Archive

Inequalities in skills are fundamentally linked to economic and social inequalities.

So, most Nobel Prize exegetes went a long way, this week, toward explaining that asset pricing is not primarily born out of theoretical reflection but out of prize-deserving empirical work.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, few would dispute the risks of excessive borrowing. But which debts should one worry about – public or private? This column presents new research on the interplay of public and private debts since 1870 in 17 advanced economies. History demonstrates that excessive private-sector borrowing plays a greater role than fiscal profligacy in generating financial instability. However, when the credit boom collapses, the government’s capacity to alleviate the downturn is limited by the prevailing level of public debt.

This episode features grantee D’Maris Coffman of the Centre for Financial History talking about her organization’s commitment to a New Financial History and what the fruits of their approach can tell us about modern debt crises and sustainable debt levels.

Advisory Board members Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff today issued a response to recent criticism of their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.”

This episode features Pier Carlo Padoan, Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD, talking about the euro zone crisis, Europe’s structural problems, and how uncertainty has damaged economic growth in Europe.

If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?

This morning, when I woke up a few hours before the Nobel announcement, I felt seriously dissatisfied. I had meant to write a post on Thomson Reuters’s prediction that Card, Angrist and Krueger may win the Nobel for their work on empirical microeconomics.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

This episode features David Vines of Oxford University talking about the euro crisis. Can the monetary union survive the crisis?

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

How does economic theory match up with reality?

The current economic and financial crisis has given rise to a vigorous debate about the state of economics, and the training which graduate and undergraduates economics students are receiving. Importantly, among those arguing most strongly for a change in the way that young economists are trained are the ultimate employers of these students, in both the private and the public sector. Employers are increasingly complaining that young economists don’t understand how the financial system actually works, and are ill-prepared to think about appropriate policies at a time of crisis.

Anat Admati, author of The Bankers’ New Clothes: Whats Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, talks about how to fix our broken banking sector.

Sadly, it is questionable whether the economy has really improved.