Archive

The Volcker Alliance and the Institute for New Economic Thinking convened a group of influential thinkers for a half-day forum to discuss regulatory and structural changes needed to ensure the stability and resilience of financial markets. 

Nobel laureate argues that the party’s adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy has hurt its prospects

The business corporation is the central economic institution in a modern economy. A company’s senior executives, with the advice and support of the board of directors, are responsible for the allocation of corporate resources to investments in productive capabilities. Senior executives also advise the board on the extent to which, given the need to invest in productive capabilities, the company can afford to make cash distributions to shareholders. Motivating corporate resource-allocation decisions are the modes of remuneration that incentivize and reward the top executives of these companies. A sound analysis of the operation and performance of a modern economy requires an understanding of not only how much these executives are paid but also the ways in which the prevailing system of executive pay influences their decisions to allocate corporate resources.

Neither do rapid growth in government debt, declining interest rates, or rapid increases in a central bank’s balance sheet

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

Real existing neoliberalism as a set of social facts distinct from a purist ideology has proven remarkably adaptable and politically resilient 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies allowed the United States to avoid the perils of right-wing populism that plunged Europe into war in the 1930s — Europe should learn from his example

Columbia professor Dan O’Flaherty explains how an awareness of racial trauma developed from growing up in Newark inspired him to write and teach on the economics of race.

Viewing economic outcomes as divorced from politics risks serious misunderstanding and virtually ensures regulatory failure.

What we’re reading: Some analysts expect dramatic changes and a short-term boost to the US economy, others predict continuity — and see Trump’s election reflecting a sea change in the global order

By suddenly eliminating two widely used bank notes, India’s government risks undermining public confidence in the basic means of exchange

Surviving the geopolitical and economic challenges of the coming years requires a world order less vulnerable to the vagaries of U.S. elections

How orthodox economics paved the way for the political shocks of 2016

The YSI Working Group on Economic Development, the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC) of the University of Greenwich, and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) would like to invite you to a talk by Professor Tim Jackson. 

International trade and investment are vital drivers of economic growth. As the size and shape of the world economy enters a new period of change, trade patterns reflect an evolving reality

By suppressing important questions in favor of being cheerleaders for globalization, economists failed to influence the public conversation

How economics underperforms in diversity, and some potential remedies

The TPP is dead, as is the assumption that future free-trade agreements can be negotiated by experts alone

Mission-oriented public investment is vital to spur a revival of private-sector investment

A conversation with Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for U.S. – China Relations and Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, shares a vision of how to bring economic opportunity to women of color

This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979- 2014.

In his keynote address to our #EconOfRace conference in Detroit, Rev. Dr. William Barber III issued a blistering critique of structural inequality in the United States, and urged economists to recognize their responsibility to the poor.

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economics has a race problem.

Prof. Marlene Kim says her research has revealed that African-American women face triple penalties from race and gender bias, and the combination of those two

Getting rid of barriers to economic security is possible with the right policies at the right time. 

Hoping to learn from other countries’ experiences in organizing finance for agriculture, more than 150 Americans were sent abroad in the summer of 1913 to investigate the minutiae of farm-credit systems in and around Europe.

Language has always been a way to divide, conquer, classify, and control, but it also helps to constitute who we are and what we think. 

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Economists offer widely different explanations for the decline in trade between nations, in a debate that remains unresolved but is increasingly urgent

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economist Darrick Hamilton and Institute President Rob Johnson discuss “stratification economics”, which addresses the failure of orthodox economics to see, explain and point to remedies for persistent racial inequality.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

Seven dangers of chronically low interest rates amid austerity and fiscal-policy phobia

This paper analyzes the Euro crisis in light of the experience of center-periphery relations over the last 40 years of renewed financial globalization.

Black Americans remain second-class citizens in access to housing finance

Oral contraception created a population that, today, is disproportionately inclined to save, resulting in low to negative real interest rates. Excess eurozone savings can only be accomodated by raising sovereign debt levels

Young women of all races and gender identities are powering movements from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform to reproductive justice to minimum wage and beyond. Researchers need to support their progress with metrics that capture the spirit they are building

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Wired profiles Color of Change leader Rashad Robinson and explores the challenges of movement-building in an era of digital activism

Historian Prof. Thomas Sugrue offers a critique of the conventional wisdom that roots the city’s fate in the racial tension of the tumultuous ‘60s and the decline of the auto industry.

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

Like the Great Depression and the stagflation of the ’70s, the anemic growth of the U.S. economy can’t be understood or remedied without changes in economists’ thinking

In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs.

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Institute for New Economic Thinking President Robert Johnson, in an appearance of the CNN International show Quest Means Business, warns that the anger of Trump’s supporters is unlikely to ebb absent significant economic and political changes — and that this anger could be more successfully marshaled by a more skilled and sophisticated Republican challenger four years from now. 

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

We examine whether personal wealth interests affect politicians’ decisions about stabilizing financial markets.

New approaches are being developed, but efforts are fragmented and need to be brought together if we hope to piece together a paradigm. 

William Darity, Jr. has a new key to unlocking the mystery of inequality: stratification economics.

Social safety nets don’t always need to come with a dark side

Institute for New Economic Thinking launches a far-reaching research effort into causes and potential remedies for the low-to-no-growth malaise afflicting many of the world’s leading economies

A conversation with Robert Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, former Managing Director for Soros Fund Management and former Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee.

The epidemic extension of working hours and difficulty in maintaining work-life balance raises the question of the point of income and leisure satisfaction.

Institute grantee Boyce cited for integrating ‘ecological, developmental and justice-oriented approaches’ into economics

Justice requires that the media, policy makers, and the public understand why corporations engage in misconduct and fraud

Economists honored for their work on contract theory, which has important implications for issues such as executive compensation that have been a focus of Institute research

The financial system no longer funds new ideas and projects — only about 15 percent of the money coming out of financial institutions goes into business investment; the rest is spent buying and selling existing financial instruments.

Eight years after the crisis erupted, what the global economy is experiencing is starting to look less like a slow recovery than like a new low-growth equilibrium. With monetary policy unable to stimulate demand, or even inflation, it’s time for fiscal authorities to relieve the burden on central banks.

Out of Ammunition? A discussion on central banking and secular stagnation with Larry Summers and Adair Turner

A new paper by Nancy Folbre offers an evidence-based refutation of ‘just-world’ assumptions

The media has failed ask basic questions about the economic thinking — and business record — of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, says Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, author of The Making of Donald Trump.

The main point of this paper is that loanable funds macroeconomic models with their “natural” interest rate don’t fit with modern institutions and data. Before getting into the numbers, it makes sense to describe the models and how to think about macroeconomics in the first place.

CEP Lecture by Adair Turner co-hosted with the IMF. 

Marc Levin highlights the recent effects of hyper-gentrification in New York City’s West Chelsea, focusing on an intersection where an elite private school sits directly across the street from public housing projects.

This course aims to introduce graduate students to the “standard” basic methods and topics of microeconomics as taught at the Ph.D. level, while providing a very different teaching approach than is prevalent in introductory doctoral-level microeconomics courses. Typically, much effort is focused on mastering a large technical apparatus consisting of axioms, theorems, propositions, and corresponding proofs, often leaving students longing for an informed and critical understanding of the deeper significance of the methods and results.

Past failures, present uncertainty, and a challenging political environment have vastly complicated the central bank’s task, says Institute President Rob Johnson

Research by INET grantees Atkinson, Casarico and Voitchovsky shows that women are starkly underrepresented in top earning brackets across a range of different countries

The idea that economics has recently gone through an empirical turn –that it went from theory to data– is all over the place. I argue that this transformation has been oversimplified and mischaracterized.

In a Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit Debate, Institute board chairman Adair Turner explains why extraordinary monetary policy isn’t working

Vice President warns that corporate stock buybacks restrict America’s long-term prosperity, citing the research of Institute grantee William Lazonick who has long argued the same

If additional education is not the solution to racial inequality, what is?

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

An award created as a concession to market-minded bankers needs to recognize the centrality of social-democratic policies to the wellbeing of industrialized economies

While many countries throughout the world have faced severe financial crises over the last decades, and while the Japanese stagnation and the 1997 Asian financial crisis did induce some additional interest for the introduction of banking and finance in macroeconomic theory, it is only with the advent of the US subprime financial crisis that macroeconomic and monetary theories put forward by mainstream economists have started to be questioned.

Remarks by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde remind us why gender remains a major research and policy focus for the Fund — and for the Institute for New Economic Thinking

The Eurozone is (quietly) disintegrating as ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries continue on paths of economic divergence. That disintegration is reinforced by self-defeating policies shaped by a macroeconomic model that mimics and reinforces the divisions between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

An exclusive conversation with Richard Batley, Head of Macroeconomics at Lombard Street Research.

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

We are happy to announce that we are offering a second run of the online course which aims to introduce graduate students and interested persons generally to the basic methods and topics of standard microeconomics as taught at the Ph.D. level — with a bit of ‘attitude’!

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

An Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper by William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins reveals that much reporting on executive pay relies on systems of measurement that underreport real compensation

Newspaper’s probe amplifies questions raised by our research into the impact of corporate donations onU.S. elections

Painting economics as blind to inequality may be overstating matters, but for too long efforts to explain it have been self limiting. Now, new economic thinkers are willing to pose uncomfortable questions.

We know about emergency lending, but what we are missing is the macroeconomic framework to guide a new rule for stabilization policy

Prof. Sanjeev Goyal explains his general theory of network formation based on individual incentives, and their economic implications

Investigating race as a driver of economic destiny.

There is much for U.S. authorities to learn from the European example of forcing corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, but more far-reaching oversight of executives’ allocation of resources is also required

Like any family reunion, the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium may have been as significant for what was said as it was for what was not discussed

In June of this year, Swiss voters saw an initiative on their ballots calling for an “unconditional basic income” that would “allow the whole population to lead a decent life and participate in public life.” Put on the ballot by a petition drive after it was rejected in parliament, the initiative was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters, with 23 percent approving.