Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” has recently come under scrutiny
Yesterday we posted RR’s response to criticisms, and today Grantee Arindrajit Dube has a post on Rortybomb that examines RR’s causal claim that higher debt leads to lower growth.
Dube uses the RR data to check if high debt levels are indicative of lower future growth, or if instead high debt levels are predicted by lower past growth. Which way the data suggests causation goes has important implications for economic policy in our high-debt, low-growth world today. And what Dube found contradicts much of the public discussion around debt and growth.
