Working Papers

Internationalization of the renminbi is a stated goal of the Chinese government, its brief flirtation with Special Drawing Rights and an Asian Currency Unit notwithstanding. Chinese officials understand that a dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a mixedblessing.

Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.

In “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” which is my contribution to L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and originally published in French in 1978, I attempt to apply mimetic theory to modern economics and to economicphenomena, and also to explain why economic issues and economics as a discipline occupy such an important place in the modern world.

My remarks today will be focused primarily on features of the developed world’s financial system which led to the crisis of 2008 and to the Great Recession that followed, from which we are only slowly and painfully emerging.

In his recent lecture at the Cass Business School, Lord Turner noted that even mentioning the possibility of overt monetary financing was akin to breaking a taboo.

A striking feature of the neoclassical economic theory which has been dominant in Western universities in recent years is that it has had so little to say about innovation and innovation policy which is useful for policy-makers.

It would be nonsensical to blame economists for not foreseeing the crisis; even less for causing it. It was obvious there would be a crisis. It was impossible to foresee how it would start and evolve, and at what moment these events would occur.

The problem of value has always occupied a central place in economic thought and debate.

We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted.

Shadowy banking is safety-net arbitrage. It employs substitutes for products and activities performed within the traditional banking sector.

This paper considers a puzzle in growth theory from a Keynesian perspective.

We derive generalization error bounds — bounds on the expected inaccuracy of the predictions — for traditional time series forecasting models.

The European periphery is qualitatively dierent from the core.

Ireland has experienced a series of interlocking banking, fiscal, unemployment and political crises since 2007.