Grants

The INET Taskforce in Macroeconomic Efficiency and Stability, chaired by Professor Joseph Stiglitz, focuses on the inefficiencies and instabilities that arise from the interaction of agents and institutions operating in networks and from pervasive macro-economic externalities, as well as on the macroeconomic inconsistencies that may result from those interactions.

Note: As of March 2019, the Imperfect Knowledge Economics(IKE) Program has been re-launched as the INET Program on Knightian Uncertainty Economics (KUE). Please see the KUE page for updates on this body of work.

This project brings new mathematical tools and ideas from high-dimensional statistics to bear on the problem of creating reliable macroeconomic forecasting models.

This research project creates a new database of international capital flows from the early 19th century, when London became the financial capital of the world, until 1931, when international capital markets collapsed.

This research project explores Chinese economic thought of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with direct relevance to the present day, and in particular focuses on one specific thinker, Wang Yanan, and the intellectual debates he animated and in which he participated as a major theorist.

This research project examines the role of political and social unrest by analyzing their effects on bond and stock markets over the period 1900-2000.

This research project investigates how economists sought to make their science more relevant to real-world issues and policy design from the mid-1960s on, by becoming “applied economists.”

This research project focuses mainly on whether the wealth of the United States middle class recovered and whether wealth inequality continued to rise or moderated over the years 2010 to 2013 following the financial crisis of 2008.

This research project studies the innovation of mortgage-backed securities in the 18th century in order to understand the effects of securitization on financial and real markets.

This research project develops an intellectual biography of the Hungarian economist Tibor Scitovsky (1910-2002), who is known primarily for his path breaking 1976 book, The Joyless Economy.

This research project investigates whether rising inequality has contributed to the macroeconomic imbalances that erupted in the present crisis, based on a Kaleckian macroeconomic model.

This research project focuses on the sustainability of economic growth and implications for distribution, employment, stability, and economic policy.

This research project formulates a new model of bounded rationality, based on the idea that agents will keep a simple, or “sparse,” model of the world.

This research project posits that increasing income concentration and erosion of the middle class are interrelated results of a change in the dominant corporate resource-allocation regime from “retain-and-reinvest” to “downsize-and-distribute,” manifested by massive distributions to shareholders and the disappearance of “collective and cumulative” careers.

This research project studies the evolution of monetary policy since the financial crisis, as regards to changes in implementation mechanisms and use of conventional/unconventional instruments of monetary policy, as well as its mpact on macroeconomic variables, including income distribution.

The objective of this proposal is to build distributional statistics of income and wealth consistent with national accounts aggregates for the United States.

This research project improves our understanding of the effects of intellectual property rights—and in particular copyrights—on creativity and innovation.

This research project develops a “Money View” analysis of the recent evolution of China’s financial system.

This research project explores the process of modern (shadow) money creation in hierarchical and interconnected monetary systems. In theorizing the dynamic instability of shadow money, it provides a comparative account of the structural and institutional specifics of shadow money in the US, Eurozone and China, and the policy challenges thereof.

This research project studies the macroeconomic effects of rising inequality by focusing not on top incomes but instead on the economics of the “bottom 99%” which has been squeezed out by rising inequality and falling labor shares.

This research project explores the underlying limits—especially of the social and economic sciences—in identifying causalities including, among other aspects, the strong epistemological and statistical limitations of and assumptions behind the methods applied.

This research project continues the work of the University of Texas Inequality Project, developing new data and research in several technical areas.

This research project addresses the problem of inferring causal relationships in economics. It investigates the philosophical roots of the problem and develops econometric tools which take into account the complexity of economic systems.

This research project proposes to revise common interpretations of 20th-century economic history by unearthing the often overlooked story of tax havens and offshore finance, Eurodollars, and export processing zones between the 1870s and 1980s.

This research project models financial interdependencies in the form of dynamic networks and propose policy and risk measurement tools to pre-identify contagion.

This research project uses information from digitized Google books and library catalogues to create new measures of technological innovation and diffusion for OECD countries from 1850 to the present.

This research project offers a historical taxonomy of organizational ways that governments fund and implement industrial and innovation policy as well as a taxonomy of contemporary implementation practices.

This research project provides guidance to policymakers for designing policies that are able to bring economies out of recessions by identifying the best policies to fight unemployment and stabilize the business cycle while alleviating inequality.

This research project provides a better understanding of the processes that accompanied the reforms of the Austrian schilling in 1947 and the birth of the deutschmark in 1948 by merging archival sources with financial data from banks and markets and comparing the two reforms.

This research project brings together ideas from the literature on robustness in macroeconomics, network theory, and evolutionary game theory to study the way in which perceptions of safe asset status evolve among financial market participants.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the rise of China’s shadow banks based on the Modern Money Theory and its extension on the analysis on modern financial systems.

This research project develops a theoretical framework to examine the relation between arbitrage capital and the price properties of different asset markets.

This research project combines interdisciplinary expertise with a wholly unique database on hedge funds compiled by the Foundation for Fund Governance to examine the organization and governance of the offshore hedge fund industry.

This research project employs a new theory and innovative empirical analysis as a new lens for understanding financial instability and financial crises, focusing on the Great Depression.

This research project investigates the rise of federal credit programs in the United States, leading to a better understanding of the development of federal credit programs.

This research project rescues the work of the London and Cambridge Economic Service, arguably the first body in Britain to collect and disseminate economic statistics.

This research project explores the origins of covered mortgage bonds and tests for the impact of financial development on economic growth by analyzing the Prussian Landschaften.

This research project re-examines the debates around the time of the Great Depression and compares them with those before and since the start of the Long Recession in 2007/8, focusing on Keynes, Hayek, and their followers.

This research project explores whether the financialization of the US economy has contributed to rising income inequality through complementary analyses at the individual, firm and industry levels.

This research project formulates a normative theory of learning both preferences and probabilities that explains a broad spectrum of economic behavior heretofore judged irrational.

This research project develops a new behavioral paradigm of heterogeneous expectations that can help explain the sources of financial and macroeconomic instability and find possible policy remedies.

This research project develops tools that allow social scientists to understand how and when social factors, such as peer influences, role models, or norms, affect individual choices.

This research project studies how the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association operate and the factors that help shape the extent to which they are able to ensure financial stability from a public-interest standpoint.

This research project establishes the conditions under which international capital flows are a force for stability, thereby improving the capacity for macroeconomic policy to avoid large boom-bust cycles.

This research project develops a rigorous new theoretical way to study controls of international capital flows and determine their optimal magnitude using a promising new empirical methodology.

This research project commences work on a supplementary edition covering much of John Maynard Keynes’s significant writings on economics, philosophy, and politics that remain unpublished.

This research project aims at analyzing the role of economic models in economic policy-making. Specifically, we investigate the impact of CGE models, related to the TTIP debate, and potential output models, related to fiscal policy in the EU, on politicial decision-making and public debate.

This research project will study the long-run interactions between transport infrastructure and economic development using spatially-disaggregated data for England and Wales over the period c.1817—2011. It will look to inform policy toward large investments in physical infrastructures.

This research project traces the history of German energy policy from 1945 to the present. It explores the political economy behind Germany’s transition from coal, to oil, to green energy, the crises driving these shifts, and the evolving efforts to balance affordability with security and environmental protection.

This research project investigates the air quality co-benefits of climate policy. Reduced burning of fossil fuels curbs not only CO2 emissions but also emissions of hazardous co-pollutants, such as particulate matter. The extent of air quality co-benefits relative to CO2 reduction varies across regions and pollution sources, and hence the distribution of emissions reductions matters for both efficiency and equity.

This research project uses macroeconomic data going back to the mid-19th century to analyze issues such as the relation between income distribution and economic growth; and how debt, asset prices, and growth moved together the last 160 years.

This research project examines the long process of innovation at Fair Isaac, the analytics firm behind the FICO scoring system.

This research project lays a foundation for new and better long-run estimates of poverty and inequality around the world through the collection, digitisation, and harmonisation of household budget data.

This research project explores how genomic data can inform the understanding of social science questions. The genomic revolution means that social scientists are able to correlate a range of outcomes and behaviors with genes. This research studies what these correlations mean.

This research project deepens our understanding of labor market conditions during the Great Depression by assemling data at the national, state, and industry level for jobs created, jobs destroyed, unemployment, employment, and the labor force.

This research project examines how the spatial pattern of inequality in US cities shapes the provision of public transit and more broadly the prospects for a more equitable and sustainable transportation policy.

This research project shows the European origins of development economics between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and describes how the postwar global challenge of development took shape.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

This research project constructs a broad set of software tools designed to better facilitate the understanding and comparative features of various types of agent-based finical markets.

This research project improves the mathematical capabilities of non-Neoclassical economics and uses modern techniques from nonlinear dynamical systems to model the expansion and contraction of credit and its effect on real economic output and asset prices.

This research project employs ideas from statistical physics to deal with income and wealth inequality, financial instability, and the distribution of energy consumption around the world.

This research project investigates the impact of the new style of central banking on the bank’s solvency, its ability to control inflation, and on economic stability.

This research project builds a new generation of models fit to analyze and manage the challenges of governing globalized and interconnected economies.

This research project combines 140 years of economic history with state-of-the-art econometric methods to gain new insights into the relationship between finance, growth, and crises.

This research project examines the informational inefficiency of market prices in the presence of Knightian uncertainty or ambiguity by modeling the decision making of financial market traders.

This research project discovers how real people, not just the abstractions of traditional economic theory, respond to various possible policy interventions aimed to bring climate change under control and thus which policies will have the biggest impact.

This research project studies the pricing and liquidity implications of sentiment and disagreement as origins of radical uncertainty in financial markets.

This research project develops a new field of anthropology: the anthropology of financialization, focusing on China and two main institutions of financialization, management consultancies and fund managers.

This resarch project examines the economic theory, policy, and international political economy of cross border finance in the run up to and in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.

This research project seeks to develop a theory of how bubbles and crashes can arise even when all agents are rational, informed, and trading in perfect markets.

This research project develops a novel framework to capture both instantaneous and dynamic contagion mechanisms arising in financial networks when balance sheet linkages across entities exist.

This research project uses statistical physics and network analysis to understand and explain the contagion and panic effects associated with crises that are unexplained in standard economic models.

This research project explores the sources of and remedies for financial instability as well as the relationship between traders’ choice of a price-setting mechanism and market structure and the relationship between market freezes and the amount of intermediation in the market.

This research project investigates the reasons behind the US financial crisis by applying the tools of the history of economic thought to the postwar evolution of US antitrust law and economic

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 contends that Piero Sraffa tried to develop an economic theory that could stand up as an alternative to the orthodox theory of value and provide a foundation for the Keynesian and post-Keynesian alternatives.

This research project establishes a long-run global picture of economic inequality as revealed by fiscal records and analyzes the long-run drivers of inequality as well as the distributional impact of banking crises.

This research project incorporates recent US data to update empirical analyses of regional growth and utilizes case study strategies of American regions to investigate the underlying causal mechanisms of inequality.

This research project follows freed slaves from when they first applied for their land under the Southern Homestead Act until 1900 to learn how access to free land influenced their economic progress.

This research project addresses a need for a more comprehensive estimation of the distributional impact of various policies attempting to limit carbon emissions in the United States.

This research project replicates a large number of studies by teaching replication to students, with the results included in a wiki project about the replicability of research.

This research project provides insights into how the lending market and resale market for asset-backed securities could have broken down during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, leading to a near-collapse of the banking sector and to a significant decline in real loan activity.

This research project explores the interaction between group identities and decisions to engage in collective action to secure access to public goods, such as education.

This research project proposes a large-scale simulation of how distress and growth propagate through the real economy via a network of trade credit between firms.

This research project aims to change the conventional wisdom about how global banks take and manage risks and generate ideas that are both innovative and useful to realistic thinking about policy.

This research project develops, estimates, calibrates, and deploys a new class of stock flow consistent macroeconomic models to try to understand Ireland’s macroeconomic collapse since 2007.

This project studies a broad array of financial institutions to discover the impacts of financial regulations on functionally efficient finance, productivity growth, and income distribution.

This research project builds on theory indicating that credit flows to the real sector have systematically different effects from financial flows to asset markets.

This research project elaborates an original model of Keynesian demand-led growth and communicates Keynesian macroeconomic insights to a broad and diverse audience.

This research project studies contagion among financial institutions and the role of financial market regulation in weakening or strengthening the transmission of financial turmoil across institutions.

This research project develops a model of foreign exchange markets in which agents’ expectations are explicitly modeled and evolve over time and examines how these models perform in terms of capturing the behavior observed in the experiments with human subjects.

This research project designs and evaluates new strategies that can address the issues of financing human capital investments by developing and estimating a unified framework.

This research project proposes linking emission fees to actual temperatures, thereby helping to break the policy stalemate and reach agreement on an effective policy.

This research project creates a systematic and publically available database of macroeconomic and structural conditions in all IMF loan agreements signed after 1987.

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 introduces heterogeneous microeconomic behavior into a demand-driven stock flow consistent model to study the links between microeconomic financial fragility and macroeconomic instability.

This research project analyzes the country-specific effects of inequality within a stock-flow consistent macro model and within a DSGE model with heterogeneous and interacting households.

This research project seeks to understand the linkages between the changes in the financial economy and the behavior of households in the real economy.

This research project organizes a systematic database of policies implemented in response to crises, focusing on fiscal and monetary measures, in order to identify policy action rather than simply looking at endogenous outcome variables.