Archive

On 25 September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious policy agenda that aims to eradicate poverty, in all its forms and dimensions, by 2030.

It is high time to ditch this myth for at least the following five reasons.

Recently, our analysis has been questioned by Servaas Storm who has claimed that it is untenable to blame neo-mercantilist Germany for driving a wedge into the Eurozone. [i] It is shown below that Storm’s critique has a certain aplomb, but lacks substance.

Today’s richest Americans may soon blow past the tycoons of the Roaring Twenties. Lance Taylor explains why, and what to do about it.

Economic growth and rising prosperity does not happen at the moment of invention. Only an innovation policy aiming to maximise activities throughout the innovation cycle will succeed in capturing economic growth that enhance the welfare of all citizens.

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

We first show that, with a Kaleckian structure that is consistent with Pasinetti (1962), the relationship between distribution and growth is more robust than conventional wisdom suggests. Next, we extend our model by incorporating borrowing and emulation effects into workers’ consumption behavior, under different assumptions about how debt is serviced.

Comments on “German Wage Moderation and the Eurozone Crisis: A Critical Analysis” by Servaas Storm

Trust is an essential part of a functioning economy, yet it is often one of the least understood variables in economics. While trust is difficult to understand and measure in the context of economics, this type of innovative work enables new and important conversations about trust and how it affects the economy.

Lessons Ignored From the 1930s

Professor Casarico explains why her focus on gender and the “glass ceiling” can help us push forward economic thinking.

It is high time to look more closely at the labor cost competitiveness myth.

For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong – aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?

Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco

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.

Some Fundamental Keynesian and Post-Keynesian Insights, with an Analysis of Possible Mechanisms to Achieve a Sustained Recovery

A budget approach cloaked in the aura of science and technical jargon became a tool of manipulation.

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Since Aristotle the question about the potential relationship between economic inequality and democratic changes has been studied and debated – but scientifically our ability as researchers to assess and understand how such complex social phenomena may be related is much more limited than recognised.

Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, discusses the Irish banking crisis.

‘Tis the season to celebrate gift giving. But for big banks Santa Claus comes all the time, in the form of handsomely wrapped subsidies and subtly packaged regulatory nuances worth more more gold than the wildest dreams of the Three Wise Men.

This paper applies Schein’s model of organizational culture to financial firms and their prudential regulators.

With the RMB in the SDR, careful progression in China could balance the international monetary system.

The idea of this blog is to engage current financial news and policy debates from the standpoint of the classics of monetary theory. We ask, “What would Bagehot say?”, “What would Minsky say?”, “What would Fischer Black say?” Like them, our starting point is the idea that capitalism is essentially a financial system, which means that we need to take a money view in order to understand how it works.

Can education stop the country’s backward slide?

Innovation is not a magic pill to solve the current afflictions that ail our 21st century economy.

The Cambridge UK vs USA capital theory debates of the 1960s showed that the workhorse mainstream growth model relies on unsustainable assumptions. Its standard interpretation is not consistent with the last four decades of data.

There is a deeper story to be told about the inclusion of the Renminbi.

How might a reimagined American foreign policy both bolster the domestic economy and help build a 21st-century global economy that works for everyone?

Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?

In 2003, McCullough and Vinod wrote, “Research that cannot be replicated is not science, and cannot be trusted either as part of the profession’s accumulated body of knowledge or as a basis for policy.”(1)

“Governments propose, markets dispose,” as Charles Kindleberger liked to say.

Lance Taylor explains how missing the big picture is too common in the field.

The United States economy has come apart, with the rich getting richer and workers’ incomes not advancing at all.

Lord Adair Turner visited the Oxford Martin Lecture Theatre on Tuesday 24 November for a well-attended INET Oxford event launching his latest book ‘Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance’ (Princeton University Press).

This paper analyzes what assumptions on formation of expectations are consistent with Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) and its corollaries.

Spain’s future path for economic policy will soon be decided.

Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

I describe the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis.

This paper analyses the financial assistance provided to Greece in the first two rescue packages granted by the Troika (European Union, European Central Bank and IMF).

A gap between theory and reality has haunted economists.

A radical solution to the current economic malaise.

This is almost certainly the highest level of relative, and certainly absolute, global inequality at any point in human history. Is there anything we can do to reverse or mitigate this trend?

We investigate the claim that the way in which debtor households service their debts matters for macroeconomic performance.

We develop a neo-Kaleckian growth model that emphasizes the importance of consumption behavior.

Sometimes a radical path is the most practical way out of a mess.

Throughout its first 10 years operation, the John Bates Clark medal was constantly challenged. Many young economists found it biased toward theory, and demanded the establishment of a distinct award for applied work.

This paper sketches the outlines of the new international monetary system that has emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

A panel featuring Thomas Piketty, Kevin Murphy, and Steven Durlauf

The impact of the post-meltdown Federal Reserve policy of ultra-low interest rates and Quantitative Easing (QE) on income and wealth inequality has become an important policy and political issue.

A combination of leeway within the government and constitutional immunity during incumbency enables office holders to abuse their budget at will, which in turn creates a crisis of growth in Africa, relative to other parts of the world.

By integrating the history of industrial development in Britain and the United States with the ideas of leading economic thinkers, this essay demonstrates the absurdity of perfect competition as the ideal of economic efficiency.

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang.

This paper traces the evolution of the concept of the cyclically adjusted budget from the 1930s to the present.

Is an ancient financial taboo keeping us from prosperity? Adair Turner, author of a new book on global finance, explains.

In 1953, Oskar Morgenstern proposed to reform the eligibility criterion for fellows of the Econometric Society, in an attempt to foster empirical work.

Public funding behind the technology is the secret ingredient.

The Institute extends its congratulations to Philip Lane, who has been named to succeed Patrick Honohan as the Irish central bank chief, and inherit his role on the council of the ECB.

This essay critically evaluates the benefits and costs of the dominant methodology in macroeconomics, the DSGE approach. Although the approach has led to great progress in some areas, it has also created biases and blind spots in the profession that hold back our understanding and our ability to govern the macroeconomy. There is great scope for progress in macroeconomics by judiciously pushing the boundaries of some of the methodological restrictions imposed by the DSGE approach.

The Institute recently sponsored several panels at the Kiel Global Economic Symposium. In particular, the panel on Income Distribution and Mobility struck us as likely to be of especially wide interest. We are grateful for the participation of all the scholars on them and are pleased to present summaries of their presentations here.

Adair Turner talks about his new book, Between Debt & the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance with Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in a free, public discussion.

Adair Turner discusses his new book, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance.

A new online course challenges typical teaching approaches.

John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.

Do we need to rethink the teaching of economics?

The World Bank’s global poverty estimates suffer from deep-seated problems arising from a single source, the lack of a standard for identifying who is poor and who is not that is consistent and meaningful.

Economists’ assumptions, even about seemingly “small” matters, make an enormous difference to global poverty estimates but their impact often goes unnoticed, and the choices made have been badly justified. We must stop pretending that the World Bank’s “$1 per day” estimates are at all reliable.

Hot on the heels of the BIS, now comes the IMF Global Financial Stability report, “Corporate Leverage in Emerging Markets–A Concern?”. Yes, a concern, and just in time for the annual meeting in Peru next week.

US Military needs during the Cold War induced a mathematical modeling of rational allocation and control processes while simultaneously binding that rationality with computational reality. Modeling strategies to map the optimal to the operational ensued and eventually became a driving force in the development of macroeconomic dynamics.

A student of microeconomics learns that any competitive equilibrium leads to a Pareto efficient outcome (First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics). What do we mean by the efficiency or inefficiency of markets?

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

The reality of human homeostasis expands the views on preferences and rational choice that are part of traditionally conceived Homo economicus and casts doubts on economic models that depend only on an “invisible hand” mechanism.

A student of microeconomics learns that any desirable efficient market allocation can be sustained by a competitive equilibrium (the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics), given appropriate lump-sum wealth redistributions. This is typically understood as a means to correct unfair market outcomes. What are the real world implications of the second theorem? How well does it address distributional concerns?

The best-known China bear says the emperor is not yet naked, but getting there.

Join Columbia University Dean Merit E. Janow for a talk by Lord Adair Turner, Chairman, Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Professor Richard Portes discusses the problems of Europe and then specifically drills down into Greece itself.

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation of pricing kernels, or equivalently of marginal utility functions up to scale, in consumption based asset pricing Euler equations. Ours is the first paper to prove nonparametric identification of Euler equations under low level conditions (without imposing functional restrictions or just assuming completeness).

Have economists fallen in love with an idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets? To what extent is standard microeconomics responsible for this state of affairs?

As Greece heads to the polls, a look back at the crisis and what the future will bring.

Marc Lavoie discusses the methodological foundations of heterodox economics, and offers a very different model of money and credit, firms and pricing, consumer theory, effective demand and employment and growth theories.

Professor Heckman was invited to speak at the HDCA 2015 Conference as the keynote speaker for the Amartya Sen Lecture. The presentation offered recent research on the economics of creating flourishing lives, discussing the importance of cognitive skills, character skills and health.

Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researcher Max Roser recently collaborated with world famous Swedish statistical showman Hans Rosling on the upcoming documentary ‘Don’t Panic: How To End Poverty In 15 Years’.

News about a wonderful workshop, “Knowledge Transfer and Its Contexts”

US household wealth concentration is not likely to decline in response to fiscal interventions alone.

Tania Singer on the key importance of understanding preferences and behavioral change.

A little-understood rule in the tax code is making headlines. What’s all the fuss?

A prolonged period of extremely low nominal interest rates has not resulted in high inflation. This has led to increased interest in the “Neo-Fisherian” proposition according to which low nominal interest rates may themselves cause inflation to be lower.