Articles

Employment as University Professor is by comparison with the grind of the professional world a peaceful, perhaps even relaxing, assignment.

The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.

Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

In late 2007, the United States started feeling the effects of the Great Recession. And over the ensuing two years the economic disaster spread across the globe.

There is a new economics rock-star touring the US by all accounts, and his name is Thomas Piketty.

Who wields supreme power over the ECB? This column analyses the recent ruling by the German Constitutional Court that the ECB cannot act as lender of last resort. Although seemingly couched by the referral of this decision to the European Court of Justice, this is a bid for power and the return to the pre-crisis paradigm of ‘ultra posse nemo obligatur’.

A showdown has taken place within Italy’s governing coalition.

Given the choice, would you accept to live in a society where happiness and prosperity is guaranteed for all on the condition that one single person be kept permanently unhappy? Is the well-being of thousands of people “worth” the sacrifice and suffering of a single innocent child? Such is the dilemma to which the inhabitants of the utopian city of Omelas are confronted in Ursula Le Guin’s philosophical short-story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. In her parable, most people are ultimately able to come to terms with the atrocity. The few citizens who cannot end up walking away from the city — nobody knows where they go and they are never heard from again.

The main goal of the macroeconomist is to understand the sources behind business cycles and the behavior of financial markets in the modern economy.

In our two papers, we analyze how changes in personal and functional (wages versus profits) income distribution interact to produce different macroeconomic outcomes in different countries. On the basis of a stock-flow consistent model calibrated for the United States, Germany, and China, simulations suggest that a substantial part of the increase in household debt and the decrease in the current account in the United States since the early 1980s can be explained by the interplay of rising (top-end) household income inequality and certain institutions (e.g. easy access to credit, privately financed education and health care systems).