Technology & Innovation

Adair Turner at the Institute’s #HumanAfterAll conference in Toronto, CA (2014).

The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.

Innovation, the commercialization of invention, is both desirable and necessary for growth and higher living standards in modern economies. Innovation’s contribution to the economy is being measured increasingly more precisely, and its contribution has been assessed aseconomically important and growing.

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.

This paper analyzes equilibrium, dynamics, and optimal decisions on the factor bias of innovation in a model of induced innovation.

This research project integrates two research paradigms to understand the degree to which financial markets can be reformed in order to nurture value creation and :capital development” rather than value extraction and destruction.

This research project analyzes the role of investment in the operation and performance of three broad high-technology sectors: communication technology, biopharmaceutical drugs and medical technologies, and wind power, solar power, electric vehicles, and the smart grid.

This research project uses reflexivity thinking to develop a theory of reflexive economic agents whose behavior is central to both the theory of innovation and to the explanation of phenomena such as bubbles, cascades, and herding that are inconsistent with DSGE/rational expectations macroeconomics.

The Bank of England took the first step in putting the brakes on the surging property market as it scrapped the United Kingdom’s flagship initiative that encourages mortgage lending, introduced earlier this year by Treasury minster George Osborne.

When Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis threatened the euro’s survival, U.S. officials called their European counterparts to express bewilderment at their inability to resolve the issue.