening with the book So the book is suffering from two problems The first one is I think I've been a little bit over ambitious by now I think I have like 800 pages and that's probably too many and I'm still not even like one-third down nine months in a desert island at the top of a mountain Just yesterday I woke up in the morning and I said I'm going to work on the book for the whole day I got like 200 emails and just handling emails Find a place where I can go hide for nine months and finish the book >> Jon Hartley: There's a place in California called Hoover touristic trip around the world and finish the book I think it's a very creative and innovative book everything we have learned about economic history over the last 20 years It's just that it's a global economic history textbook it's a lot of effort and you really need to spend a lot of time learning stuff last year I wanted to write about Latin America like the chapters thinking about why Latin America fail So I basically had to learn a lot about Latin America economic history And that was fun and I spent like maybe nine months If you want to ask questions about Argentinian economic history in the 19th century >> Jon Hartley: Would you describe yourself as economic institutions So let me give you an example of my favorite question And I don't ask that question more often because otherwise the students will be able to forecast it perfectly Why did the oil industry first appear in the United States The United States doesn't really have a lot of oil in comparison with other countries And yet the United States is even today the largest oil producer in the world because there is a fundamental difference between the US and nearly every other country in the planet I'm looking at my backyard now through the window If I go to the backyard of my dad in Spain and I dig and I find something in the English common law system is called crown's property You are not going to have a lot of digging in a country where you dig and that's yours The first oil industry in the world and even to today is the main technological leader in oil industry is precisely what we have It's not that the US institutions are perfect but perhaps a little bit from some of the other institutional guys is that I like to link this a lot with a rich historical narrative but they appear because of the confluence of a lot of different reasons It's kind of hard to have a one-size-fits-all The US is in the way the US because of a lot of events and a lot of them were random and a lot of them were more structural And what I'm trying to tell is a history that highlights institutions I will say reasonable amount of space to alternative theories and say maybe there is some other type of officials that may be important And the reason for that is because I actually don't think that geography per se matters that much you mentioned my work before on the fractured land Geography is key on determine the type of institutions that you have And these things matter in a lot of subtle ways And I don't think that economies and economic histories experience have really work out all those subtleties and all those nuances I think there's a lot of these nuances to work through I think institutions matter a lot for growth And I think even their taxonomy of inclusive versus extractive institutions isn't perfect at some level how do you explain the success of what I would call liberal economic institutions or massive market reforms If you look at India in the early 90s or Chile in the late 20th century or you look at Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR and a lot of these sort of stories about inclusive versus extractive institutions But it's been a real honor to have you on and hear about your career and ideas You're also a prolific Op-ed writer in Spain as well in your home country And I highly recommend that our listeners check out both all your academic writings as well as your popular writings as well >> Jon Hartley: This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast an official podcast with the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde is a Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania director of the Penn Institute for the Study of Markets (PISM) a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER_ and Research Affiliate of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) He has also been a visiting Professor at Harvard and Cambridge and a visiting scholar at several Federal Reserve Banks His research agenda focuses on economic history with a focus on the computation and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models Each episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century a video podcast series and the official podcast of the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group focuses on getting into the weeds of economics and public policy on important current topics through one-on-one interviews Host Jon Hartley asks guests about their main ideas and contributions to academic research and policy The podcast is titled after Milton Friedman‘s famous 1962 bestselling book Capitalism and Freedom remains prescient from its focus on various topics which are now at the forefront of economic debates For more information, visit: capitalismandfreedom.substack.com/ With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind The opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Hoover Institution or Stanford University by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde | Xiwen Bai | Yiliang Li | Le Xu | Francesco Zanetti National Bureau of Economic Research We examine the rise of dark shipping—oil tankers disabling AIS transceivers to evade detection—amid Western sanctions on Iran Using a machine learning-based ship clustering model we track dark-shipped crude oil trade flows worldwide and detect unauthorized ship-to-ship transfers dark ships transported an estimated 7.8 million metric tons of crude oil monthly—43% of global seaborne crude exports—with China absorbing 15% These sanctioned flows offset recorded declines in global oil exports but create distinct economic shifts faces lower oil prices but benefits from cheaper Chinese imports contends with rising energy costs yet gains from Chinese demand Our findings expose dark shipping’s central role in reshaping oil markets and macroeconomic dynamics Read the full working paper here. Recent release “We Are Family” from Page Publishing author Abilio Villaverde is a captivating story that explores the strength and unity that a union can bring to workers When a father and union worker discover one of his union brothers is in need of financial help he and his fellow union members work together to help alleviate his burden and show the power that a union can have you may witness something the world’s never seen before: the world population will peak and then start declining an economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania “You’re going to be the first generation in human history that is going to see the population of the planet fall in a systematic way,” Fernández-Villaverde said Tuesday at Harvard University at an event hosted by the Abigail Adams Institute Fernández-Villaverde laid out the economic implications of the fertility crisis: collapse of Social Security systems really costly for a lot of reasons,” he said Among his proposed solutions are pro-family government policies and “making better men.” “We’re going to start losing a lot of population much faster than anyone can think,” he said The year 2023 saw record-low birth rates in many countries sparking a growing awareness of the long-term demographic The phenomenon is not unique to the United States or even the Western world — it’s observed across both developed and developing countries The global replacement fertility rate is 2.2 and the United Nations estimates the current fertility rate for the world is at 2.25 Fernández-Villaverde believes the United Nations is overcounting the births and the more accurate global fertility rate is 2.18 But the main take-away remains that that fertility rates around the world are rapidly dropping has seen its fertility rate rise above that of several Latin American countries which traditionally had higher birth rates The reduction of a gender wage gap across Latin America has contributed to dropping marriage rates allowing women to gain financial independence and make choices about marriage and motherhood that differ from traditional norms the United States has a higher fertility rate than Mexico Among the places that are still above replacement rate are Africa, as well as a group of countries in the Middle East — Oman “For the first time in our history as a species we are not having enough children to replace ourselves,” he said “I’m not talking about rich countries or Western countries — it’s the whole planet.” Economic growth depends on both productivity and the size of the workforce is expected to experience much slower economic expansion Fernández-Villaverde estimates that this demographic shift could lead to a potential loss of $1.8 quadrillion in economic output over the long term This decline in growth will strain the country’s ability to fund critical programs like Social Security and maintain infrastructure like railroads and highways The decline in birth rates will also impact public services These consequences will especially impact the countries with aging populations This system is designed to redistribute wealth and provide a social safety net Fernández-Villaverde argues that individuals earning below a certain threshold — typically 70% of the median income — may receive more in government benefits and services than they contribute in taxes the welfare state is half-collapsed already “What happened is fertility has gone down so much that all the increases in government expenditures in all major European countries over the last 20 years have gone more than 100% to retirement benefits,” he said The pattern has already started happening in California where a substantial portion of California’s budget is being directed toward covering the rising costs of public pensions which primarily serve retired state employees Solving the fertility crisis with immigration may not be so easy to the United States has declined in recent years partly due to improvements in the Mexican economy will need to bring is phenomenal,” Fernández-Villaverde said would need to have about 4 million immigrants a year to keep its population stable the country’s population would have to transform from being over 99% ethnically Korean to less than 30% Korean with the influx of immigrants that the country would need: “What society can handle that demographic change?” When one person in the audience asked whether low birth rates may actually be good for the planet Fernández-Villaverde offered his perspective view environmental protection as a “luxury good,” meaning that wealthier societies tend to prioritize environmental issues more than those facing economic instability Fernández-Villaverde pointed out that by 2050 when many social security systems and national health programs could face bankruptcy due to declining birth rates it will be much harder to persuade voters to support climate change policies the focus should be on rapidly reducing the cost of electricity production and CO2 emissions in the coming decade should be increasing the fertility rate — at this point even bringing it up to 1.8-1.9 (which is still below the 2.1 replacement rate) would be sufficient “Make better husbands,” Fernández-Villaverde said nearly 6 in 10 young men (57%) expressed a desire to become fathers “There’s something fundamental that we need to change about the education of our boys so they become good husbands,” he said “All federal and state legislation should have an explicitly pro-marriage design,” Fernández-Villaverde said housing would make it easier for people to make a decision to get married Cities should invest in family friendly city design and transportation “Modern city planning is deeply anti-family and anti-kids,” said Fernández-Villaverde Scaling down on intense parenting expectations would help too Changing college admissions policies to elite universities to alleviate the pressure many families feel when it comes to raising children and preparing them for adulthood would help in shift away from the view of parenting as a stressful enterprise for those considering having a child Fernández-Villaverde advocates for a generous parental leave — 12 months Among Harvard students who gather each week at the Abigail Adams Institute a recurring conversation is the difficulty of forming relationships a social scientist and director of the institute “There is not a lot of dating at Harvard — I don’t think that’s news to anyone,” Petranovich said “It’s not a part of their lived experience in some sense.” He hopes the work of Fernández-Villaverde can put the declining fertility trajectory into broader context women are having fewer kids than they wish,” said Fernández-Villaverde “So my goal is not to force anyone into having more kids than they want My goal is to allow everyone who wants to have kids to have those kids.” Broadcasting now: The title of the event Display event Summary the Keynote Lecture "Spain (and Europe) in trouble" at the Rafael del Pino Foundation Jesús Fernández Villaverde isHoward Marks Presidential Professor of Economics and Director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of the Markets at the University of Pennsylvania Fellow of the Econometric Society and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of the "group of one hundred" and of the editorial board of relevant national and international publications He holds a degree in Law and Economics and Business Administration from ICADE and a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota the Rafael del Pino Foundation was the venue for a master conference given by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde Under the title "Spain (and Europe) in trouble" the speaker accurately dissected the great challenges facing Spain and the European continent at a historic moment characterised by demographic collapse geopolitical instability and the irruption of artificial intelligence (AI) This article gathers together the central ideas of a conference that left no one in attendance indifferent with a fertility rate of only 1.2 children per woman faces a structural problem that threatens to reduce its population by 40% per generation This phenomenon not only poses existential problems for the country but also has a direct impact on public accounts: an ageing population increases spending on pensions and healthcare reducing the resources available for other key areas Fernández-Villaverde showed how Spain and Europe have been losing ground to the United States in terms of per capita income While the US economy is growing at a dynamic pace has failed to realise its potential for convergence The economist also highlighted Europe's weaknesses in defence European countries have neglected to invest in security confident that the international context would remain benign the reorientation of US priorities and the rise of new powers such as China and Russia call for an urgent strategic rethink The emergence of AI represents the most significant technological change of our era while the US and China are leading the field Fernández-Villaverde pointed out that Spain lacks great AI models and faces a regulatory framework that discourages innovation the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has a more favourable environment for AI than Spain," he said Fernández-Villaverde put forward five key strategies to put Spain's future on track: The economist described the demographic collapse as "Spain's existential problem" and proposed redirecting all economic policy towards increasing fertility Although reaching the replacement rate (2.1) seems an ambitious goal any improvement above 1.2 would have a positive impact Public sector inefficiency is a critical obstacle From emergency response to technology implementation administrations need to modernise and adapt to the demands of the 21st century Spain must increase its investment in defence and strengthen its international relations to guarantee its security and competitiveness in a more complex world promoting efficient capital markets and reducing regulatory hurdles are essential steps to stimulate economic growth and attract foreign investment the availability of affordable electricity becomes a key competitive factor Spain has the opportunity to lead in solar energy taking advantage of its geography and climate Jesús Fernández-Villaverde closed his lecture with a strong message: although Spain and Europe face monumental challenges could be the key to reversing the stagnation Spain risks becoming an irrelevant tourist destination on the global stage The question that remained in the air was whether we will have the political and social will to face these challenges or whether we will continue to waste time in sterile debates while opportunities slip away The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of their authors The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments opinions or statements made by third parties the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors Rafael del Pino Foundation 2025 ©All rights reserved Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter Sterling Infrastructure (NASDAQ: STRL) has announced leadership changes in its financial department has been appointed as interim Principal Financial Officer and Principal Accounting Officer This appointment follows the departure of Sharon Villaverde who is leaving to pursue other opportunities Ballschmiede brings significant experience to the interim role having previously served as Sterling's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer from November 2015 to May 2024 while maintaining his Executive Vice President position since 2015 The company has initiated a formal search process to identify a permanent Chief Financial Officer Sterling Infrastructure (NASDAQ: STRL) ha annunciato cambiamenti nella leadership del suo dipartimento finanziario è stato nominato come Chief Financial Officer e Chief Accounting Officer ad interim Questa nomina segue la partenza di Sharon Villaverde che lascia per perseguire altre opportunità Ballschmiede porta un'esperienza significativa nel ruolo ad interim avendo precedentemente ricoperto le cariche di Chief Financial Officer e Chief Accounting Officer di Sterling da novembre 2015 a maggio 2024 mantenendo nel contempo la sua posizione di Vicepresidente Esecutivo dal 2015 L'azienda ha avviato un processo di ricerca formale per identificare un Chief Financial Officer permanente Sterling Infrastructure (NASDAQ: STRL) ha anunciado cambios en la dirección de su departamento financiero ha sido nombrado como Director Financiero Principal y Director de Contabilidad Principal interino con efecto a partir del 14 de marzo de 2025 Este nombramiento sigue a la salida de Sharon Villaverde quien se va para buscar otras oportunidades Ballschmiede aporta una experiencia significativa al rol interino habiendo ocupado anteriormente los cargos de Director Financiero y Director de Contabilidad de Sterling desde noviembre de 2015 hasta mayo de 2024 mientras mantenía su posición de Vicepresidente Ejecutivo desde 2015 La empresa ha iniciado un proceso de búsqueda formal para identificar un Director Financiero Principal permanente 스터링 인프라스트럭처 (NASDAQ: STRL)는 재무 부서의 리더십 변화를 발표했습니다 발슈미데가 2025년 3월 14일부터 임시 최고 재무 책임자 및 임시 회계 책임자로 임명되었습니다 발슈미데는 2015년 11월부터 2024년 5월까지 스터링의 최고 재무 책임자와 최고 회계 책임자로 근무한 경험이 있으며 회사는 영구적인 최고 재무 책임자를 찾기 위한 공식적인 검색 프로세스를 시작했습니다 Sterling Infrastructure (NASDAQ: STRL) a annoncé des changements de direction dans son département financier a été nommé Directeur Financier Principal et Directeur Comptable Principal par intérim Cette nomination fait suite au départ de Sharon Villaverde qui quitte pour poursuivre d'autres opportunités Ballschmiede apporte une expérience significative à ce rôle intérimaire ayant précédemment occupé les postes de Directeur Financier et de Directeur Comptable de Sterling de novembre 2015 à mai 2024 tout en maintenant sa position de Vice-Président Exécutif depuis 2015 L'entreprise a lancé un processus de recherche formel pour identifier un Directeur Financier Principal permanent Sterling Infrastructure (NASDAQ: STRL) hat Führungswechsel in seiner Finanzabteilung angekündigt der Executive Vice President des Unternehmens März 2025 zum Interim Principal Financial Officer und Interim Principal Accounting Officer ernannt Diese Ernennung folgt auf den Weggang von Sharon Villaverde Ballschmiede bringt bedeutende Erfahrungen in die interimistische Rolle ein nachdem er von November 2015 bis Mai 2024 als Chief Financial Officer und Chief Accounting Officer von Sterling tätig war während er seit 2015 die Position des Executive Vice President innehat Das Unternehmen hat einen formellen Suchprozess eingeleitet um einen dauerhaften Chief Financial Officer zu finden CEO Remarks "I would like to thank Sharon for her contributions to Sterling over the past year and wish her all the best in her future endeavors," stated Joe Cutillo About Sterling Sterling operates through a variety of subsidiaries within three segments specializing in E-Infrastructure Sterling Infrastructure ContactNoelle Dilts, VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy281-214-0795noelle.dilts@strlco.com 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Login American Heritage scored four first-half goals on its way to an 7-0 Class 4A girls soccer state semifinal win over Lemon Bay on Tuesday at Lake Myrtle Sports Complex American Heritage will face Orlando Bishop Moore for the 4A state title Friday at 7 p.m. Bishop Moore advanced after topping Jacksonville Bishop Kenny The two-time defending champion Patriots (18-1) will be vying for their 14th state title and eighth under head coach Cindy Marcial “I thought we played really well and we are scoring the goals,” Marcial said Marcial once guided American Heritage to a four-peat so she is no stranger to stringing state championships together “I would love for this team to get a three-peat because the girls that really started it were my sophomores So hopefully we can do it again,” Marcial said Samantha Villaverde scored three goals – two in the first half – in the onslaught Her best goal was a header off a corner kick from Courtney Caruso “It’s kind of become a thing between me and Courtney,”  Villaverde said “She just places it perfectly in the box for me and I just run and put a head on it when I can American Heritage junior forward Allison Aleman added two goals – one in the first half at the 25:23 mark to put the Patriots up 3-0 Her second goal came with 20:40 left in the game to put the Patriots up 6-0 “It’s very exciting because it's our third time here “We always come here with the mentality to win I missed one at the beginning so I had to get one back.” Also scoring for American Heritage were Mia Sanders who nailed a 25-yard shot that just snuck under the crossbar and over the goalkeeper’s outstretched arms AUBURNDALE – Bishop Moore spread the scoring wealth out nicely in its state semifinal Orlando Bishop Moore (14-6-2) picked up four goals from four-different players on its way to a 4-1 over Jacksonville Bishop Kenny on Tuesday in a Class 4A state girls soccer semifinals at Lake Myrtle Sports Complex Bishop Moore advanced into the state championship game to face two-time defending state champions Plantation American Heritage Friday at 7 p.m Scoring for Bishop Moore were Sienna Rivera twice Bishop Kenny picked up a goal from Stella Jones © 2025 ABG-SI LLC - SPORTS ILLUSTRATED IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ABG-SI LLC The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Sports Illustrated or its affiliates All picks and predictions are suggestions only and not a guarantee of success or profit If you or someone you know has a gambling problem crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER Population decline and worldwide falling birth rates are at the forefront of many social conservatives’ minds But what many on both sides of the ideological spectrum fail to recognize is that the West’s declining population has significant economic implications contributing editor Kelly Hanlon speaks with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania about the economic impact of low birth rates and how they will threaten human flourishing Kelly Hanlon: Thanks for joining us, Professor Fernandez-Villaverde. This interview grew out of a talk that you delivered over the summer at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education The topic of your lecture was “An Economic Policy for a Flourishing Society” and you began by saying that you’re an economist and reminding the audience that America needs both sound fiscal policy and a rules-based approach to monetary policy you spent most of your time talking about the fertility crisis but by applying economic principles and numerically articulating what the fertility crisis might really look like in terms of GDP over time For Public Discourse readers who haven’t heard your talk can you give us an overview of the fertility crisis do you think about reduced birth rates and their relationship to GDP Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: I started my talk by highlighting that ten years ago I would have talked about things of which everyone can see the point such as “let’s balance the budget” or “let’s keep inflation under control.” Those are important themes but right now we face an incredible fertility crisis And if I may make a metaphor comparing it to medicine: is it always a good idea to keep your cholesterol low But imagine you go to the doctor and your doctor says you have a really serious health problem.” The doctor would say “Let’s address the health problem first and worry about the cholesterol down the road.” That’s how I want people to understand this First we will focus on the United States and then put it in the context of the planet the average American woman is having around 1.6 children which is how many children we will need to keep the population constant over time And it means that if there were an absence of migration into the US our population would start declining very quickly An economy where there are fewer people working is an economy that produces fewer goods and services It means that we have fewer resources to pay for things we like: roads but we must pay for national defense and public debt A smaller economy means that we are not going to have the resources to keep a military that is sufficiently large and efficient to maintain peace in the world What I tried to argue during the presentation using some numbers but trying not to overwhelm the audience with too many is that we are talking about astronomical figures It surprises me to an incredible degree how little this is discussed in political discourse in the US when it seems to me to be the absolute priority The number one question for any administration is what we can do about the fertility crisis How can we get US fertility back into numbers that are more sustainable in the long run Even if they are still below the replacement rate at least we avoid falling off a demographic cliff KH: You mentioned the global fertility rates One of the questions that always comes up in these conversations is the question of immigration immigration is at the front of everyone’s minds in a slightly different way than the fertility crisis But what’s going on globally with fertility rates How does immigration affect the American fertility rate in the future JFV: The amazing thing is that this very big fall in fertility that happened in the US has happened to an even larger degree in other countries I always tell people: I’m going to give you four countries and you need to rank them from the lowest fertility rates to the highest These are four of the largest countries in the Americas The answer that I always get is that the US has the lowest fertility rate the US actually has the highest fertility rate and Colombia have had much lower fertility rates than the US for many years now That tells you that many countries are about to fall off the demographic cliff That is going to make even the survival of those societies very difficult can we bring in immigrants to fix the problem you can bring enough immigrants to keep the population constant because this will probably create other problems Many Public Discourse readers may appreciate that I quote Aristotle; Aristotle highlights that virtue is usually found in the mean having zero immigration doesn’t make sense You want to bring in some of the best minds out there people who want to come to the country and contribute to the national wealth But you don’t want to bring three million people a year either It makes it very difficult for people to assimilate It makes it very difficult for social services The US has a reasonable amount of space to bring it should be 200,000.” Three million is just not sustainable; it’s going to create problems The number of people that we would need to admit if we relied on immigration to keep the population constant doesn’t make any sense where are these immigrants going to come from when the whole world’s population starts declining What I think a lot of people do not realize is that most of the illegal immigrants crossing into the US right now do not come from Mexico The reason they don’t come from Mexico anymore is because fertility has fallen so much in Mexico that most Mexicans do not feel the need to migrate We may well be in a situation in 2050 where people aren’t coming to the US because I was talking with someone at a relatively well-known university that has relied a lot on Chinese undergraduate students With the big drop in fertility in China eighteen years ago there are not that many Chinese students wanting to come to the US anymore so the university’s business model is in serious trouble We want to keep in mind that the very low fertility rates across the world also have direct consequences for the US as well I was just talking this morning about this with a couple of the people who work with me at UPenn One of the local universities here in Philadelphia has 15 percent less enrollment this year than they expected Many universities are already facing the fact that they will need to shut down a lot of programs We have seen a lot of small liberal arts colleges closing over the last few years Cabrini University here in Philadelphia just closed last year What I tell people—and I hate to be the prophet of doom—is this is just the first of many closings over the next two to three decades Your average small liberal arts college is toast The super fancy Bowdoins of the world will still have a market top-of-the-line small liberal arts college KH: Going back to some of the alternative suggestions to address the fertility crisis there has been a lot of talk lately about in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other treatments to help address the fertility crisis Are fertility treatments the way of the future Are they going to help reverse the demographic decline The drop in fertility is due to the enormous increase in the number of childless women only around 8 to 10 percent of women would never have a child and we try to figure out what is happening a few of them are having fertility problems and even for some of those having fertility problems the main issue is that they are not building families setting up an independent life as a new household This is not about failures to get pregnant and it’s an unwillingness to start an independent household What is also happening is that a lot of people who are getting married are getting married very late; and it is true that for those people it’s more difficult to get pregnant for the first time Fertility treatments can move the needle a bit but I have come to the conclusion that we are barking up the wrong tree The main issue is why people in their twenties are not getting married and starting a family If a future president of the United States makes me the czar of fertility that’s what I would focus 99 percent of my attention on We need to get those twenty-seven-year-olds to get married and then maybe a few of them will have fertility problems and then we can think about how to address that But thinking we need more IVF is missing the point Everyone can have their own beliefs about the ethical principles of human fertility the problem is people are not getting married KH: That’s exactly where I wanted to go next particularly on the Right (and a little bit on the Left too) The darlings of the Right seem to be following Viktor Orbán’s model in Hungary of paying people to have more babies and offering child tax credits Is there anything that can be done from a policy standpoint to encourage young people to get married and/or have children Or are we talking about social and cultural norms in which case there aren’t policy prescriptions that can help us and I ask for the forgiveness of your readers if they feel that I am missing some important aspect The first thing I want to mention is that I think that every pro-family and pro-fertility policy should be based on the concept of human dignity and freedom I don’t want to force anyone to get married because those who claim there is no such thing as a fertility crisis portray those of us concerned about this as authoritarian people who want to get people to do things they don’t want to do I am a very deep believer in both human freedom and human dignity What I think is happening right now in the US is not that people don’t want to get married What type of things can we do to make this easier but let me focus on two that I’m convinced could really make a difference I was spending the weekend in upstate New York and there was this very nice lady who I was talking to about this issue of fertility She said: “Well I understand that because here in our small town Who can afford a $350,000 house when you are 27?” And I said you got that 100 percent right.” By speaking personally to the people in her community she got to the heart of the issue in a unique way There’s plenty of space in the US to build more affordable housing of course there are all kinds of policy questions One of the ones that I keep coming back to is so much of housing policy is developed at the local level that it’s hard to do anything from the state or the national level How do you then address affordable housing issues Kamala Harris promised to give out $25,000 to first-time home buyers As we’ve seen with other federal subsidies this type of policy would simply drive up home prices even more My brother and his wife back in Spain own an apartment the government a few years ago announced that they were going to give €500 which is roughly a little bit less than a $600 subsidy to young people renting apartments “The first thing I did was increase the rent of my apartment by €600.” My brother is not an economist if we are to give people $25,000 to buy their first house what you’re going to have is houses that are $25,000 more expensive build.” We need ten to fifteen million new dwellings in the United States And you put your finger absolutely on a fundamental issue which is that local authorities do not want to do it so I cannot really tell you how we can do this the fact that a lot of these regulations are local is something that the states can change New Jersey can decide to have different zoning Whether the federal government can do this is a different issue So perhaps the policy will not depend as much on the federal government but on convincing the state to take away a lot of the restrictions on building there are countries in Europe where these zoning regulations are much more centralized The types of outrageous limitations on construction that I’ve seen in many states I have friends who are lawyers who argue that the Takings Clause should be used to eliminate some of these restrictions because you’re really limiting people’s ability to use their own land in sensible ways We have also passed too many regulations on housing quality and materials it’s great to have a house that has the absolute best materials and the best standards we used to live in houses that didn’t have those requirements and those standards When the undergrads here at UPenn come to the first day of economics class It would be wonderful to live in the best house possible So maybe a lot of the regulations we have on houses are difficult The second area in which the government can play a role is thinking carefully about every aspect of society that makes having children more difficult I think the evidence is clear that even a $5,000 tax credit doesn’t make much of a difference Having a child is at least an eighteen-year-long project $5,000 is not changing your mind at the margin One of the things that we need is more school choice because there is evidence that when schools need to respond to parents a school picks start times and end times that are better for families We need to be able to go back to a society where kids can roam alone for a few hours during the day and nothing happens to them We need to think about what we can do to make it easier for families to live with kids on a day-to-day basis Some of them need to be done by the federal government Part of civil society should also play a role in helping with this You asked if social and cultural norms matter The problem with norms is that as an economist it’s much harder for me to say how we can change norms who can work a little bit more on how we can highlight the importance of marriage and fertility I will try to point out how economic policy can help a bit with norms puts it this way: twenty-eight-year-olds want to spend Saturday evenings with their buddies They can spend their Saturday evenings with their buddies at the pub or at the soccer field with their kids If no one is having kids because tax policies you don’t want to have a kid either because you want to be with your friends the norm is following the best economic decision If all your friends get married and have kids and are taking their kids to a soccer game on Saturday at five o’clock I also think a big part of the problem right now is the absence of good husbands but you go to the US and you see that at the bottom of income and education distribution There are many teen boys growing up without any social skills because they spent the first fourteen years of their lives playing video games They have not been taught responsibility or the importance of being a good husband I think that a lot of the reason why some women do not want to get married is because they say I don’t want to get married to this person I would be more than happy to get married to a good husband The way I put it the other day at a talk at Harvard is just reminding kids in high school what our grandmothers always told us: be serious and we need to start telling kids that again I think that boys are suffering from that culture of lack of responsibility much more than girls I think there is something in the brains of girls that makes them a little more responsible even when there is no one teaching them those basic ideas which deals with phones and screen time versus playing outside the book is encouraging parents to band together and say my child can walk three blocks to school at the age of nine or ten” and making that a societal norm again Are there any books that you would recommend along these sorts of broad lines What are you reading and looking at besides some of the technical papers and economics I think that the evidence that we have accumulated by now is that having a father and a mother at home makes a difference And we have gone too far in the other direction we were cruel to those who came from broken homes But we have gone too far in the other direction by now saying that coming from a broken family is not a big deal and we need to understand that a child from a broken home will need help with that problem I think that’s one of the problems of our modern society We often confuse the need for compassion with the idea that we can dismiss the underlying problem We have gone from discriminating against someone because he was born out of wedlock to You want to be raising families with two parents We have evidence of the enormous impact that this has KH: Do you have any concluding thoughts for us there are many disputes about numerous issues It has become very difficult to reach an agreement with people on the other side of the policy discussion if we sit down and explain the issues carefully—dispassionately that all the policies we want to build are based on the ideas of dignity and human freedom—I truly think that most Americans would support what I believe are common sense solutions Who could be against kids’ having more free time Who could be against making it easier to have a family I wish we could really build a consensus about why this is so important and not transform it into yet another game of political football I think there is a sense in which we can be hopeful about the future in terms of finding common ground and applying common sense principles to perhaps the most fundamental unit of society Thank you so much for joining us at Public Discourse Image by Studio Romantic and licensed via Adobe Stock birth control use is on the rise and teen pregnancy on… If we are to restore confidence in free markets Leaders should get the facts straight before they start theorizing For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic solutions including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse many predict the world will soon reproduce at less than the replacement rate humans aren’t producing enough babies to sustain the population you’re likely to witness something humans haven’t seen for 60,000 years not during wars or pandemics: a sustained decrease in the world population A society’s reproduction level is measured by the fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has The replacement level is accepted as 2.1: any higher and the population grows; any lower and it falls Like the R number in epidemiology (which we heard so much about during the pandemic) the replacement level is a critical figure Either side of it leads to dramatically different outcomes The replacement level is put at a little over 2 to take account of the slight imbalance in male and female births – slightly more of the former are born not all girls survive until reproductive age According to the UN World Population Prospects the global total fertility rate last year was 2.25 – a little above the replacement rate It’s not easy to calculate the figure because there’s a lack of statistics in many countries Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde is Professor of Economics at Pennsylvania University Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3 Already a subscriber? Log in By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde The Spectator Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale Read the full article at The Spectator. Weekly analysis from AEI’s Economic Policy Studies scholars Andrea has been an art director since 2016 at agencies around the globe such as MRM She’s worked for major brands including Coca-Cola We spent two minutes with Andrea to learn more about her background her creative inspirations and recent work she’s admired where the cloudy skies provided a unique backdrop I was two years old when I was stacking boxes to reach the candy shelf That’s when creativity became my superpower Her motto: “Impossible N’est pas Français” (“Impossible Isn’t French”) inspired me to push boundaries and think outside the box I went through a tough period that changed many aspects of my outlook on life which is why I had a phoenix tattooed on my chest and now I see things differently Banksy His thought-provoking street art challenges societal norms his anonymity adds an intriguing layer to his work I discovered it a while ago, but I still read it from time to time and find it inspiring: Sun Tzu’s Art of War Alice from Alice in Wonderland courage and a plethora of other traits and behaviors “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” I can recommend a ton! @jimmydarts, @aquisandrax, @tristaneaton, @emiliogarcia.art… Definitely a campaign we did for Pride with American Express that got me a billboard in Times Square A Coca-Cola campaign that aimed to trigger the moment in which we free ourselves from tensions and reconnect with our passions after our daily responsibilities The combination of vibrant imagery and compelling storytelling made it a truly satisfying experience It’s called “The Power of the Words.” No words…  Criss Bellini I think the twist she gives to existing designs is great and the way she mixes contemporary art with more classic pieces … it’s fascinating I thrive on breaking through conventional boundaries and pushing the limits of what’s possible I’ve recognized that perfection is subjective I’ve been able to create high-quality work while being open to discovery and progress 2 Minutes With is our regular interview series where we chat with creatives about their backgrounds, creative inspirations, work they admire and more. For more about 2 Minutes With, or to be considered for the series, please get in touch. Shahnaz Mahmud is a contributing writer to Muse by Clios Economic growth in fast-graying Japan has been "surprisingly" strong if measured per working-age adult despite a much poorer showing in terms of growth per capita including Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the gross domestic product of advanced economies per working-age adult aged 15 to 64 which is becoming a "misleading indicator for growth theory" due to those economies' aging population "Japan appears as a surprisingly robust economy" when demographics are considered also involving Gustavo Ventura of Arizona State University and Yao Wen of Tsinghua University "the country with the highest growth rate of output per working-age adult in this period is Japan" among the Group of Seven major countries plus Spain The growth rate during the period surpassed the corresponding U.S which covers the economic downturn in Japan following a sharp asset price drop Japan's growth per working-age adult is weaker at 1.39 percent than the U.S rate of 1.65 percent and Britain's 1.62 percent While Japan is known to have a high labor force participation by those aged 65 and over the participation rate stood at around 25 percent in both 1991 and 2019 That of the United States rose from around 11 percent to 20 percent during the same period suggesting that "Japan's relative success cannot be attributed to an increasing employment rate among its older population," it said The study also looked into the statistical impact of more people between 65 and 69 continuing working but "any suitable redefinition of working age gives us roughly the same result," it said Fernandez-Villaverde said Japan's labor productivity is "still relatively low," but economic and financial policies have supported the country's economy and helped achieve the high growth per working-age adult While Japan needs to remove some of the problems that have kept its productivity low since the 1990s increasing the fertility rate is the top priority for the country's future growth Japan's jobless rate falls to 2.5% in August Japan's April-June GDP growth revised down to annualized real 2.9% Japan's real wages rise 0.4% in July, up for 2nd straight month To have the latest news and stories delivered to your inbox Simply enter your email address below and an email will be sent through which to complete your subscription Please check your inbox for a confirmation email Thank you for reaching out to us.We will get back to you as soon as possible 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Sterling Infrastructure (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or "the Company")  today announced the promotion of Sharon Villaverde to the roles of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Accounting Officer (CAO) who has served as Sterling's Executive Vice President focusing on a smooth transition of his CFO duties until his planned retirement later this year Sharon has 30 years of experience in accounting and finance roles at prominent public companies spanning diverse industries Before joining Sterling as Vice President of Finance in March 2024 Sharon held the position of Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer at Dycom Industries she served as Vice President of Finance at Natus Medical Incorporated and also held accounting and financial management roles at Lockheed Martin Corporation and Alcon Inc Sharon began her career as an accountant at Deloitte & Touche She earned a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a Certified Public Accountant "Sharon is the right person to help us build upon our strong financial platform and balance sheet as we capitalize on the unprecedented market opportunities ahead We are extremely excited to have Sharon on our executive leadership team Her experience and insights will be a valuable asset to Sterling." Mr "Ron has been a tremendous partner as we worked to build Sterling into the company it is today and financial acumen were a key part of Sterling's transformation over the past eight and a half years Ron and Sharon will work together in the coming months to ensure a seamless transition." we had a vision to transform the company into a leading infrastructure services provider I could not be more proud of how far we've come My years at Sterling have been some of the most fulfilling of my career My focus remains on my CFO duties through the transition after which I look forward to spending more time with my family." "I am honored to serve as Sterling's CFO and CAO I look forward to guiding our financial teams to new achievements and contributing to Sterling's continued growth and success." Sterling operates through a variety of subsidiaries within three segments specializing in E-Infrastructure and plumbing services for new single-family residential builds "We build and service the infrastructure that enables our economy to run, our people to move and our country to grow." Important Information for Investors and Stockholders Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains statements that are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties including those risks identified in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission such statements should be considered in light of these risks The forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements for any reason notwithstanding any changes in our assumptions These cautionary statements qualify all forward-looking statements attributable to us or persons acting on our behalf Noelle Dilts, VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy281-214-0795[email protected] Telecommunications Industry has published an article falsely claiming that the global population will decline when the United Nations’s (UN) latest projections predict we’re on track to grow to 10 billion Campaigns and Media Officer Madeleine Hewitt responds with a detailed fact-check debunking the article’s claims In its latest issue, The Spectator has published an article, The global fertility crisis is worse than you think The author asserts several false and misleading claims on population growth and the trend of lowering birth rates Due to several misleading claims within the article Below you will find a series of selected statements from the article with a direct response applied to each one The average life expectancy of a woman in the UK today is 83 years That means a 55-year-old in 2024 will likely live until about 2051 some 30 years before the global population is due to peak according to the UN’s 2024 Population Prospects Most people under 55 will see the world population reach 10 billion by 2061 That’s an increase of 2 billion people in less than 40 years there will be more people on the planet than at the start of it political constraints bind the organisation last year’s birth numbers were between 10 per cent and 20 per cent lower than UN estimates Yet its national statistical agency counted 510,000 The total fertility rate is a measure of the average number of children a woman of a selected cohort is predicted to have over the course of her reproductive years (assuming average life expectancy and no issues with infertility) It is expressed as the average number of children per woman The birth rate is a measure of the number of live-born births in a year To conflate total fertility rates and birth rates as the same thing is misleading and serves to falsely undermine the authority of the UN’s data on global fertility rates The United Nations Population Division releases a set of data on global population predictions every two years. You can read our analysis of the 2024 World Population Prospects here While other organisations also make detailed population projections, the UN’s have traditionally been seen as the most authoritative and have a good track record of accuracy on the global scale An independent study conducted by Our World in Data found that most of the UN’s historical projections for global population were close to the final figure even when projecting three to four decades in the future Most projections differed from the latest estimates by just one to two per cent the UN’s predictions for total fertility rates and predicted birth rates for individual countries tend to be less accurate Our World in Data found that the UN over- and under-estimates of particular populations cancelled each other out leading to a total figure that is more accurate than it was for individual groups an overestimate of the population in Asia could be partly cancelled out by an underestimate in Europe whilst the UN can be cited as predicting trends in global population growth accurately it is not as accurate in predicting individual countries’ population trends The article’s comparison of the UN’s estimate of birth rates v recorded birth rates in Colombia reflects this inaccuracy on the national scale However, to use this as an example that all the UN’s data on population must be wrong falsely represents the fact that the UN has been proven to be an accurate authoritative body when it comes to predicting total population growth on the global scale. This doesn’t mean the global population is already falling ‘Demographic momentum’ means that women born in the 1990s and 2000s are currently having children while their parents’ generations haven’t yet died At present rates the human population will peak in around 30 years The global population is expected to peak at 10.3 billion in the next 60 years, and after that it’s predicted that the global population will plateau and then gradually decline to 10.2 billion by 2100 We know less about Africa because of poor quality data suggests it’s undergoing a rapid decline: where we do have more reliable information – Egypt Tunisia and Kenya – it shows fertility rates plummeting at an unprecedented pace More than half of the people added to the world’s population over the rest of the century will be in sub-Saharan Africa The fertility rate remains high in most African countries. In 2024 the fertility rate in Africa was 4.1 children per woman fertility in Africa is projected to decline to around 3.8 births per woman.  This will contribute to Africa’s rapid population growth Environmental concern is a ‘luxury good’: we do it more when prosperous Voters in 2050 in a country with acute budgetary problems caused by an ageing population will care a lot less about global warming The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, the climate crisis could cause an additional 14.5 million deaths, $12.5 trillion in economic losses and $1.1 trillion in extra costs to healthcare systems around the globe. In this scenario it seems doubtful that voters in 2050 will “care less” about the predicted catastrophic effects of the climate crisis “Environmental concerns” do not exist only in the span of human attention pressing issues degrading the natural systems that we depend upon to survive Prosperity does not solve environmental crises. Rather it has caused them, as our current economic and social systems focus on continuous population and economic growth has led to humanity demanding more resources than the earth can sustainably provide – demanding the equivalent resources of 1.7 earths. The triple planetary crisis (climate change, accelerating biodiversity loss, and increasing pollution and waste) is the direct result of humanity’s unsustainable demand for natural resources “Globally, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.” – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change An ageing population is a more manageable, solvable problem than the climate crisis. An ageing population can be adapted to policies that invest in skills retraining and lifelong learning, harnessing the potential of a multigenerational workforce where older people still want to work. The above claims in The Spectator article don’t just get the facts wrong on population but form part of a wave of pronatalist articles falsely scaremongering that low birth rates are a cause for alarm when instead they should be celebrated We should celebrate low birth rates as it means more enlightened empowered women who have agency over their lives employed and have limited barriers to accessing modern contraception And instead focus on how ending global population growth and reducing our overconsumption of resources are key to solving the environmental crises the world faces Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is causing concern due to his staunch anti-abortion views Part one of a three-part series exploring the widespread push to increase birth rates around the world Campaign and Communications Specialist Florence Blondel outlines the issue and unpacks why political leaders are panicking The United Nations has today released its updated population projections up to 2100 It predicts there’ll be another two billion people on the planet by 2061 Do you want to find out more about our important work Sign up to our newsletter to keep up to date with all things population and consumption Executive Editor Public Relations and Marketing Communications formerly the associate vice president for Budget and Financial Analysis at The George Washington University has joined Georgia State as vice president for Financial Planning and Operations The new role will oversee the budget and long-range business planning for the university Villaverde led the university’s budget office and developed the annual operating and capital budgets she led the analysis and modeling for university-wide strategic initiatives for the largest higher education institution in Washington she was financial manager at the food and beverage giant Sysco and served as interim chief financial officer there for four months she was the finance manager at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine a leader in clinical research and patient care Villaverde managed the medical center’s budget and planning process “We are so excited to welcome Cynthia as the university’s first vice president for financial planning and operations,” said L Georgia State’s executive vice president and Chief Operating Officer “Georgia State is renowned for using data analytics to facilitate student success The idea behind the new Financial Planning and Operations unit is to take the same empirical approach to drive innovation and excellence in financial modeling and planning I couldn't be more pleased to have Cynthia joining us to provide leadership over this new function Cynthia is the best in the business when it comes to financial planning analysis and we will all benefit by bringing her expertise to Georgia State." Filed Under: Academic Unit News Advance Your Craft Without Putting Your Career on Hold: Georgia State’s Low-Residency MM in Conducting Mary Beth Corbett (J.D. ‘25): Tech + Teaching = Tax Law M.F.A. Film Candidate Deena Ramadan is Set to Embark on Creative Filmmaking Journey with Open Options CEHD Celebrates Student Achievement, Donor Impact at Annual Luncheon Bliss Honored for Outstanding Contribution to Clinical Legal Education Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Francisco de la Torre The Rafael del Pino Foundation is organising the meeting "Territorial Privileges in Spain" in which the following will participate Luis Garicano Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Francisco de la Torreon the occasion of the presentation of the book "La factura del cupo catalán Territorial privileges versus citizenship" by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Francisco de la Torre The event will take place according to the following programme: 19.15 Intervention by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde 19.35 Dialogue "Privileges of the territories in Spain vis-à-vis citizenship" Jesús Fernández-Villaverde isHoward Marks Presidential Professor of Economics and Director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of the Markets at the University of Pennsylvania Francisco de la Torre holds a degree in Law and a degree in Economics and Business Studies from ICADE he passed the competitive examination for the post of Tax Inspector in 1999 He has worked as an Administrator of the Tax Agency and also as an Inspector He was elected Member of Parliament in the general elections in December 2012 he was elected Chairman of the Budget Committee of the Congress of Deputies He was also spokesman for Ciudadanos in the Finance and Public Function Committee and deputy spokesman in the Economy In January 2017 he was elected as head of taxation in the National Executive Committee of Ciudadanos He resigned in July 2019 from the executive committee of Cs joining the Ministry of Justice as a tax inspector in the international arbitration unit of the State Attorney's Office After spending three years in the technical office of the Director General of the Tax Agency as a consultant inspector and coordinator he joined the Central Delegation of Large Taxpayers in December 2024 He was secretary general and spokesperson for the Professional Organisation of Tax Inspectors between 2008 and 2012 Luis Garicano is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics He began his academic career at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago where he obtained the rank of Senior Lecturer in Economics and Strategy after ten years on the faculty and subsequently at the London School of Economics where he has been a Senior Lecturer in Economics and Strategy in the school's Economics and Management Departments and Director of the Economics and Management Strategy Group He has also been a visiting professor at other institutions Columbia Business School and the London Business School He has held positions as an economist at the European Commission and at McKinsey & Company where he has also been a professor at the FEDEA foundation His research has appeared in leading international academic journals in economics including The Quarterly Journal of Economics The American Economic Review y The Review of Economic Studies Garicano left academia and became an MEP between 2019 and August 2022 he was vice-president of the Renew Europe Group and vice-president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Luis Garicano holds a degree in Economics and Law from the University of Valladolid a Master's degree in European Economic Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges and a Master's and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago please contact the Foundation by e-mail at confirmaciones@frdelpino.es We Cannot Find The Page You Were Looking For Professor Fernández-Villaverde is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Penn’s Population Studies Center and a Research Affiliate for the Centre for Economic Policy Research His research agenda is in macroeconomics and econometrics His research agenda focuses on the computation and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models; the standard tool of modern quantitative macroeconomics Fernández-Villaverde’s research has focused on how to evaluate the likelihood on non-linear and/or non-normal DSGE models and in exploring situations where those features are important to account for the data His two most recent papers are examples of this line: an evaluation of the effects of fiscal uncertainty on economic activity a study of asset pricing implications of DSGE models with Epstein-Zin preferences and an investigation of the consequences of stochastic volatility for small open economies Map She was a light in many people’s lives as you stated We had about 1000 people who joined us in her celebration of life that day I am still having to break the news to people who loved her To see the love they had for her in their reactions makes me even more proud she is my mom That was over 35 years ago and I still remember how much she cared about me Until I read her obituary I had no idea what an amazing person she was Please accept my deepest condolences and sympathy 37 years later and I still remember the impact she had on me The world was a better place because she was in it Copyright 2024© All rights reserved. Walker Funeral Home by Mountain Media 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Sterling Infrastructure (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or "the Company") today announced the appointment of Sharon Villaverde to the role of Vice President of Finance Sharon will be responsible for managing Sterling's finance and accounting functions she will help to shape the Company's strategic financial initiatives Sharon brings a wealth of experience to Sterling having spent 30 years in accounting and finance roles at prominent public companies spanning diverse industries she served as Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer at Dycom Industries she served as Vice President of Finance at Natus Medical Incorporated and in accounting and financial management roles at Lockheed Martin Corporation and Alcon Inc CEO Remarks"I am honored to welcome Sharon to our executive team," stated Joe Cutillo "As Sterling continues its forward momentum of growth and transformation Sharon's deep financial expertise will be a tremendous resource she will play a crucial role in crafting our financial strategy while overseeing our finance and accounting functions We are thrilled to have Sharon as part of the Sterling family." ("Sterling," "the Company," "we," "our" or "us") operates through a variety of subsidiaries within three segments specializing in E-Infrastructure Mid-Atlantic and Rocky Mountain regions and Hawaii Building Solutions projects include residential and commercial concrete foundations for single-family and multi-family homes Forward-looking statements included herein relate to matters that are not based on historical facts and reflect our current expectations as of the date of this press release our financial strategy and allocation of cash flows These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties which include: changes in the Company's financial position and other factors identified in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission any forward-looking statements should be considered in light of these risks Investor Relations Company ContactSterling Infrastructure, Inc.Noelle Dilts, VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy281-214-0795[email protected] (NasdaqGS: STRL) ("Sterling" or the "Company") today announced financial results for the first quarter of 2025 This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page The project was officially unveiled by celebrated interior designer Sussanne Khan who also announced a design collaboration with the developers Villa Verde boasts a 100-foot grand entrance arch and a 100-foot approach road the company noted that each villa is designed to offer unmatched comfort and sophistication—including a minimum of three car parks and a private terrace swim spa Metro Rail Conference has acquired 1.05 acres of industrial land in Sri City marking a key milestone in its expansion strategy in India is located adjacent to the RED Star Polymers facility and will support scaling up the company’s manufacturing operations.This acquisition closely follows REHAU’s majority stake purchase (51 per cent) in RED Star Polymers Pvt Ltd reinforcing its long-term commitment to the Indian market The site offers strategic advantages in proximity a subsidiary of BSH Hausgeräte GmbH and global leader in premium home appliances has launched its first exclusive Bosch and Siemens brand store in Kolkata Located in the upscale Dhakuria neighbourhood the store signifies BSH’s strategic push in East India a region where it has recorded a 26 per cent CAGR between 2019 and 2025.Spanning 1,450 sq ft for Bosch and 850 sq ft for Siemens the new showroom is operated in partnership with Multi-Channel Electronics It offers customers a hands-on experience of BSH’s latest innovations is India’s only termiticide validated by CBRI and GreenPro This non-repellent soil treatment eliminates entire termite colonies effectively Premise ensures long-lasting protection with a proven safety and performance profile.Contact: Envu IndiaWebsite: www.envu.com. Get daily newsletters around different themes from Construction world Don't miss out on valuable insights and opportunities to connect with like minded professionals Construction World (CW) is India’s premier and largest circulated construction business magazine In my last article I outlined the unusual demographic future of humanity: it is highly probable that between 2050 and 2060 our species will reach a population peak close to 9.5 billion I also pointed out some of the mechanisms that could make this prediction incorrect changes in the relative proportions of social groups China has just announced new and very restrictive regulations on abortion the purpose of which is to increase fertility let us assume that the future approximately resembles the demographic trends we observe from our vantage point in 2021 It is worth spending some time thinking about the consequences of this population change there will be positive and negative consequences and which of these predominate will depend on our ability to design policies that manage the transition well I will focus on the most direct economic consequences In the third and last essay of this series (coming out in a few weeks) I will review the social consequences of this demographic shift on the structure of the family and on the distribution of the population in terms of both land and housing Positive Consequences of Population Decline I would need about forty-six shelves to store the books on my Kindle in physical format That would take up my entire office and a good part of another one Since I started reading and buying books as a child I progressively accumulated “weight” in paper my paper “weight” first stabilized and then later began to fall but I gave away more than fourteen of the books I already had There were many books that I had repurchased in electronic version to have them always at hand so I gave the physical copies to my students This observation applies to almost all my possessions: I can’t even remember the last time I bought a CD or a DVD All my possessions together “weigh” less today than they did five years ago We get better and better at recombining ideas in incredibly creative ways to generate much more added value That’s why the UK was able to emit less carbon dioxide in 2019 (before the pandemic) than it did in 1890 the United States consumed 2 percent less oil in 2019 than in 1978 three times larger (and the United States has not been overly concerned with saving energy) The weakness of the above argument is that it focuses on more advanced economies Less developed economies still need more resources to grow and reach the level of wealth of the leading countries But as these economies stabilize in total size even higher per capita resource use will be compatible with stable or declining global resource consumption The negative consequences of the fall in world population are more complex we must get used to the fact that gross domestic product is growing at lower rates and we must adapt our societies accordingly labor productivity has grown by an average of 2 percent per year If the working population increases at 1 percent per year (as it did during the 1960s in many advanced economies) the economy will grow by 3 percent (2 percent productivity plus 1 percent population) When the economy accelerates above the normal situation (due to demand or supply shocks) it is always fluctuating somewhere around the 3 percent mark let’s imagine a situation where the working population falls at 1 percent per year instead of growing at that rate If labor productivity continues to grow at 2 percent—I’ll come back to this in a moment—the economy will grow on average by 1 percent (2 percent productivity minus 1 percent population decline) When the economy accelerates above average This is exactly what has happened to Japan its economy has looked stagnant since the mid-1990s But if we look at it in terms of its gross domestic product divided by working-age adults (ages sixteen to sixty-five) a measure of the economy’s potential workers regardless of whether they are employed or not Japan has grown at about the same rate as the United States and faster than Germany The rivers of ink written about the origins of Japan’s “economic ills” over the past few decades are basically useless Japan is growing at the speed one would expect given its demographic changes You might be asking: what does it matter that the economy is growing at 1 percent instead of 3 percent in total terms if in terms of working-age adults we continue to grow at the same rate Shouldn’t we be concerned about per capita income instead of total income because the relevant measure of income to assess the welfare of a society is per capita because per capita income is not everything Imagine a country with a public debt to gross domestic product ratio of 100 percent If that country’s economy grows at 3 percent public debt stabilizes as a percentage of gross domestic product If the general government deficit is 3 percent we add 3 more points of debt to the numerator but the denominator also grows by 3 points we need to bring the general government deficit to 1 percent to stabilize the debt This takes considerably more fiscal effort The same is true of many state obligations These social benefits are much more onerous to maintain when along with the fall in the working-age population we are faced with a lengthening of life expectancy Changes such as raising the retirement age help but they do not significantly change the basic scenario we can slow down the fall in the active population the arguments in the previous paragraphs may be too optimistic Will labor productivity continue to grow by 2 percent even if the population falls But other ideas include new theorems in mathematics (important for your credit card to work on the internet) and the development of new forms of business Founding Amazon or the invention of cost accounting were as much innovations as a new chemical process Ideas are the result of research effort and creativity the flow of ideas in a society depends on the number of people thinking It is virtually certain that a society with 200 million people will develop more innovative ideas than a society with two million provided that the economic institutions are similar Switzerland produces more ideas than Nigeria because it has better institutions but Switzerland produces fewer innovative ideas than the United States because it has fewer people even in the countries of the world with better innovative institutions (United States are going to be populations with fewer innovative ideas This phenomenon may be particularly pressing if we note that the evidence suggests that, as we accumulate knowledge, it is increasingly difficult to create new ideas Humanity will never have a new Galileo Galilei and biology that these scientists developed cannot be “reinvented.” Even the relativity theory or quantum mechanics of twentieth-century physics with all their novelty and dramatic consequences were more refinements of existing cognitive structures than radical breakthroughs as was the invention of the experimental method or the development of infinitesimal calculus Newton was probably not wrong when he argued that he could see further because he stood on the shoulders of giants but even from up there more and more clouds prevent us from having a clear view had it much easier: everything was yet to be discovered This does not detract in any way from their achievements (they were both great geniuses) but it does put the merits of the current generation of young researchers into perspective humanity has been participating in a race in which it is increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas there are more and more of us engaged in research These two forces have counteracted each other is that we have been able to develop new technologies and scientific advances that have given us that 2 percent average annual growth in labor productivity It will be increasingly difficult to increase the total number of academic researchers and business innovators Many people have no interest or ability to do research and each additional researcher is one less person working in the production of goods and services we can’t all dedicate ourselves to innovation Someone will have to apply that innovation to produce things we like In other words, a shrinking human population can also be a much less dynamic population from the point of view of innovation. Many economists argue that the effects are already being felt in the creation of new businesses and in the poor productivity since 2008 To return to our calculations: let’s assume that labor productivity will only grow by 1 percent per year With a 1 percent fall in the working-age population the “new normal” will be 0 percent growth in gross domestic product How are we going to pay for the welfare state and our level of public debt with zero average growth I often come across the argument that automation will save us If we have enough robots and develop artificial intelligence systems My response is always that this was the idea behind the Soviet Union’s economic strategy; it didn’t work in the twentieth century The second blast furnace in the 1950s had a much lower yield Think about it with the televisions in your house The fourth television stays in the cupboard Just by looking at the diminishing marginal returns of physical capital installed in the Soviet Union one can understand Robots are another form of physical capital perhaps more interesting than a blast furnace they are also subject to diminishing marginal returns In short: with a smaller population in 2100 we are likely to have fewer innovative ideas and with them It is also possible that new technologies are not subject to the same diminishing marginal returns as the technologies of past centuries data are non-rivalrous goods: using data in one line of business of a company does not limit its uses in another line of business using a machine in one line of business does preclude its use in another line of business Will these changes be powerful enough to defeat the effect of population decline on the creation of new ideas? I, following Robert Gordon tend to be pessimistic that these changes will be enough but I would like nothing better than to be wrong This article was originally published in October 2021 at El Confidencial We are grateful to Professor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde for his permission to publish it in English here The world’s demographic future is highly unusual Those younger than age fifty will witness a… billed as ‘uber-luxury’ featuring 100 feet entrance arch overlooking a 100 feet approach road was unveiled by interior designer Sussane Khan the luxury villa project of Cybercity Developers consisting of 89 high-end villas ranging from 300 to 440 square yards in a development area of 13.4 acres was unveiled by noted interior designer Sussane Khan and founder of The Charcoal Project the interior designer also announced a collaboration the Cybercity Builders and Developers also celebrated their 20th anniversary celebrations features and amenities that are handcrafted to deliver the very best of luxury living All villas in the project offer unmatched features like minimum of 3 car parks and terrace swim spa for each villa Villa Verde offers carefully curated over 15 indoor amenities and over 35 outdoor amenities spread across 1.4 acres of open area to make every day a testament of everlasting luxury Lottoland's vice-president of legal has confirmed his exit after a two-year spell with the Gibraltar-based firm as Antonio Torralba Villaverde admits he is excited for a break before starting a “new chapter” Antonio Torralba Villaverde has confirmed he is leaving his post as vice-president of legal at Lottoland Having arrived at the Gibraltar-based company in June 2022 Villaverde called time on his reign after just over two years in the role The outgoing vice-president of legal arrived at the group having spent nearly three years as a legal director for ticketing giant StubHub between July 2019 and May 2022 based out of the company’s offices in Madrid Villaverde’s spell at Lottoland was not his first foray into the gambling industry, having previously served as head of legal for the evoke-owned brand Mr Green in Malta between October 2017 and May 2019 Taking to LinkedIn to announce his departure yet it feels much longer – in the best way possible It’s been an incredibly intense and rewarding journey filled with learning growth and unforgettable experiences.” The tech lawyer went on to heap praise on his former colleagues before detailing his top achievement at the lottery giant which is active in 15 markets and boasts more than 18 million customers worldwide Villaverde said: “One of my proudest accomplishments at Lottoland was setting up Saber.Tech and seeing it flourish from scratch to its current state.  “The coolest office space and an amazing team in the heart of Málaga – this wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable support of one of the greatest people ops teams I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.” Villaverde stopped short of revealing where he might be heading next instead saying he was looking forward to a “well-deserved break”, but did admit it was time to begin a “new chapter” Lottoland’s German segment was finally granted a lottery licence by the Gemeinsamen Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL) after previous issues in its efforts to expand into Europe’s largest economy were hindered by legal challenges In October 2022, the GGL ordered German internet service providers to block Lottoland’s domain which was met with a complaint filed by Villaverde’s former employers the GGL’s original order against Lottoland was deemed unlawful by the Higher Administrative Court of Rhineland-Palatinate Arnold Ash is EGR’s Executive Recruitment Partner. They support ambitious organisations to identify and attract industry leading executive talent. Find out more here. Please select what you would like included for printing: Copy the text below and then paste that into your favorite email application This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply Service map data © OpenStreetMap contributors « Back We’re one of 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks working together with the Board of Governors to support a healthy economy Our job is to serve the American public — to serve you And our mission is to foster economic stability and strength Learn more about our bank  > We work to support a safe and sound financial system and foster an efficient and accessible payments system. We conduct research to support policymaking and thought leadership on issues important to the Federal Reserve and the Fifth District We also inform the public through our data and economic analysis Learn more about Economic Research  > We share research, data and resources and regularly engage regional leaders and policymakers to understand and address community‑specific economic issues. students and the public to enhance understanding of economics Learn more about our resources and educational programs.  > News Releases Speeches Media Advisories Our News Media Kit Contacts Events .st0{fill:none;stroke-width:1.5;stroke-miterlimit:10;} Publications Research Community Development Education Topics Careers Home / Publications / Research / Econ Focus / 2018 / Econ Focus About Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania has broader interests than most economists The work for which he is perhaps most well-known resides at the forefront of formal macroeconomics: theoretical modeling and techniques for solving models with computers But Fernández-Villaverde also has a passion for the gamut of historical he has studied how politics determine macroeconomic outcomes the enduring significance of the Magna Carta and even how contraceptive technologies influence the way societies socialize children about sex On top of all this is what he calls "a second life" of writing prolifically about economics and policy in Spanish tour and the European tour," he says with characteristic humor With a keen interest in the future of macroeconomics and as the director of graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania's economics department he helps shape the next generation of economists by advising them on how to best invest in their training He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research is a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and has books in progress on macroeconomics on economic history Renee Haltom interviewed Fernández-Villaverde in his office at Penn in February 2018 EF: You've been active in the debate over the state of macroeconomics as a discipline There are prominent economists who say much of what is studied is nonsense while others argue that macro is thriving if you understand what it is designed to do Fernández-Villaverde: I'm much more sanguine about the state of macro Just to give a little bit of background: After World War II there had been a generation of large macro Keynesian models was a leading proponent and got the Nobel Prize because of that work you'd have an equation for consumption and an equation for investment and an equation for exports and an equation for imports the generation of Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent and Neil Wallace said we want to build models where the economy is a system where rational agents interact in a purposeful way we learned how to econometrically estimate those models the first and most important advance in macroeconomics in the last 30 or 40 years we learned as a profession how to build models that are dynamic that take the randomness of the economy seriously and that incorporate price and wage stickiness That class of models started being called DSGE which is the terribly unsexy Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium acronym I think these models really clarify a lot of aspects of how monetary policy interacts with aggregate activity is a big revival in models with heterogeneity In the standard basic model that we teach first-year graduate students we know this is not a description of reality; we have people who are older versus younger college-educated versus not college-educated Both solving these models and taking them to the data was such a large task that This led to criticisms of representative agent models with only one type of agent But over the last 10 years there has been a tremendous jump in our computational capabilities This iPhone on my desk is computationally more powerful than the best supercomputer on the planet in 1982 That means we can do a lot of things that even 10 years ago we couldn't EF: What explains the divergence of views on those developments Fernández-Villaverde: The problem is that a lot of this exciting backbreaking research has not transpired outside of the relatively small group of people working on the frontier the people who are doing this are quite busy you are trying to establish yourself as a senior member of the profession You don't really have a lot of time to do interviews or write blogs or go to purely policy-oriented conferences many times it takes a generation of students to distill the lessons of frontier research and express them in ways that other researchers This happens all the time in the history of mathematics and other fields it's difficult for people to really appreciate how important the tools are If you take the best 20 macroeconomists of my generation but the things they talk about are very different from the type of things you will see on Twitter or the blogosphere The conversation sometimes looks like two very different worlds Sometimes I see criticisms about the state of macro saying "Macroeconomists should do X," and I'm thinking sometimes you get a biased view of where the state of a field is just because of who has incentives to talk to the general public Many of the people who are currently very critical of macro are in another generation and some of them may not be fully aware of where the frontier of research is right now so it's much easier for them to write 20 pages of some type of exposé This raises a more general issue of whether academia in general and the economics profession in particular have the right incentives to transmit some of these learnings from the frontier to the general public If you write a successful introductory textbook and it gets adopted in the large state schools there are incentives to write papers that will go to the American Economic Review; then I can go to my dean and say But there are not a lot of incentives for your average economist to write a textbook that is a little more advanced and that may impact in the long run the way the profession thinks about the world it is not very clear to me what we are going to get out of it beyond self-satisfaction and perhaps the recognition of our colleagues I think that that is a little bit of a problem that we suffer in this profession I think a positive case for macro can be made and it is a pity that sometimes there are not very good incentives for those who can make it there are strong incentives for those with more negative views to be very vocal about them and try to make a splash EF: Does the divergence of views have an impact on the profession it has a real impact on undergraduates in terms of not really understanding the way the real world works I can perfectly understand their confusion I could see myself reading blogs and similar things and maybe not getting a balanced view of where the profession is Coming back to the idea of incentives within the profession This last fall I taught a class here at Penn called "Foundations of Market Economies." Instead of doing math and methods the idea was to take a step back and think in a more fundamental way about why markets can be a good way to run a society and what alternatives are out there and try to bring in economic history and political philosophy there are not a lot of incentives within a university to do that they have a chair for the public understanding of science; the idea is to have a professor who can spend some time trying to explain advanced science to a more general audience I could see a top university like Princeton or Harvard hiring an advanced economist in his late 50s or early 60s a person who may have his best papers behind them — because life is cruel — and having him spend the next five or 10 years of his life trying to explain to the public a lot of what we know in economics If I were the president of a university or I knew a rich this is nothing more than a crazy proposal.  EF: Where do you think macro has performed best versus not so well Fernández-Villaverde: Where I think we have done well is the well-understood result among macroeconomics that quantitative easing was going to be nearly irrelevant By "quantitative easing," I mean what sometimes is called QE3 the world is about to end," and then the Fed came and said we will buy it to show that the world is not ending." Whereas QE3 was buying a lot of long-run bonds and issuing reserves against it and Chris Sims — Wallace is the only one that unfortunately has not got the Nobel Prize yet but is someone I admire very deeply He proved in 1981 that these types of operations were going to be irrelevant And later Mike Woodford proved that the result holds even more so when you are at the zero lower bound most people in monetary economics said the most likely effects were going to be very small I actually wrote something in Spanish saying that and you should have seen the amount of hate mail that I got – most people thought either that QE3 would cure all illnesses of the day or that we'd get hyperinflation I think that the evidence is in and nearly everyone has concluded that QE3 had very small effects (the only discussion seems to be whether the effects were very small or really very small) So that was a clear prediction that has been supported nicely by the data A place where macro may not have done so well is the consequences of the zero lower bound The zero lower bound is when nominal interest rates get to zero and then it's difficult for monetary authorities to lower it below zero at the zero lower bound the economy is going to suffer deflation and a very severe contraction I'm not saying that 2012 to 2016 were great years but inflation was around 1 percent and there was a moderate expansion We also don't understand inflation dynamics very well We understand that if you are Zimbabwe or Venezuela and you start printing money like crazy but do we really understand why inflation is 1 percent and not 3 percent one of the puzzles we have had during the recovery over the last two or three years even more so in Europe than in the United States I had many people in central banks asking me why and I said that I wish I knew because I would be writing a paper about it EF: What are you most excited about in macro Fernández-Villaverde: Where I really believe the next generation of students can make big contributions is the integration of micro data with macro data The amount of information that we have about economic activity at a very very granular level is absolutely incredible I'm working on a project for the Philadelphia Fed involving electricity consumption to better understand the dynamics of the business cycle in their district We actually have information about how much electricity is consumed in the district second by second As we get better at putting all those numbers together we are going to have a much better view of what's happening in the economy butter is a good indicator of how inflation is going to move over the next three months If I were the president of one of the regional Feds and I had very detailed information about how the price of butter is evolving in all the supermarkets in my district I may have an early warning system for inflation A more concrete example is labor construction accidents The first time I understood that the real estate bubble was getting out of control was when a friend of mine who is involved in labor administration in Spain told me that construction-related injuries were going up — when the market is hot you push your workers hard and they start doing awful things to their hands with nails Another example would be models where we really understand in detail how people make decisions about coming in and out of the labor force The reason I think this area of research is going to be enormously important is because we are going to be able to combine those immensely rich data at individual levels with powerful computers that are able to handle them I really envision a whole new generation of models that will take very seriously everything we know about the microeconomy to build a much more coherent view of the macroeconomy That's what I tell my students they should spend a lot of time trying to think about — the investment in methods but also the learning about the economics of these types of problems EF: Let's focus on the zero lower bound for a second What do we understand reasonably well about the zero lower bound and what do we not People who want to save for the future take resources from today and move them into the future and people who want to invest borrow today — say to build a factory — and pay it back tomorrow The saving-investment market clears by a price The zero lower bound implicitly introduces a price control in that market Since that market determines how much we save and invest things don't get right intertemporally and the economy ends up operating at a lower level of activity than you could get in normal times the negative consequences of the zero lower bound are much more acute than what we actually have seen in the real world which suggests that there are issues we don't fully understand I described before a very simple model with one type of investment and one type of saving there is a whole set of investment opportunities and a whole set of saving opportunities What some people have argued —and I'm trying to write papers on it now — is that the real constraint right now is not so much a general savings and a general investment market This research was started by Ricardo Caballero at MIT and by Emmanuel Farhi at Harvard The idea is you have a lot of aging Chinese and Germans who want to invest in very safe assets and there are just not enough of those assets And that pushes the price of the asset high which is the same thing as pushing the interest rate down So maybe it's not as much that all the investments and savings clear at this zero interest rate and that's why things have not been quite as bad as the basic New Keynesian model forecasted A lot of very great economists have been doing fantastic work on this. I mentioned Caballero and Farhi, but also Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Ben Bernanke himself. What I'm trying to think a little bit about right now, in new research with Robert Barro at Harvard University and Oren Levintal here at Penn is how economies generate these safe assets and what determines the total amount of safe assets EF: Another common criticism of the profession is that economists routinely use models that are so complex they can't even understand them Fernández-Villaverde: Did you come here by plane Fernández-Villaverde: Are you aware that aerospace engineers do not fully understand the turbulences that keep that plane in the air EF: I don't want to think about that until after I've flown home (Laughs.) We have a very limited understanding of what makes planes fly But we have very good computational methods that allow us to simulate how the plane is going to work and so we are more than happy to get inside a carbon fiber and aluminum tube and go 35,000 feet above the ground at almost 600 miles per hour intuitive models that help us understand the mechanisms at work is important they play a tremendously important role in undergraduate education; the book I'm trying to write with Dirk Krueger tries to not use a computer at all so the student can understand really what is going on Consider the following scenario. There is now a lot of talk about whether the Dodd-Frank law is the best way to handle financial regulation. The president of the Minneapolis Fed has come out with a simpler system where you just require financial institutions to hold large equity That's fine; I can write a simple model on my white board to understand that argument But when you get to the concrete question of whether we need 15 percent you cannot get the answer without a quantitative model It's the same way that an aerospace engineer will tell you "We kind of understand Bernoulli's principle but there are a couple of things here and there that we are not very sure about." To say a model is difficult to understand is A much more sensible approach is to understand the things for which we want simple models and the things for which we want complex models can you offer me examples of where people use very complex models to do silly things and we are not going to prohibit selling bananas EF: Presumably not many bananas get published in top journals I take a little bit of a different view on that I'm an editor of a journal and an associate editor of other journals you need to understand you are never going to get all your calls right If you only accept papers you are 100 percent sure are right I don't even say that my own papers are 100 percent right Whether a paper makes a big advance or not isn't that consequential Pick any American Economic Review from 1990 and randomly select a paper and you will see that many of them have been sleeping for eternity and no one cares Then there are papers that are very important that people are going to look at again and again to learn from their strengths and weaknesses Recently I was writing a report about a very famous paper the main result hadn't held water after 10 years of empirical investigation But the paper opened such an important door for people to think about the problem and for that the paper has become a classic But the process of science is much more dialectic than sometimes is expressed This notion of the perfect paper getting published and then we learn something is an idealized view of the way science works EF: One research agenda of yours that did, in fact, have enduring success was on the particle filter Fernández-Villaverde: I once made a joke at a conference that the particle filter pays for my mortgage Let me give you an example of what the particle filter does In early 2018 we entered a time of high volatility in the stock market The problem with volatility is that it is not directly observed: I can go to the back pages of the Financial Times and find a value in the table for a stock's price but there is no number to express its volatility What you need is a statistical model that will let you learn about volatility from things you can actually observe the variations of the stock market from one day to the next This is called filtering — learning about things that you haven't seen from things you can see The original filters were developed for the space program The idea is you are the guy in Houston with a joystick and you see the satellite but can't get its exact position because you are measuring with radar and there is noise What you are trying to figure out is how much to push the joystick to the left or right given what the radar is telling you For the longest time the most important filter was the Kalman filter It requires two assumptions: that the world is linear and that noise comes from a normal distribution or is "well behaved." Those assumptions prevent it from handling many The best example is volatility because it can only be positive: You can have a lot of volatility or very little I was very interested in coming up with methods that could extend filtering to these types of environments I spent a lot of hours browsing through math journals and I heard about this new generation of methods called sequential Monte Carlo which is a complex name for something quite simple: A classic question in a basic probability class is if you throw two die what is the probability that the sum of the two is five You have to calculate the probability that the first is a one and the second is a four and when you do that homework you always make a mistake because you forget one combination you could throw the dice one million times some people came up with the idea of applying Monte Carlos recursively to filtering problems So I came back to my office and got my dear friend and co-author Juan Rubio and I explained to him let's write a paper." So we wrote the paper EF: The eurozone crisis is still in the news There is little agreement among economists on the fundamental causes of the eurozone's economic troubles the crisis is about forcing fundamentally different countries to share a common currency or weak and improperly designed institutions Fernández-Villaverde: My view is a mix of poor institutions and not being an optimal currency area the case for creating the Euro was mainly political and not economic a lot of the gains from integration had already been accomplished It would have been more important to continue eliminating administrative barriers to a unified market But the political process decided for a combination of reasons that a common currency needed to be introduced The problem is this currency has very asymmetric effects in different countries depending on their institutional framework a lot of economists were aware at the time that the euro's design had fundamental flaws and that those flaws would eventually have nefarious consequences argued that the introduction of the euro would force countries such as Italy and Spain to undertake the right institutional changes He argued that once you have the discipline of a monetary union with Germany — he called it an iron straitjacket — you will not have an alternative to reforms That's exactly what happens in most European countries This was not conservative versus socialist or left versus right; it's even within the same party The governments basically engaged in fiscal expenditures that were not sustainable in the long run Ireland and Spain went for private debt; they say and to have a gigantic boom that lasts for six or seven years." Houses in Spain which means the government was getting extraordinary income not because our fiscal position was healthy in the long run (as often mistakenly argued by U.S economists who do not understand our budgetary structure but only look at headline numbers) but because we were building so many houses The second problem that we highlight is that the big boom lets bad managers get away with it we had what were called cajas which is roughly equivalent to a savings and loan The board of directors was elected by the regional politicians If I'm the leader of a political party in 2002 and I want to get rid of you You may have never run a banking business in your life but when the economy is growing at 6 percent a year it's nearly impossible to lose money It's even worse than that: We document that the worst managers are the ones making the most money because they are taking the really crazy bets that pay a lot in the short run but then collapse the bank when the euro crisis comes was these changing incentives within the context of a bad institutional setup EF: What does this imply about the way forward for Europe Fernández-Villaverde: Using an old-fashioned terminology which is that it is not an optimal currency area "Should I marry my friend X?" I may tell you you are going to end up divorced." But that's a very different question from "Should I get a divorce now that we are married and have a mortgage and the Germans got married to the Spaniards because breaking up now would be way too costly you need to tell countries that they will not face economic crises alone that there is going to be money from the European Union that will help the Netherlands going through a rough patch in the same way that federal taxes and transfers will help if California suffers a bad period moving toward a bigger European Union budget and creating some European bond system There is a lot of discussion among European economists about how to design such a thing fiscal discipline and cleaning up the house really needs to be done There has to be a great bargain between those who point out the need for making financial and economic crises easier to go through and those who emphasize that That's the big question mark: Is the political process within Europe going to be able to deliver that solution EF: I wanted to touch on cryptocurrencies. Many economists have argued that currency competition can work in principle. But you have a recent paper that argues something somewhat different and how does it differ from what Hayek and others advocated previously Fernández-Villaverde: Let me tell you a little bit about the motivation of the paper Hayek called The Denationalization of Money Hayek had the idea that a possible response to the very high inflation that Western countries were suffering in the 1970s would be moving to a system of private currencies He argued that the same incentives that work in getting private firms to manufacture a good car will force firms to provide good money Hayek explicitly mentioned that his idea was based on the experiences of free banking The most positive of those were actually in Scotland which ran a system of free banking from the 18th century until the mid-19th century that worked remarkably well The reason it was eliminated was not because the system entered into any crisis thought that the Bank of England should keep control of the currency Hayek's idea languished as a theoretical possibility for 20 or 30 years particularly after the conquest of inflation in the early 1980s It became only a technical curiosity for undergraduates like me The arrival of cryptocurrencies means that for the first time we can have again a system of private monies Cryptocurrencies have some important differences from these private monies The first important distinction is that most private monies were tied with gold They are even more fiat than federal government money because on April 15 when my taxes are due the federal government will accept government money as payment The second distinction is that historical currencies were linked with banking networks That means the First Bank of Richmond issues money and people will take it because corresponding banks will accept it as payment I don't need to set up 100 branches across the United States; anyone with access to the Internet can start trading my currency The third difference is that crypto techniques make counterfeiting much harder Back in the time of the free banking system in the United States because if you were in Delaware and you got a note from a bank in New York you can use basic ideas about whether a system of private money will work to think about cryptocurrencies Our paper's answer is both interesting and disappointing; interesting because I think it helps us to understand how a monetary system works and disappointing because it's "sometimes," and people would rather have clear yes/no answers We built a standard environment in modern monetary economics where under certain assumptions regarding technology and the cost of issuance of money The reason why Hayek's intuition may not fully work, even if the experience of free banking in the United States was by and large positive — but not always positive; there were some footnotes to be remembered (see "When Banking Was 'Free'" in this issue) — is because the market for money is very different from the market for bananas Money provides liquidity; it allows me to go the restaurant tonight and buy dinner Otherwise you face the double coincidence of wants where I would have to say to the waitress and you really look like someone who wants to learn about the particle filter." But the problem is that when liquidity is scarce I want to provide less because I am worried myself So the market for money is inherently not going to work well (the formal argument is somewhat more subtle That's why governments tend to take the supply of liquidity into their hands I think there are reasons to be skeptical about private monies as a way to solve our problems I think that a lot of people get a little carried away by the hype of blockchain and not the reality There are going to be a few examples where blockchain technology is going to be useful but at the end of the day it's an Excel file EF: Where do you think blockchain-based currency will be most useful Fernández-Villaverde: I think it will be useful in three types of situations Anyone who buys a house knows how painful it is to put money in escrow; you go to settlement and then you realize that something has gone wrong and the next thing you know you have spent three months of your life fixing things Cryptocurrencies allow you to build in conditions on payments not necessarily crypto­currencies themselves but a lot of the ideas behind them are going to be very useful is in international payments I often go to Europe and get reimbursed for my expenses In a modern world this should be 25 cents and a five-minute transaction I think a lot of the techniques from cryptocurrencies will be adopted by central banks and by central payment systems Countries like Australia have already made a lot of progress in it Europe through TARGET2 is also making progress The United States is lagging behind for a number of reasons I think that cryptocurrencies may be a little bit of the fire that the Fed and other regulators need to get their act together I think cryptocurrencies may help push us toward a world without physical cash These days you should be able to pay for everything with debit cards or credit cards and I never got Norwegian kroner; I used my debit card for everything Issues related to anonymity can be addressed with things like gift cards My friends who work on Wall Street tell me that these days firms are exposed to a lot of counterparty risk because settlements sometimes take three or four days EF: Your research has covered such a broad array of topics What do you think accounts for your breadth of interests Fernández-Villaverde: Lack of self-discipline (Laughs.) I come from the old-style European intellectual tradition that highlights classical education and looking at problems from different perspectives I had to suffer Latin and those types of things for many I actually went to law school before doing my Ph.D in economics; I supposedly passed my bar and everything I always thought that being a big fan of economic history is not incompatible with being very interested in formal modeling and I also understood from day one that the profession rewards high specialization it's relatively easy to be successful because you learn the ropes and know everyone in your field part of the reason the privilege of being a tenured professor at an Ivy League is given is as an incentive to explore new things We were going through the biggest crisis in my lifetime (hopefully we will not have anything as big again before I die!) It would have just felt odd not to engage myself in it There are people who do one specific thing and that's the only thing they're going to do for their whole life They're fantastic and produce wonderful papers that I wish I could write Then there are people like me who just like to try a little bit of this and that One just needs to understand that having many different areas of research means a cost in terms of publications the same way that buying yourself a nice car is more expensive than buying yourself a cheaper car EF: Which economists have influenced you the most Fernández-Villaverde: Let me start with an economist I have only read about: Milton Friedman The reason I became an economist is that I read Free to Choose when I was in high school It's not that I got convinced by all his arguments; it was his enormous ability to show that economics could help you think about many problems That book was really eye opening in the sense of truly appreciating the power of economics as a general field of inquiry With respect to people I have met: Tom Sargent I actually told him when we became co-authors that part of the reason I wanted to write textbooks is because of his He wrote some very influential textbooks about macro in the late 1970s and we used the first chapters of that textbook translated into Spanish in my undergrad macro class That showed me how beautiful macro research could be and that I should go to the United States I have always admired Tom because of his ability to combine data with theory He also has a couple of great books in economic history that by themselves would probably make him a top professor at a university even forgetting about everything he wrote in macro The third person I would say influenced me the most is Ed Prescott who was the chair of my dissertation committee in Minnesota What is amazing about Ed is his incredible ability to say what standard economics can explain and what standard economics cannot One of his most-cited papers is the one about the equity premium puzzle where he asked a trivial question: Can a standard model account for the equity premium And that generated 30 years of finance literature Fernández-Villaverde: I mentioned before the work on safe assets The second thing I am working on is machine learning But I use it a different way than other people do — not to understand how people behave or to make predictions about the world Agents within the model act as machine learners and that helps you solve the model in situations that otherwise you would not be able to solve This makes sense because in real life none of us accomplish perfect computations we use algorithms as a way to solve our problems in ways that resemble machine learning A paper that I am presenting these days is a model where agents use a machine learning algorithm to keep track of the distribution of assets and equity in the model This is relatively easy to incorporate into standard macro and then you can solve many The third thing I'm working on is trying to wrap up the textbook with Dirk and another one that I have on economic history The problem I'm having is every time I reach a new chapter I think I need to read all these other books Then it takes me a month to read all the books University of Pennsylvania; Research Associate National Bureau of Economic Research; Research Affiliate Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2014-2015); Kenen Fellow in International Economics Princeton University (2013-2014); Director Penn Institute for Economic Research (2011-2012) Receive an email notification when Econ Focus is posted online By submitting this form you agree to the Bank's Terms & Conditions and Privacy Notice. you will need to confirm your request to receive email notifications from the Richmond Fed Please click the confirm subscription link in the email to activate your request If you do not receive a confirmation email check your junk or spam folder as the email may have been diverted You can unsubscribe at any time using the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email Subscribe to our other digital publications Tim Sablik Check out all the action from the second day of Mad Cool 2024 Day Two of Mad Cool 2024 saw triumphant sets (and frozen margaritas) aplenty as a wealth of brilliant musicians kept the good vibes flowing at Madrid’s premier music festival Michael Kiwanuka delivered a stunning main stage set followed by riotous moments from Kneecap and Nia Archives Check out Team NME‘s highlights below There’s an air of mystery surrounding Merina Gris have managed to conceal their surnames and faces since their formation in 2020 audiences will be able to approach their music without preconceived prejudice taking to the Mahou Cinco Estrellas stage in their bejeweled masks to deliver an intoxicating set crafting moments of intensity that unexpectedly and suddenly collapsed into smooth judging by the explosive reception from the Madrid audience their anonymity hasn’t hindered any dedication from fans – perhaps encouraging greater dedication instead and we’re always still surprised to see that we have fans outside of the UK,’ Keane frontman Tom Chaplin quipped looking out at an audience that stretched into the horizon It may have been two decades since the band first broke onto the scene with ‘Hopes And Fears’ the energy and conviction with which they delivered their was just as powerful as when they first started Classic tracks like ‘Everybody’s Changing’ ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ and ‘Bedshaped’ came in thick and fast and as each word was sung back to them during Madrid’s golden hour This moment meant so much to band members and fans alike Keane at Mad Cool 2024 (CREDIT: Javier Bragado) West Belfast’s rowdiest sons caused near-instant pandemonium on the Mad Cool site – even before they hit the stage An hour before they took to the Mahou Cinco Estrellas tent – which has a strict capacity of 800 festival-goers – hundreds of fans were already waiting to be let inside bedecked in tri-colour balaclavas and vintage Ireland jerseys Kneecap are pushing the Irish language into a space that it has never previously occupied on a scale that even they could surely never have imagined ‘Sick In The Head’ was an electrifying frenzy of pure energy while anthemic calling card ‘H.O.O.D’ inspired moshpits galore though not without Mo Chara running through some etiquette pointers first Though the audience for Nia Archives’ Mad Cool performance was sparse when she first stepped up to the decks it only took moments of her infectious energy to conjure punters from across the field with many sprinting towards the stage before immediately bursting into dance as the sun set Nia played homage to the genre’s history with videos of old ravers flashing on the screens beside her Nia Archives at Mad Cool 2024 (CREDIT: Nia Archives) The world’s defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking what’s new and what’s next since 1952 WP 24-06 – How does an economy behave in a historical environment where gold is the international monetary standard We find that key features of this monetary system are long-run price stability and the nonneutrality of money in the short run We present a micro-founded monetary model of a small open economy to examine the behavior of money we formally analyze Hume’s celebrated price-specie flow mechanism Our framework incorporates the influence of international trade on the money supply in the Home country through gold flows a positive correlation exists between the quantity of money and the price level we demonstrate that money is non-neutral during the transition to the steady state While the gold standard exposes the Home country to short-term fluctuations in money it ensures long-term price stability as the quantity of money and prices only temporarily deviate from their steady-state levels We discuss the importance of policy coordination for achieving efficiency under the gold standard and consider the role of fiat money in this environment We also develop a version of the model with two large economies Research in Focus — To understand the gold standard’s dynamic impact on money two economists developed a model that lets them contrast it with today’s fiat money Research in Focus — By modeling the transmission of economic shocks from one country to another the authors uncover a previously understudied flaw of a gold-based monetary system WP 22-33 – We model an international gold standard and find that it exposes domestic economies to external shocks prompting the least-productive countries to opt out of the standard the gold standard can be sustainable at the core but not at the periphery (215) 574-6000 It’s a critical problem that hinders people with lived experience from developing technology solutions that can benefit millions of Medicaid enrollees and diminishes business and wealth-building opportunities for women as well as Latino/x and Black people Vanessa Villaverde is working to change that She is the newest senior program investment officer on the California Health Care Foundation’s Innovation Fund team and one of the handful of Latina/x investors in the country “There are many talented entrepreneurs of color who are developing health care solutions and want to work in the health care safety net but they don’t have the financial resources Villaverde is leveraging years of experience at the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as well as deep expertise working with health care tech companies Her goal is to help entrepreneurs develop their technologies and make the leap into the Medicaid marketplace I sat down with Villaverde recently to find out why she became an investor why technology is so important to Medicaid programs and enrollees and what can be done do to eliminate the funding challenges facing entrepreneurs of color Q: How did you become interested in investing in health tech and why A: I got my start in entrepreneurship as one of the first employees at a small company called Remedy Partners My job was to translate between our investors and our operators I had to communicate complex ideas to investors who didn’t work in health care I realized that investors were willing to support an idea if they trusted the founding team and had this “Aha!” moment that trust is the basis of economic transactions I went into investing because I realized that trust is the gift that investors bring to founders and to companies: if I deploy capital with you you will build a company that will have an impact involved in the trust-building that leads to company creation today Q: Founders of color get a small fraction of the investments that flow to White founders it isn’t because founders of color don’t build companies that are as valuable or impactful It isn’t because we don’t have the same amount of talent there are gaps in networking relationships and opportunities for people of color that result in fewer doors opening for them That means these founders get fewer opportunities to obtain funding Most venture capital (VC) investors rely on referrals from people they know to make deals making it nearly impossible for anyone outside of their spheres to get access to capital We must find ways to overcome these barriers because there are many talented women and people of color who are developing brilliant solutions Q: How can we break down the barriers faced by entrepreneurs of color A: Investors can break out of their information silos and expand the places where they source information on new companies and technologies The majority of VC firms are demographically homogenous — mostly male and White This homogeneity produces a group bias that leads VC investors to invest in people who look like them VC firms can listen to investors from communities of color with whom they are not typically involved They can focus on talented people with big ideas and support them with money and with their Rolodex — do people still say Rolodex Because we must work together to make change and create the connections that are missing Q: You grew up in Texas only a nine-minute drive from the Mexican border How did the proximity to Mexico affect your perspective on health care Texas — a place where the US and Mexican economies were permeable You had a choice to get goods or services in this country or in Mexico but his employer never provided him with health insurance To make the most of that job opportunity and take care of his family he couldn’t complain about the fact that he wasn’t given the same health care benefits as an engineer born and educated in the US we received health care on the Mexican side oftentimes paying cash to keep our costs low and to avoid having to choose between buying food or buying medicine I contracted hepatitis from drinking contaminated water It was the first time that I had a very costly illness That meant that my dad couldn’t take our one car to work He had to ride a bicycle for miles to get to his office so that I could ride in the car to the doctor These kinds of vivid memories are why I stay in health care People should not have to choose between providing for their families and getting care Q: Why is innovation so critical in health care people thought that safety net programs like Medicaid should allow for emergency room coverage and a minimum number of primary care activities Then people started to realize that until we invested in innovation and personalized medicine across all populations regardless of income we weren’t going to get to the outcome we wanted We have the power and opportunity to create options in Medicaid for people who are the backbone of our country These are populations that are working their butts off in farmworker trades and construction jobs who just want to provide for their families We can give them choices like street medicine and services that come to their home so that they can get the care they need when they need it a company we invested in called Spect makes a specialized camera that attaches to a mobile phone allowing community clinics and other outpatient/mobile providers to conduct virtual retinal examinations for diabetic patients It is a tremendous privilege to bring innovation to populations that need it most Q: Why did you decide to join the California Health Care Foundation A: I want us to live in a world in which talent can flourish and people can find each other and build economies together based on the impact that they want to create And I care deeply about creating an impact in communities with low incomes which is why I came to the California Health Care Foundation In the Villaverde district of southern Madrid a new social housing scheme traces an orthogonal pattern presided by a large boulevard in an area occupied until just recently by a large factory This part of the city is still under development but the parameters for the future neighborhood in the overall masterplan were clear eight stories high and a pitched roof; all in a 2,000 square meter footprint Rather than the U-shape (predetermined by the overall masterplan) what makes this building special is the exterior treatment that dilutes the presence of the roof and dyes the facade in different tones The exterior enclosure consists of dyed GRC pieces (corresponding to the closets inside the dwellings) that alternate with floor-to-ceiling windows ordered in staggered parallel rows in the form of balconies interprets these restrictions in a way that guarantees a bold and unique result So whereas the neighboring buildings adopt a symmetrical double-pitched roof rounding off the last floor so there is no way of knowing where one ends and where the other starts the vertical enclosure is transformed into a low roof with a very gentle pitch whereas towards the interior it bevels slightly from the fifth floor on This strategy allows for a more sculptural approach that is underscored by the varied rhythm of openings designed as balcony-windows with rails and uniformly punched into each facade of the volume The stairs are tucked into the solid areas and the rest of the facade is a profusely punctured surface that speaks of a great variety of distributions and of an absence of hierarchy among rooms: the usual living room-large window bedrooms and kitchen-smaller window relationship is not repeated on the facade two and three-bedroom apartments show an exemplary order that is adjusted to the social housing building codes that assimilates the different kinds of fenestration so that no floor has the same order so the halls receive enough natural light and lastly so that the clotheslines do not become a sort of stopper once they are part of the balcony The prefabricated concrete panels reinforced with fiberglass ten centimeters deep and in a range of earthy tones that go from ocher to brown give the prism a chromatic variation that is underscored on ground floor by the presence of a slate blue concrete portico this pergola marks the access to the garage and the arcades Linares (estructura structure); Santiago Sanz Emilio Fernandez (ingeniería mechanical engineering); Jan F there arent any match using your search terms