Archive

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.

A survey on behalf of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung indicates that German economists are much more American in their thinking than is presumed – with a rising trend.

It is a shame that Greece was unable to manage its finances and is now slipping into chaos. But this outcome was inevitable and could not be permanently averted with loans from the international community.

It is time for Greece to make a daring leap and adopt its own currency, says Ifo President Hans-Werner Sinn. “The drachma should be introduced immediately as a virtual currency,” Sinn said in Munich.

The ECB has decided to maintain its current level of emergency liquidity to Greece (ECB 2015). By refusing to extend additional emergency liquidity, the ECB has decided that Greece must leave the Eurozone. This may be a legal necessity or a political judgement call, or both. Anyway, it raises a host of unpleasant questions about the treatment of a member country and about the independence of the central bank.

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness.

Greece: reculer pour mieux sauter

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyse the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the liquidity of households’ wealth

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness.

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.

According to Reuters, Eurozone officials attempted to suppress the publication of this report.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

The (very) recent rise of quantitative analysis in history of economics working papers calls for a closer examination of the prospects and limitations of this approach, and of the impediment to its large-scale development.

Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.

The International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, recently asked a simple and important question: “How much of an adjustment has to be made by Greece, how much has to be made by its official creditors?” But that raises two more questions: How much of an adjustment has Greece already made? And have its creditors given anything at all?

It doesn’t make sense to pay someone to rob you.