Archive
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Article
How German Economists Really Think
Jul 7, 2015
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.
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Article
Why 'Grexit' could be good for Greece
Jul 7, 2015
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.
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Article
Sinn Advises Greece to Reinstate the Drachma
Jul 6, 2015
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.
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Article
Grexit: The Staggering Cost Of Central Bank Dependence
Jul 5, 2015
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.
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Working Paper
Partnership PaperIs There a Debt-threshold Effect on Output Growth?
Jul 2015
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.
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Video
Fixing the Eurozone
Jul 1, 2015
Greece: reculer pour mieux sauter
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Working Paper
Working paperThe Consumption Response to Liquidity-Enhancing Transfers: Evidence from Italian Earthquakes
Jun 2015
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
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Working Paper
Working paperIs There a Debt-threshold Effect on Output Growth?
Jun 2015
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.
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Article
Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy
Jun 30, 2015
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.
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Article
The Charleston shooter has been arrested, but the true killer remains at large
Jun 29, 2015
Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.
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Working Paper
ReportIMF Country Report 15/165: Greek Debt Sustainability Analysis
Jun 2015
According to Reuters, Eurozone officials attempted to suppress the publication of this report.
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Video
It's Time to Get Radical on Inequality
Jun 25, 2015
America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.
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Article
Is There a Quantitative Turn in the History of Economics (and how not to screw it up)?
Jun 23, 2015
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.
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Video
The Death of ‘Homo Economicus’
Jun 18, 2015
Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.
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Article
Greece Has Made Tough Choices. Now It's the IMF's Turn.
Jun 18, 2015
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?
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Article
Bankers Think They Have an Ethical Duty to Steal From Taxpayers
Jun 16, 2015
It doesn’t make sense to pay someone to rob you.
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Article
Why This Time Is Different for Ukraine
Jun 15, 2015
The Ukrainian government has committed to implement far-reaching reforms in exchange for the support it is getting from the international community, led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Understandably, given Ukraine’s disappointing transition history, there is widespread scepticism on whether the country will live up to its commitments. Three failed IMF programmes later, the fundamental question is: Is it different this time?
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Article
What Even Famous Mainstream Economists Miss About the Cambridge Capital Controversies
Jun 15, 2015
Non-mainstream economists are disputing neoclassical ideas about capital.
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Working Paper
Working paperAggregating Elasticities: Intensive and Extensive Margins of Female Labour Supply
Jun 2015
There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.
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Article
Fiscal implications of the ECB’s bond-buying program
Jun 14, 2015
The monetary-fiscal policy connection is under scrutiny by the German Constitutional Court in the context of the ECB’s OMT bond-buying programme. This column argues that most analyses are deeply flawed by the misapplication of private-company default principles to the central bank. ECB bond-buying transforms public bonds into monetary base, and sovereign-default risk into inflation risk. The real question is: What is the non-inflationary limit to money-base expansion? This depends upon the economic situation and is much higher in the current liquidity-trap setting.
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Video
How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security
Jun 14, 2015
Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?
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Article
The rise of financialization has led to lower living standards and reduced growth in the U.S.
Jun 12, 2015
The last 30 years has seen a massive rise in the importance of financial instruments in the American economy. But what has been the impact of this shift in corporate investment strategy?
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Article
Thoughts On Skidelsky's Rant Against The Current Economics Curriculum
Jun 9, 2015
The extremely wise Robert Skidelsky has an excellent rant against Anglo-Saxon economics departments
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Article
Fixing The Financial System: Adam Smith Vs. Jeremy Bentham
Jun 9, 2015
How do we create a “change in culture”?
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Section
History of Economics Playground
A blog by young and restless (and good looking) historians of economics.
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Article
History of Economics on the Making
Jun 1, 2015
New topics and approaches make their way into two recent conferences on the history of economics
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Working Paper
Working paperBeyond Competitive Devaluations: The Monetary Dimensions of Comparative Advantage
May 2015
Motivated by the long-standing debate on the pros and cons of competitive devaluation, we propose a new perspective on how monetary and exchange rate policies can contribute to a country’s international competitiveness. We refocus the analysis on the implications of monetary stabilization for a country’s comparative advantage.
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Collection
Realigning Financial Regulation
Has financial reform succeeded in realigning finance with society’s broader public interests? Here’s what several of our top experts have to say.
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Article
America’s Competition Fetish Kills Creativity and Produces Human Sheep
May 28, 2015
Margaret Heffernan on her latest book, A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better
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Video
The Long Road Back Toward Ethical Banking Practices
May 20, 2015
How do we rebuild trust in financial services?
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Video
Adair Turner on Debt
May 13, 2015
The former chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and author of the forthcoming book “Between Debt and the Devil” explains why private debt, not banks, deepened the financial crisis and continues to cause trouble today.
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Article
UK Election: A Tale Of Two Nations
May 11, 2015
Yes, it is a tale of two nations, but in a much broader way than you think. Not just England and Scotland, but an equally salient parallel between Great Britain and Canada.
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Working Paper
Working paperContagion Exposure and Protection Technology
May 2015
People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.
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Article
Making Financial Regulations Work for Society
May 8, 2015
Remarks from Finance & Society May 6, 2015
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Conference Session
Welcome Address & Introductory Remarks
May 5, 2015 | 05:00—05:15
Introductory remarks at the 2015 Finance & Society conference in Washington D.C.
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Conference Session
Other People's Money: Governance, Integrity, & Ethics
May 5, 2015 | 06:45—08:00
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Conference Session
A Conversation with Christine Lagarde & Janet Yellen
May 5, 2015 | 05:15—06:15
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Conference Session
Credit Markets: Booms, Busts, & Distortions
May 5, 2015 | 09:15—10:45
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Conference Session
Making Financial Regulation Work for Society
May 5, 2015 | 10:45—11:45
In this session Anat Admati and Brooksley Born discuss their observations about financial regulation needed to make sure the financial system serves society.
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Conference Session
An Interview With Sarah Bloom Raskin
May 5, 2015 | 12:00—12:30
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Conference Session
Concluding Remarks
May 5, 2015 | 12:30—01:00
Closing remarks at the 2015 Finance & Society conference in Washington D.C.
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Article
Want to Take on Financial and Governmental Corruption? Hire Women.
May 5, 2015
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Webinars and Events
Finance & Society
ConferenceMay 5–6, 2015
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde joined a renowned group of globally influential women in discussing how the financial system can be re-imagined to truly benefit society.
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Conference Session
Finance & Society
May 4, 2015 | 02:30—05:30
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Video
Breaking the Glass Ceiling
May 3, 2015
Whilst progress has been made, the “glass ceiling” dividing men and women has yet to be broken definitively. Monika Queisser discusses the challenges still facing women in the workplace and beyond.
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Article
How Sociologists Think About Inequality
May 1, 2015
Most sociologists believe that formal and informal institutions are more critical in explaining the rising inequality observed in advanced economies. In this light, changing institutions such as the ascendance of shareholder-centered corporate governance model, finance-friendly policies since the late 70s, credentialism, and deunionization all contribute to the earnings dynamics at different parts of the distribution.
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Working Paper
Working paperInput Diffusion and the Evolution of Production Network
Apr 2015
The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.
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Working Paper
Working paperLaid Low: The IMF, The Eurozone and the First Rescue of Greece
Apr 2015
As Greece descended into a financial maelstrom in the spring of 2010, a small group of staffers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held top-secret talks with officials from the German and French finance ministries to discuss the idea of restructuring Greece’s debt.
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Video
Women, Finance & Society
Apr 27, 2015
Gudrun Johnsen on Iceland, “womenomics”, and Finance & Society
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Article
Why journal editors should commission history papers for their anniversary issues
Apr 23, 2015
Writing the history of economic journals is not merely a way to reconstruct the development of new fields and new approaches to economics. It also recasts current debates on peer-review, retractions, open-access, replicability, and bias in scientific publishing in a wider perspective. It answers important questions on the influence of editors, publishers and referees on the development or marginalization of various economic approaches. But such endeavour requires the preservation of journals’ archives, the recognition of historical expertise, and economists’ adoption of a more relaxed and humble approach to their history.
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Article
History as Personal Expression — a personal note
Apr 22, 2015
Economists and historians of economics have constructed different (and sometimes conflicting) narratives about the past of their field. In fact what is history for economists may not be what is history for historians. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Economic Journal invited renowned economists to discuss important contributions published in the past by the journal and the works on similar topics by historians of economics are absent from these accounts. History of economics here seems to have the weight of a JEL descriptor attached to an invited contribution, which we ought to agree that it is not much.
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Article
Our Banking System is a Giant House of Cards
Apr 21, 2015
It Could Fall On You.
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Article
New Climate-Economic Thinking
Apr 21, 2015
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Video
Income Inequality in Europe
Apr 19, 2015
A member of the Austrian Central Bank tells us his research on wealth and income inequality in Europe.
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Working Paper
Working paperDiscrimination, Social Identity, and Coordination: An Experiment
Apr 2015
This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesAn Economical Business-Cycle Model
Apr 2015
In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to matching frictions, and real wealth enters the utility function. These assumptions modify the two core equations of the standard New Keynesian model
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Video
Greece and the Eurozone
Apr 14, 2015
Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Stiglitz discuss Greece’s financial challenges and the associated Eurozone politics in this exclusive conversation.
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Article
How to Recognize New Economic Thinking
Apr 14, 2015
The Institute for New Economic Thinking responds to an evident need for innovative approaches to understanding economic and financial processes.
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Article
We Must Lean Over Backwards
Apr 14, 2015
Emulate Richard Feynman: Lean over backwards so you do not fool yourself, and teach your students the discipline correctly from the start, rather than teaching them things at the start you will have to unteach them later.
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Article
Party Competition to Cut the Government Deficit by More in the UK's General Election
Apr 14, 2015
At least the Labour Party has only promised to cut day-to-day spending, not public investment.
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Video
Upholding the Rule of Law
Apr 13, 2015
Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.
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Article
New Economic Thinking vs. Hard Political Realities
Apr 13, 2015
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Article
False Economic Policy Clichés and General Elections
Apr 13, 2015
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Article
Is the Fed Making Inequality Worse? Yes, New Research Shows.
Apr 11, 2015
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Working Paper
Conference paperA New Rational Expectations Hypothesis: What Can Economists Really Know About the Future?
Apr 2015
John Muth proposed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) to represent how the market (an aggregate of its participants) understands and forecasts outcomes. REH imposes internal consistency between the market’s forecasts and “the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961, p. 316).
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Working Paper
Conference paperChange of Course: a Journalist’s Perspective
Apr 2015
I first came across economics students’ campaigns to revolutionise their education in that bastion of radical thought: the newsroom of the Financial Times.
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Conference Session
George Soros on the Future of Europe
Apr 10, 2015 | 03:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperFrom Terrible to Terrific Undergraduate Economics Curricula
Apr 2015
Among the areas left largely unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent never-‐ending recession, the teaching of economics ranks high.
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Eurozone crisis: A debt shortage as the final cause
Apr 2015
This paper proposes a different interpretation of the Eurozone crisis, seeing as its “final” cause European policies which have forced private savings down too low.
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Working Paper
Conference paperWhat's Wrong With Economics?
Apr 2015
Hubris might well head the list
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Conference Session
The Eurozone Crisis: Fiscal Profligacy Or Capital Flows As Final Causes
Apr 10, 2015 | 06:30—08:00
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Conference Session
Ukraine & The Future of Europe
Apr 10, 2015 | 08:00—08:30
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Conference Session
Durable Inequality and Individual Differences in Capacities and Behavior
Apr 10, 2015 | 06:15—07:45
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Conference Session
Teaching Economics
Apr 10, 2015 | 07:00—08:30
This panel covers the teaching of economics at the university level.
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Conference Session
Finance, Sustainability and the Environment
Apr 10, 2015 | 07:15—08:45
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Conference Session
Economics Curriculum for Activists
Apr 10, 2015 | 06:00—07:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperAusteritarianism in Europe: What Options for Resistance?
Apr 2015
In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.
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Working Paper
Conference paperEmbedding GroupThink
Apr 2015
This memo outlines key concepts and the methodological approach involved in a recently funded Institute for New Economic Thinking project. Our aim is to pinpoint the relationship between the reception of academic ideas, traced by citation networks with qualitative coding, and positions of institutional and political power.
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Working Paper
Conference paperReflexivity, expectations feedback and almost self-fulfilling equilibria: economic theory, empirical evidence and laboratory experiments
Apr 2015
We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.
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Working Paper
Conference paperLinking Individual and Community Economic Mobility: The Spatial Foundations of Persistent Inequality in the United States
Apr 2015
Considerable academic and public attention has been drawn to the pulling away of the very rich—the so-called “one percent” whose gains have far outpaced those of everyone else (Piketty 2014). But the debate has reached well beyond the very top, especially in the United States.Indeed, the hollowing out of the middle class, continuing stagnation of wages, and new evidence on the lack of upward mobility across generations all strike at the very heart of the American ideal.
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Working Paper
Conference paperItaly's Crisis: Neither Fiscal Profligacy nor Capital Flows
Apr 2015
Italy was one of the worst hit during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis (GFC) among the major advanced economies. By year-end 2009, Italy’s economy had contracted by 6.6 percent; significantly larger than the recessions in the euro zone and the United States, for example, which saw their GDPs shrink by 4.4 and 3.1 percent, respectively.
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Working Paper
Conference paperReviving Debate In Economics: Motivations and Methods of the International Student Movement
Apr 2015
In the past three years, students around the world have turned the heat of scrutiny onto our economics departments. Our call is strikingly uniform across our diverse cultures and languages: we want critical debate back in the economics curriculum.
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Article
Herr Schauble’s Foibles: The Eurozone Rebalancing Conundrum
Apr 10, 2015
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Conference Session
How Did Bad Economics Crowd Out Good Economics? Evidence from Citation Analysis
Apr 10, 2015 | 06:45—08:15
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Working Paper
Conference paperHow Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence
Apr 2015
“Because many interests come into play in the financing of an election campaign and then they ask you to pay back. So the election campaign should be independent from anyone who may finance it.” - Pope Francis
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Working Paper
Conference paperGordian knot: A panoramic perspective on stemming illicit financial flows from Africa
Apr 2015
Pushing this strand of research brings a certain feeling of trepidation. It comes from recognizing that by openly elaborating on how to catch or deter a criminal, you thereby confer an undue advantage on the criminal through forewarning.
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Working Paper
Conference paperTowards a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Framework
Apr 2015
Initiatives to improve sovereign debt restructuring (“SDR”) began long before recent Argentine bond decisions but were redoubled in the aftermath of these rulings. At first glance, these cases identify problematic contract language that could be rectified by re-drafting critical boilerplate provisions such as the pari passu and collective action clauses (“CAC”).
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Prince('s) Rules: Economic Theories and Political Struggle in Europe.
Apr 2015
The Cyclically Adjusted Budget (CAB) is the estimated size of the public budget at some previously defined level of output which may represent the ‘normal’ output or a policy target and that usually is considered to be unaffected by business fluctuations or cycles. Such an estimate is supposed to isolate the automatic movements of revenues and expenditures, given the current structure of tax and transfers, from discretionary fiscal interventions and indicate the “impact” and sustainability of fiscal action.
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Working Paper
Conference paperSocial investment for inclusive growth: a Southern European perspective
Apr 2015
Inequality has emerged as a major economic issue: sharp increases in the share of income going to those at the very top of the income distribution, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages, and a fall in median family income have raised concern over the sustainability of our economies and societies.
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Working Paper
Conference paperCapital Flight from Africa and Development Inequality: Domestic and Global Dimensions
Apr 2015
Over the past decades African economies have exhibited two stunning paradoxes: growth acceleration coexisting with stubbornly high poverty rates; increasing capital flight along with widening development financing gaps. There has been no attempt to link the two in the literature.
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Working Paper
Conference paperGoethe’s Faust and the socioeconomic roots of modern subjectivity
Apr 2015
The modern individual is the point of intersection of the processes of consumption and production. The subjective representation of these processes has been determined by two branches of the modern middle class, the bourgeoisie, which has privileged consumption, and the bureaucracy, which has privileged production.
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Working Paper
Conference paperTwisting the economic tale: what literature can do that political economy can’t
Apr 2015
This paper will address the problem of how we might gain economic understanding from literature. It will look at the aesthetic form of literature as being an efficient vehicle for economic thinking.
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Conference Session
Challenging Economic Injustice Through Literature
Apr 9, 2015 | 10:15—11:45
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Conference Session
Political Institutions & Inequality
Apr 9, 2015 | 11:00—12:30
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Conference Session
The Problem of Capital Flight
Apr 9, 2015 | 11:30—01:00
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Conference Session
Macroeconomic Externalities
Apr 9, 2015 | 12:15—01:45
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Working Paper
Conference paperInformation and Economics: A New Way to Think About Expectations and to Improve Economic Prediction.
Apr 2015
The largely unexpected arrival of the global economic crisis and the largely unpredicted slowness of the recovery from the Great Recession should be precipitating an intellectual crisis across economics and policy making. We require additional theories and additional methods to detect how an economy is evolving and to provide the basis for policy intervention (Haldane, 2014).
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Working Paper
Conference paperTwo Paths to War: The Origins of the First World War versus the Dynamics of Contemporary Sino-American Confrontations
Apr 2015
During the past year, there have been numerous and somber reflections, rather like those during a traditional period of mourning, about the great and tragic events that occurred just 100 years ago – the beginning of the First World War. And in the course of these melancholy reflections about the past, there naturally have arisen anxious concerns about the future.
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Working Paper
Conference paperHow the Planned Perversion of Democracy generated accelerating inequalities
Apr 2015
What is at stake : Increasing doubt over the virtue of democracy. One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of confidence and hope in the so-called democratic institutions by a large majority of the people. The fundamental cause is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule and thereby the welfare of the people, and the indomitable tendency of rising and unsustainable inequality in terms of income, standard of living and wealth.
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Working Paper
Conference paperSocial Interaction Models and Keynes' Macroeconomics
Apr 2015
The central concepts of Keynes’ macroeconomic theories concerning the behavior of labor markets, aggregate demand, and asset pricing can be formulated as special cases of a general social interaction model.