Working Papers

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies, had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Firms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperforming unconnected ones by 5% to 8% between January and March 1933. These results are not driven by sectoral composition and are robust to alternative estimators and definitions of affiliation. 

After re-iterating five well-known theorems about the properties of conditional expectations in stationary settings—such as providing unbiased minimum mean square error predictions despite in- complete information, and the law of iterated expectations—we clarify unpredictability and illustrate its prevalence empirically.

In the paper that we present this afternoon, Soren Johansen, Anders Rahbek, Morten Tabor, and I introduce the Qualitative Expectations Hypothesis (QEH) as a new approach to modeling macroeconomic and financial outcomes.

“The Failure of Democracy” – “The weaknesses of Weimar” Do headlines such as these suggest that the whole architecture of the first German republic was wrong, that it was doomed right from the start, that the “collapse” was unavoidable?

Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks 

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom.

This paper discusses household debt as a long term phenomenon that influences economies beyond crises.1 In other words, rather than look at how household indebtedness can lead to crises, I will focus on its surprising persistence at very high levels, and its interactions along the way with other key variables, such as public policies and spending. The first section describes some stylized facts and the final section explores the macroeconomic consequences.

Support for populism is often attributed to xenophobia, racism, sexism; to anger and resentment at immigrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or “uppity” non-traditional women. According to these accounts , people who feel socially resentful may reject established politicians as favoring those “others” over people like themselves, and turn to outsider populistic leaders.

The debt-growth relationship is complex, varying across countries and being affected by global factors. While there is no simple universal threshold above which debt-to-GDP becomes a significant brake on growth, based on data from the last four decades we show that high and rising public debt burdens slow down growth in the long term.

Unpacking the Effect of Trade on Workers and Voters 

This paper discusses what we have learned about the debt build-up in advanced societies over the past century. It shows that the extraordinary growth of aggregate debt in the past century was driven by the private sector.

A better set of approaches for the 21st century.

The contemporary literature on neoliberalism has grown so large as to be unwieldy. For some on the left, this has presented an occasion to denounce it altogether.

How far are economists implicated in the rise of ‘fake experts’ and ‘fake news’?

Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged?