Working Papers

In the growing debate about the pros and cons of a monetary financed fiscal stimulus (a.k.a. helicopter money) it is argued by some participants that a money-financed stimulus will have no more effect than a debt financed stimulus since:

Behavioral finance views stock-market investors’ expectations as largely unrelated to fundamental factors. Relying on survey data, this paper presents econometric evidence that fundamentals are a major driver of investors’ expectations.

Karl Polanyi demonstrated that Classical Liberalism and current Neoliberalism were organized political movements, but their successes sparked political backlashes against laissez-faire economics — a dialectic that continues to shape politics to this day.

The following is based on Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, Crisis and Sustainability. The Delusion of Free Markets.

The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries.

What does the rise of shadow banking mean for monetary theory and practice? (How) should we change our traditional theories of money to capture the complex practices through which money is created in modern financial systems?

This paper provides a careful and synthetic overview of his contributions as well as a reconstruction of Pasinetti’s philosophical approach to economics as a science meant to serve humanity.

This paper proposes a new method to empirically validate simulation models that generate artificial time series data comparable with real-world data.

We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).

This is a response to a critique by Paul Davidson of our 2013 book Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy and related work, where we describe, amongst other things, how the Swan diagram can be used to show how economies can use policy tools to achieve internal and external balance.

This paper provides critical comments on the Peter Temin - David Vines promotion of the basic Swan Diagram as (1) a policy tool to encourage any individual debtor nation experiencing balance of payment deficits to reduce its exchange rate in order to expand exports and reduce imports and (2) the Swan Diagram as a simple model for understanding Keynes’s General Theory for an Open Economy.

We first show that, with a Kaleckian structure that is consistent with Pasinetti (1962), the relationship between distribution and growth is more robust than conventional wisdom suggests. Next, we extend our model by incorporating borrowing and emulation effects into workers’ consumption behavior, under different assumptions about how debt is serviced.

Some Fundamental Keynesian and Post-Keynesian Insights, with an Analysis of Possible Mechanisms to Achieve a Sustained Recovery

This paper applies Schein’s model of organizational culture to financial firms and their prudential regulators.

The Cambridge UK vs USA capital theory debates of the 1960s showed that the workhorse mainstream growth model relies on unsustainable assumptions. Its standard interpretation is not consistent with the last four decades of data.