Archive

Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.

According to Reuters, Eurozone officials attempted to suppress the publication of this report.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

The (very) recent rise of quantitative analysis in history of economics working papers calls for a closer examination of the prospects and limitations of this approach, and of the impediment to its large-scale development.

Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.

The International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, recently asked a simple and important question: “How much of an adjustment has to be made by Greece, how much has to be made by its official creditors?” But that raises two more questions: How much of an adjustment has Greece already made? And have its creditors given anything at all?

It doesn’t make sense to pay someone to rob you.

The Ukrainian government has committed to implement far-reaching reforms in exchange for the support it is getting from the international community, led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Understandably, given Ukraine’s disappointing transition history, there is widespread scepticism on whether the country will live up to its commitments. Three failed IMF programmes later, the fundamental question is: Is it different this time?

Non-mainstream economists are disputing neoclassical ideas about capital.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.

The monetary-fiscal policy connection is under scrutiny by the German Constitutional Court in the context of the ECB’s OMT bond-buying programme. This column argues that most analyses are deeply flawed by the misapplication of private-company default principles to the central bank. ECB bond-buying transforms public bonds into monetary base, and sovereign-default risk into inflation risk. The real question is: What is the non-inflationary limit to money-base expansion? This depends upon the economic situation and is much higher in the current liquidity-trap setting.

Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?

The last 30 years has seen a massive rise in the importance of financial instruments in the American economy. But what has been the impact of this shift in corporate investment strategy?

The extremely wise Robert Skidelsky has an excellent rant against Anglo-Saxon economics departments

How do we create a “change in culture”?

A blog by young and restless (and good looking) historians of economics.

New topics and approaches make their way into two recent conferences on the history of economics

Motivated by the long-standing debate on the pros and cons of competitive devaluation, we propose a new perspective on how monetary and exchange rate policies can contribute to a country’s international competitiveness. We refocus the analysis on the implications of monetary stabilization for a country’s comparative advantage.

Has financial reform succeeded in realigning finance with society’s broader public interests? Here’s what several of our top experts have to say.

Margaret Heffernan on her latest book, A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better

How do we rebuild trust in financial services?

The former chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and author of the forthcoming book “Between Debt and the Devil” explains why private debt, not banks, deepened the financial crisis and continues to cause trouble today.

Yes, it is a tale of two nations, but in a much broader way than you think. Not just England and Scotland, but an equally salient parallel between Great Britain and Canada.

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.

Remarks from Finance & Society May 6, 2015

Introductory remarks at the 2015 Finance & Society conference in Washington D.C.

In this session Anat Admati and Brooksley Born discuss their observations about financial regulation needed to make sure the financial system serves society.

Closing remarks at the 2015 Finance & Society conference in Washington D.C.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde joined a renowned group of globally influential women in discussing how the financial system can be re-imagined to truly benefit society.

Whilst progress has been made, the “glass ceiling” dividing men and women has yet to be broken definitively. Monika Queisser discusses the challenges still facing women in the workplace and beyond.

Most sociologists believe that formal and informal institutions are more critical in explaining the rising inequality observed in advanced economies. In this light, changing institutions such as the ascendance of shareholder-centered corporate governance model, finance-friendly policies since the late 70s, credentialism, and deunionization all contribute to the earnings dynamics at different parts of the distribution.

The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.

As Greece descended into a financial maelstrom in the spring of 2010, a small group of staffers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held top-secret talks with officials from the German and French finance ministries to discuss the idea of restructuring Greece’s debt.

Gudrun Johnsen on Iceland, “womenomics”, and Finance & Society

Writing the history of economic journals is not merely a way to reconstruct the development of new fields and new approaches to economics. It also recasts current debates on peer-review, retractions, open-access, replicability, and bias in scientific publishing in a wider perspective. It answers important questions on the influence of editors, publishers and referees on the development or marginalization of various economic approaches. But such endeavour requires the preservation of journals’ archives, the recognition of historical expertise, and economists’ adoption of a more relaxed and humble approach to their history.

Economists and historians of economics have constructed different (and sometimes conflicting) narratives about the past of their field. In fact what is history for economists may not be what is history for historians. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Economic Journal invited renowned economists to discuss important contributions published in the past by the journal and the works on similar topics by historians of economics are absent from these accounts. History of economics here seems to have the weight of a JEL descriptor attached to an invited contribution, which we ought to agree that it is not much.

It Could Fall On You.

A member of the Austrian Central Bank tells us his research on wealth and income inequality in Europe.

This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate

In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to matching frictions, and real wealth enters the utility function. These assumptions modify the two core equations of the standard New Keynesian model

Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Stiglitz discuss Greece’s financial challenges and the associated Eurozone politics in this exclusive conversation.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking responds to an evident need for innovative approaches to understanding economic and financial processes.

Emulate Richard Feynman: Lean over backwards so you do not fool yourself, and teach your students the discipline correctly from the start, rather than teaching them things at the start you will have to unteach them later.

At least the Labour Party has only promised to cut day-to-day spending, not public investment.

Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.

John Muth proposed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) to represent how the market (an aggregate of its participants) understands and forecasts outcomes. REH imposes internal consistency between the market’s forecasts and “the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961, p. 316).

I first came across economics students’ campaigns to revolutionise their education in that bastion of radical thought: the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Among the areas left largely unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent never-­‐ending recession, the teaching of economics ranks high.

This paper proposes a different interpretation of the Eurozone crisis, seeing as its “final” cause European policies which have forced private savings down too low.

Hubris might well head the list

This panel covers the teaching of economics at the university level.

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

This memo outlines key concepts and the methodological approach involved in a recently funded Institute for New Economic Thinking project. Our aim is to pinpoint the relationship between the reception of academic ideas, traced by citation networks with qualitative coding, and positions of institutional and political power.

We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.

Considerable academic and public attention has been drawn to the pulling away of the very rich—the so-called “one percent” whose gains have far outpaced those of everyone else (Piketty 2014). But the debate has reached well beyond the very top, especially in the United States.Indeed, the hollowing out of the middle class, continuing stagnation of wages, and new evidence on the lack of upward mobility across generations all strike at the very heart of the American ideal.

Italy was one of the worst hit during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis (GFC) among the major advanced economies. By year-end 2009, Italy’s economy had contracted by 6.6 percent; significantly larger than the recessions in the euro zone and the United States, for example, which saw their GDPs shrink by 4.4 and 3.1 percent, respectively.

In the past three years, students around the world have turned the heat of scrutiny onto our economics departments. Our call is strikingly uniform across our diverse cultures and languages: we want critical debate back in the economics curriculum.

“Because many interests come into play in the financing of an election campaign and then they ask you to pay back. So the election campaign should be independent from anyone who may finance it.” - Pope Francis

Pushing this strand of research brings a certain feeling of trepidation. It comes from recognizing that by openly elaborating on how to catch or deter a criminal, you thereby confer an undue advantage on the criminal through forewarning.

Initiatives to improve sovereign debt restructuring (“SDR”) began long before recent Argentine bond decisions but were redoubled in the aftermath of these rulings. At first glance, these cases identify problematic contract language that could be rectified by re-drafting critical boilerplate provisions such as the pari passu and collective action clauses (“CAC”).

The Cyclically Adjusted Budget (CAB) is the estimated size of the public budget at some previously defined level of output which may represent the ‘normal’ output or a policy target and that usually is considered to be unaffected by business fluctuations or cycles. Such an estimate is supposed to isolate the automatic movements of revenues and expenditures, given the current structure of tax and transfers, from discretionary fiscal interventions and indicate the “impact” and sustainability of fiscal action.

Inequality has emerged as a major economic issue: sharp increases in the share of income going to those at the very top of the income distribution, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages, and a fall in median family income have raised concern over the sustainability of our economies and societies.

Over the past decades African economies have exhibited two stunning paradoxes: growth acceleration coexisting with stubbornly high poverty rates; increasing capital flight along with widening development financing gaps. There has been no attempt to link the two in the literature.

The modern individual is the point of intersection of the processes of consumption and production. The subjective representation of these processes has been determined by two branches of the modern middle class, the bourgeoisie, which has privileged consumption, and the bureaucracy, which has privileged production.

This paper will address the problem of how we might gain economic understanding from literature. It will look at the aesthetic form of literature as being an efficient vehicle for economic thinking.

The largely unexpected arrival of the global economic crisis and the largely unpredicted slowness of the recovery from the Great Recession should be precipitating an intellectual crisis across economics and policy making. We require additional theories and additional methods to detect how an economy is evolving and to provide the basis for policy intervention (Haldane, 2014).

During the past year, there have been numerous and somber reflections, rather like those during a traditional period of mourning, about the great and tragic events that occurred just 100 years ago – the beginning of the First World War. And in the course of these melancholy reflections about the past, there naturally have arisen anxious concerns about the future.

What is at stake : Increasing doubt over the virtue of democracy. One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of confidence and hope in the so-called democratic institutions by a large majority of the people. The fundamental cause is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule and thereby the welfare of the people, and the indomitable tendency of rising and unsustainable inequality in terms of income, standard of living and wealth.

The central concepts of Keynes’ macroeconomic theories concerning the behavior of labor markets, aggregate demand, and asset pricing can be formulated as special cases of a general social interaction model.

In this paper, we deal with the complex relationship connecting inequality to innovation, and the ways through which public investment, in particular public participation to R&D initiatives, may affect it. We first stress that multiple different equilibria may exist in the inequality-innovation space.

This paper studies the glass ceiling by analyzing the presence of women at the top of the income distribution using tax record data reported for a sample of countries with individual taxation.

Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice.