Archive

Evidence shows pharmaceutical companies won’t stop price-gouging and risking American lives for financial gain in this time of crises – unless we force them.

A Report From the Front Line

States can be sorted into two groups with statistically significantly different productivity regimes. In this sense, the US economy shows signs of dualism—which is the idea that the economy consists of heterogeneous units that exhibit different behaviors and levels of performance.

This paper analyzes regional contributions to the US payroll share from 1977 to 2017 and the four major business cycles throughout this period.

Please join us for a discussion with Geoff Mann, INET Senior Fellow and author of Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, on how the coronavirus pandemic might (or might not) teach us to prepare for a life on an increasingly hot planet.

A Template to Prevent a Global Debt Crisis?

With the COVID-19 death toll rising, we should question the wisdom and morality of an IP system that silently condemns millions of human beings to suffering and death every year.

As the COVID crisis threatens to overwhelm both federal and state government services, getting the digital component of government services to function effectively is mission critical.

Just before the crisis, European countries were designing austerity reforms that would increase inequality and reduce internal demand. Could they return?

Economists have gone to great lengths to write humans out of economics, pushing self-interest and generally providing two choices—faith in markets or the state.

Researchers have shown that the financial and economic impacts of denying women abortion care can last years

Contrary to pharmaceutical company claims, revenue from high insulin prices are going to shareholders, not R&D

This paper considers the relationship between profits realized from higher insulin list prices, pharmaceutical innovation, and the financial structures of the three dominant insulin manufacturing companies, which set list prices.

Economist Emmanuel Saez explains how inequality is destroying society.

A call to action for a world economy in crisis

Financial industry donations to members of Congress lead to the adoption of pro-bank policies

The links between campaign contributions from the financial sector and switches to a pro-bank vote were direct and substantial

IMPORTANT: Due to growing concerns around the coronavirus, the INET Conference, as well as these workshops will be postponed. Applicants will soon be provided further information.

Austerity policies will slow recovery and should be rejected

Cambridge-INET has just launched a new website, featuring research, insights and news from Cambridge Economists about the economic implications of COVID-19

Much historical commentary emphasizes how pandemics restructure long-standing social and political arrangements. The observation applies to macroeconomics as well.

Economist Gordon Lafer describes a race against the education technology industry to do what’s right for America’s kids

The scale of firm exposure to the coronavirus is unprecedented by earlier outbreaks, spans all major economies and is pervasive across all industries

As Covid-19 spreads globally in the first quarter of 2020, this paper finds that firms’ primary concerns relate to the collapse of demand, increased uncertainty, and disruption in supply chains

INET Board Member Richard Vague writes in The Hill on how to rescue the coronavirus economy

What ails the EU Green Deal is exactly what troubles the Union in general — an absence of social democracy at work

This paper considers the ambition, scale, substance and strategy of the European Union’s Green Deal

Quarantine or not, it can be hard to stay connected, but INET’s Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) is here for this generation’s new economic thinkers.

During WWII FDR mobilized private manufacturers to support the war effort. To keep Americans healthy, we need to do the same now for medical equipment

Effective and quick federal policy response is critical to create conditions for a quick recovery.

Incomes Destroyed at the Bottom, Profits Supported at the Top

William Lazonick emphasizes that keeping workers productively employed is key to economic recovery from Covid-19 as well as a healthy economic future

As we face a coronavirus-induced health and economic crisis of uncertain duration, policy makers should be particularly concerned about private equity’s heightened use of debt to buy out healthcare providers and take them private, with no regulatory oversight.

Private equity firms have become major players in the healthcare industry. How has this happened and what are the results?

It’s time for business executives, employees, and taxpayers to come together to help get us out of the pandemic and create conditions for a sustainable and equitable future

If the public is to be called upon for the second time in twelve years to bail out businesses, it should get something back for its money. Bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government.

Rob Johnson discusses whether the recession will become a depression

The younger generation, already saddled with student debt and uncertain jobs, will pay a high price as the crisis unfolds.

Stuck at home and already bored of Netflix? Then check out our #LearnEconAtHome series of video explainers you can watch from anywhere.

If the European Central Bank does not jump to the aid of peripheral countries weakened by the pandemic, the Eurozone could collapse.

Dr. Chen Long, Director of the Luohan Academy, explains why the digital revolution is so different from the industrial revolution

Establishing legal responsibility in the fissured workplace

This article proposes a new “Concentric Circle framework” which would improve workers’ access to civil, labor, and employment rights.

Economist and feminist Victoria Bateman reveals some naked truths about the failings of economics.

Trevon Logan discusses the impact of structural racism in health and economics

New research points to critical role of public funding in drug discoveries and development for the last decade

A report from the Commission on Global Economic Transformation’s meeting in West Africa

In light of the growing concerns over the coronavirus, we have decided to postpone the INET Plenary to October 13-15, 2020 (originally slated for April 13-15, 2020)

What will empower a worker to be able to make greater demands on a profitable economy or employer? The answer may be summed up in one word: leverage.

Some Personal Reflections on a Half Century of Friendship and Appreciation

In this series Polanyi reflects on an extraordinary life, and the extraordinary legacy of her family.

Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now, not just in the far future.

Is America facing a retirement crisis?

Lower Income Towns in New Hampshire Voted Heavily for Sanders; Richer Towns Did the Opposite.

Jonathan Haidt deploys insights from moral psychology to help us see ourselves and each other more clearly

How models treat innovation may be just as important as their assumptions about climate damages

We conclude that representing dynamic realism in such models is as important as – and far more empirically tractable than – continued debate about the monetization of climate damages and ‘social cost of carbon’.

The central bank today is not just the government’s bank, but also a bankers’ bank, a truly hybrid institution

The central bank today is not just the government’s bank, but also a bankers’ bank, a truly hybrid institution

How Penrosian Learning Confronts the Neoclassical Fallacy

To get beyond the neoclassical fallacy, economists have to stop relying on constrained-optimization methodology

Without new economic thinking, macro policy will retain its deflationary biases and secular stagnation remains the ‘normal’.

This paper argues that it is a mistake to dismiss secular demand stagnation as main cause of declining potential growth in the OECD.

An event for INET’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation

Explore economic growth and development through technological innovation with the renowned investor and scholar

Inequality, in many ways, may be the biggest question of our times. And yet it is a topic that is still underexplored in conventional economics curricula.

Reconstituting capitalism and revitalizing the liberal international order will require revisiting first principles of Western political economy, rebalancing the emphasis it places on broad living standards as opposed to national income. The 2020 US presidential campaign has begun to do just that.

A Seminar of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, by Maria Cristina Marcuzo

Prof. Oliver Hart will deliver the inaugural talk on Corporate Purpose

The European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF are the continent’s austerity police

Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow laws and the Great Migration

This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy.

The AEA and the Crisis of Expertise

Prof. Oliver Hart and Justice A. K. Jayasankaran Nambiar in conversation

Anwar Shaikh talks about the shortcomings of neoclassical economics and alternative frameworks

On the Modern Economic Theory of Incentives, Markets, and Socialism

Prof. Oliver Hart delivers the opening lecture of INET and ITT Bombay’s Samvaad lecture.

In an economic context that remains uncertain, the biggest loser of the UK elections may well be our health and that of the environment.

William Greider, a pioneering economic journalist, passed away last month. We at INET are saddened by his loss, and in tribute to his legacy are sharing his essay from The Nation, “What Would Happen if Women Were In Charge of the Global Economy?”

The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object?

A critique of Mankiw’s Macroeconomics

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.

One thing is clear – the ‘get Brexit done’ slogan resonated in a country which had been living on a series of knife edges as one ‘crunch’ time after another came and went.

Brexit uncertainty has already taken an economic toll

Using tools from computational linguistics, we construct new measures of the impact of Brexit on listed firms in the United States and around the world

Many of the challenges facing the new EU Presidency will need to be addressed not only at the European level but within a reinvigorated multilateral framework.

In her new book, Don’t Be Evil, Rana Foroohar explores how to confront companies like Google and their under-regulated stampede over all of us.

Stock buybacks are giveaways for greedy investors at the expense of everyone else.

Pharmaceutical drugs are often a matter of life or death. It should be a prime objective of government policy to rid the industry of financialization.

Columbia University’s Richard Robb talks about his new book on human behavior

Repeat after me: How much pipe should Fed plumbers lay if Fed plumbers like to lay pipe?

The U.S. economy is increasingly becoming a dual economy, where high productivity sectors—such as manufacturing—and high pay sectors—such as finance and professional services—co-exist with low pay and low productivity sectors that employ most workers.

This paper provides novel insights on the changing functional distribution of income in the post–war US economy.

INET experts discuss how financialization has driven up costs of healthcare—and how we can stop it.

Political theorist Wendy Brown explores new threats to democracy and society

Increased financialization is driving healthcare costs and must be addressed in our nation’s public policy.

The Financial Times correspondent on the libertarian streak in Silicon Valley

To make start-ups work for everyone, we need to put power back in the hands of workers.

National States and Conflicting Economic Priorities in the Making of the European Monetary System

This paper analyzes the early stages of the formation of the Common Market.