Archive

This paper presents a theory of pseudo-wealth in a model that displays aggregate demand externalities.

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

A structural transformation is investing labour in Europe, accelerated by the crisis started in 2008. Job destruction is dominating employment trends in most EU countries and deep changes are taking place in labour relations, labour market institutions and wage regimes.

We develop a novel stress-test framework to monitor systemic risk in financial systems. The modular structure of the framework allows to accommodate for a variety of shock scenarios, methods to estimate interbank exposures and mechanisms of distress propagation.

Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies have aggravated inequality. Inequality is an increasingly contentious political issue in both wealthy and emerging economies.

“Oh, the Chinese hate the Japanese and the Japanese hate the Chinese—to hate all but the right folks is an old established rule. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and the North Koreans hate them all. Oh, the People hate the Communists and the Communists hate the People. The Nationalists hate the Communists and the Communists hate themselves. The Confucians hate the Buddhists and the Muslims hate them all. All of my folks hate all of your folks. But during National Brotherhood Week, be nice to people who are inferior to you. It’s only for a week, so have no fear—be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”

The best new economic thinking in an age of the dominance of rent-seeking will be Marxian economic thinking

The old political-economic thinking of Karl Polanyi was never properly absorbed into “mainstream” North Atlantic economics: recognizing that land, labor, and finance are not really “commodities” returns institutions and social processes to the center of economic analysis.

This paper finds its origins in two important developments within mainstream economics since the financial crisis, both of which analyze the economy from the viewpoint of what Schumpeter (1954) referred to as the domain of “real” analysis of a modern market economy in contrast to “monetary” analysis.

Caring Economics is about a new way of thinking about human prosperity. In mainstream economics, prosperity is a matter of consumption, income and wealth. By contrast, Caring Economics conceives of prosperity in terms of deeper sources of durable human wellbeing.

The SSGAC is a research infrastructure designed to stimulate dialogue and cooperation between medical researchers and social scientists. The SSGAC facilitates collaborative research that seeks to identify associations between specific genetic markers (segments of DNA) and behavioral traits, such as preferences, personality and social-science outcomes.

Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics” based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.”

Income and wealth inequality have been rising in the past three decades. Surprisingly, inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy. However, due to the crisis, this question has been gaining more attention.

Recent years have witnessed the flourishing of a body of economic literature concerned with the search for empirical evidence of a positive relation between political connections, economic rent and the value of firms. The present paper contributes to the strand of this literature that deals with the quantitative measurement of the value of the political connections of firms.

Regulation of financial services has been an unmitigated policy disaster.

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead to serious financial crises and macroeconomic dislocations.

The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.

The global financial crisis led to widespread dislocation. Understanding the forces that led to such a crisis is no easy matter.

Ten hypotheses presented in the session “Beyond Deficits, Austerity and Deflation” at INET Conference 201

Recent weeks have surfaced an intense exchange of top-level finger pointing, both between Congress and the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, between Fed officials and executives in the private sector and within the Fed between the Board of Governors and the New York Reserve Bank.

It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.

The inequality of income and wealth is one of the defining issues of our time, in terms of both its social and macroeconomic implications. In this article, I focus on the macroeconomic implications of inequality. In particular, it is possible to identify four themes on which there seems to be growing consensus among many economists especially in the various heterodox traditions, but also increasingly in the mainstream of the economics profession:

This paper empirically examines the effects of the Federal Reserve’s Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP) on bank profits.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

In his latest annual address at Cass Business School, Visiting Professor Lord Adair Turner warned that the world is caught in a ‘debt overhang’.

Thomas Piketty and Joseph E. Stiglitz discuss the causes of, consequences of, and remedies for inequality.

The tail risks that may be generated by Mario Draghi’s monetary policy innovations in the Eurozone include even more intense versions of Andrew Haldane’s “Doom Loops”

Do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle? We answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm-level disturbances alone. We show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in it a theory of the business cycle, without appealing to aggregate shocks.

Welcome to our website, and thus weblog, relaunch.

We call attention to the class of models that serve as the foundation for the rational expectations hypothesis (REH). Models in this class rule out completely any structural change that cannot be fully anticipated with a probabilistic or other quantitative rule. REH models are abstractions of rational decision-making, but only in a hypothetical world in which participants can fully anticipate when and how they might revise their understanding of the process driving outcomes.

Together with Azim Premji University (APU), we’re creating opportunities for advanced PHDs, leading academics and experts to focus on the urgent problems facing the world’s most populous democracy.

Supporting doctoral research through granting PhDs, appointing post-doctoral fellowships, hosting leading international economists, sponsoring major conferences and providing seed funding for cutting-edge research projects.

A Ruskinian framework for economic justice.

Since 2011, the Institute has partnered with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) to change the way the field approaches the interplay between economics and governance, accelerating the development of new economic thinking.

We propose several multivariate variance ratio statistics. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the statistics and scalar functions thereof under the null hypothesis that returns are unpredictable after a constant mean adjustment (i.e., under the weak form Efficient Market Hypothesis). We do not impose the no leverage assumption of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) but our asymptotic standard errors are relatively simple and in particular do not require the selection of a bandwidth parameter. We extend the framework to allow for a time varying risk premium through common systematic factors.

“The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” John M. Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire, 1926 (p. 44)

We develop adjustments to align the NIPA measures of key household flows with cash flow concepts that better reflect household budgets and demand.

Rapid private-debt growth threw Japan into crisis in 1991 and did the same to the United States and Europe in 2008. China may be next.

This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.

The Institute partners with the Asia Global Institute (AGI), an independent think tank in Hong Kong, to encourage global policy and actions to move toward a prosperous and sustainable future for the world.

Economic activity cannot be explained solely by modeling rational behavior. Our partnership with the Kiel Institute brings interdisciplinary scholars together to develop new perspectives on human motivation and decision-making.

A jointly-created research institute devoted to finding a more realistic way of thinking about the economy, using tools from decision theory and the theory of networks to tackle problems such as unemployment and inequality.

Our partnership with the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, is conducting visionary interdisciplinary research on a wide range of economic and public policy challenges.

How can we reconnect economic success to socioeconomic outcomes?

The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) is an interdisciplinary collaboration incorporating biological, sociological and psychological perspectives into traditional economic questions of inequality and human capital.

As the pace of financial crises quickens and the volatility of economic shocks intensifies, we need new ways to understand and respond to instability. This program coordinates our research efforts on finance, macroeconomics, and monetary economics.

Inequality and distribution—areas underserved by mainstream economics—sit at the heart of The Institute’s work. This program brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop alternative approaches to the problem of inequality.

Michael Greenberger discusses the current state of play of regulatory reform and gives a barely passing grade.

Rana Dasgupta shares his view of the contradictions and tensions of India’s economic and political scenes.

Cecilia Nahon, Argentina’s Ambassador to Washington, DC., discusses the issues plaguing the Argentine government in it’s attempts to conclude debt restructuring.

My friend and “grown-up kid” Yann Giraud just called my attention to Paul Krugman’s recent column, “Empire of the Institute”, on Roy Weintraub’s recently edited HOPE volume “MIT and the Transformation of American Economics” (to which three Playground kids contributed: Yann, Beatrice Cherrier and myself).

A British national of Bengali origin, novelist Rana Dasgupta recently turned to nonfiction to explore the explosive social and economic changes in Delhi starting in 1991, when India launched a series of profoundly transformative economic reforms.

Is moving away from coal and into shale - rather than directly into renewables - a worthy move from an economic as well as environmental point of view?

This chapter surveys experimental research on networks in economics.

This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:

It is highly fitting to have a panel devoted to ‘teaching economics’ in Paris. No less than 15 years ago, in 2000, in downtown Paris, a group of students from the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s élite schools, wrote a petition asking economics teaching to be devoted to the study of real-world problems, with an instrumental use of mathematics rather than to the description of imaginary worlds based on meaningless formalizations.

With the approval of the reform proposals by the Greek government, the Eurozone has returned to calmer waters. But it is only a brief interlude.

The interaction between social structure and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. In some instances, markets can build on and enhance social networks’ economic role; in other contexts, markets appear to be in direct competition with social networks. The impact of markets on inequality and welfare is also varying: while markets can sometimes offer valuable outside options to marginalised individuals, in other situations only well connected and better off individuals can benefit from them.

When the adoption of a new labor‐saving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium‐term by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.

Individuals derive benefits from their connections, but these may, at the same time, transmit external threats. Individuals therefore invest in security to protect themselves. However, the incentives to invest in security depend on their network exposures. We study the problem of designing a network that provides the right individual incentives.

Do economists live in a world of their own?

Fresh from discussions at the UN regarding the Argentinian debt crisis, Institute grantee Kevin Gallagher tells us about his new book and how developing countries can look for opportunity amidst modern financial obstacles.

I need a history of policy evaluation.

It is instructive to view the study of networks in economics as a shift in paradigm, in the sense of Kuhn (1962). This perspective helps us locate the innovation that networks bring to economics, appreciate different strands of the research, assess the current state of the subject and identify the challenges.

Shiller (1981) and others have shown that the quantitative predictions of the REH present-value model are inconsistent with time-series data on stock prices and dividends. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the model without explicitly representing how a rational market participant forecasts dividends and interest rates.

John Smithin argues that we need to rethink the “consensus” with tools old and new.

The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.

Last year I pointed out here (and here) that macroeconomists were making themselves comfortable in the blogosphere to discuss theoretical, methodological, and, why not, historical issues of their field (see also a nice post by our fellow kid, Beatrice).