Archive

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.

If anything, it points to a better managed global financial system and a more resilient Chinese economy.

Bursting Bubbles leave a mess – in the markets, throughout the real economy, in societies, in politics and with policymaking.

Economist Alicia Girón explains why a feminist perspective is crucial to new economic thinking.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not a run of the mill recession.

This paper, an extension of the Presidential Address to the International Economic Association, evaluates alternative strands of macro-economics in terms of the three basic questions posed by deep downturns: What is the source of large perturbations? How can we explain the magnitude of volatility? How do we explain persistence?

The latest austerity deal is terrible for Greece and Europe.

And how do they relate to our democratic institutions and institutional social relations?

In the last couple of months, Greece has once again become the center of attention of politicians, academics, and the general public. The debate has, for a large part, focused on Greece’s fiscal deficit as if it were just a self-inflicted Greek problem. But is it?

Comparing outcomes for biological and adopted children sheds light on the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

Literary productions offer illustrations of economic theory in action.

Archival artifacts from the history of economics.

This paper proposes a theoretically based and easy-to-implement way to measure the systemicrisk of financial institutions using publicly available accounting and stock market data.

Dubious transactions and flimsy accounting standards need scrutiny.

Tony Atkinson’s new book points the way forward.

The unprecedented intervention by China’s authorities to backstop China’s stock market reveals widening policy tensions in China’s leaderships financial reform agenda.

The sharp and sudden plunge scared everyone. Can the Chinese government get control of the market?

The recent financial crisis has impressively illustrated the dangers of rapid credit growth in a painful way.

As I write this it would be appear that the Greek crisis is finally coming to an end. In this report I would like to discuss why the negotiations were so fraught and what an agreement actually means. In a nutshell, the EU sought to address matters with the same kinds of measures that had been tried in the past, while Greece argued that doing so would not make things any better—and would in fact make them far worse.

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

This blog interprets and presents critical commentary on the textbook “Microeconomic Theory” by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael Whinston and Jerry Green, which is widely used in Ph.D. programs in economics around the world. The blog initially accompanies the course at the New School For Social Research entitled Advanced Microeconomics I (Fall of 2012, taught by Prof. Sanjay Reddy, with Raphaele Chappe as teaching assistant) and, as such, focuses on particular parts of the textbook which are used in that course. We welcome comments and contributions from interested persons anywhere.

A four percent growth goal for first term of the next president is not only possible, but is what we should strive to achieve.

The financial crisis of 2008 was unforeseen to a significant extent. One reason is that the dominant academic theories influencing political decision makers ignore recent advances and instead rely largely on models and decision science dating back to the Second World War.

There is now a growing consensus among policymakers and academics that a key element to improve safeguards against financial instability is to strengthen the “macroprudential” orientation of regulatory and supervisory frameworks.

The Eurozone crisis has been wrongly interpreted as either a crisis of fiscal profligacy or of deteriorating unit-labour cost competitiveness (caused by rigid labour markets), or a combination of both.

A look behind the scenes of the Greek referendum and what could happen next.

The thunder from the Greek “No” vote in the referendum on Sunday, July 5 continues to roll around the world.