Archive
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Grant
Years granted: , 2015Air Quality Co-Benefits in Climate Policy
This research project investigates the air quality co-benefits of climate policy. Reduced burning of fossil fuels curbs not only CO2 emissions but also emissions of hazardous co-pollutants, such as particulate matter. The extent of air quality co-benefits relative to CO2 reduction varies across regions and pollution sources, and hence the distribution of emissions reductions matters for both efficiency and equity.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015Income Distribution, Asset Prices, and Aggregate Demand Formation, 1850-2010: A Post-Keynesian Approach to Historical Macroeconomic Data
This research project uses macroeconomic data going back to the mid-19th century to analyze issues such as the relation between income distribution and economic growth; and how debt, asset prices, and growth moved together the last 160 years.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015What Lenders See
This research project examines the long process of innovation at Fair Isaac, the analytics firm behind the FICO scoring system.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015Living Standards, Inequality, and Poverty around the World, 1815-2015: A New Household Budget Approach
This research project lays a foundation for new and better long-run estimates of poverty and inequality around the world through the collection, digitisation, and harmonisation of household budget data.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015Geno-Econometrics
This research project explores how genomic data can inform the understanding of social science questions. The genomic revolution means that social scientists are able to correlate a range of outcomes and behaviors with genes. This research studies what these correlations mean.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015Secular Stagnation and Persistent Unemployment in the Great Depression: Evidence from Monthly Labor Market Data
This research project deepens our understanding of labor market conditions during the Great Depression by assemling data at the national, state, and industry level for jobs created, jobs destroyed, unemployment, employment, and the labor force.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015Economic Inequality and Sustainable Transportation Policy
This research project examines how the spatial pattern of inequality in US cities shapes the provision of public transit and more broadly the prospects for a more equitable and sustainable transportation policy.
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Grant
Years granted: 2014, 2015Planning Peace: Development Policies in Postwar Europe
This research project shows the European origins of development economics between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and describes how the postwar global challenge of development took shape.
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Grant
Years granted: 2014, 2015Inequalities by Race and Gender in the Earnings of Women of Color
This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015Innovation Systems: Positive and Normative Perspectives
This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015Computational Platforms for Agent-Based Financial Models
This research project constructs a broad set of software tools designed to better facilitate the understanding and comparative features of various types of agent-based finical markets.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015Modeling Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis - A Dynamical Systems Approach
This research project improves the mathematical capabilities of non-Neoclassical economics and uses modern techniques from nonlinear dynamical systems to model the expansion and contraction of credit and its effect on real economic output and asset prices.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015Statistical Physics Approach to Income and Wealth Distribution
This research project employs ideas from statistical physics to deal with income and wealth inequality, financial instability, and the distribution of energy consumption around the world.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014, 2015New-Style Central Banking
This research project investigates the impact of the new style of central banking on the bank’s solvency, its ability to control inflation, and on economic stability.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015Analytical Aspects of Real-Financial Linkages in Systems of Heterogeneous Agents
This research project builds a new generation of models fit to analyze and manage the challenges of governing globalized and interconnected economies.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015Finance and the Welfare of Nations: The View from Economic History
This research project combines 140 years of economic history with state-of-the-art econometric methods to gain new insights into the relationship between finance, growth, and crises.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015Knightian Uncertainty, Informational Inefficiency and Financial Markets
This research project examines the informational inefficiency of market prices in the presence of Knightian uncertainty or ambiguity by modeling the decision making of financial market traders.
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Working Paper
Working paperEfficiency and Equilibrium in Network Games: An Experiment
Dec 2014
The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. In many contexts, social networks mediate this trade-off: an individual’s network position determines equilibrium play, and social relations allow coordination on an efficient norm.
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Working Paper
Working paperThe New Economics of Religion
Dec 2014
The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world.
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Video
Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory
Dec 27, 2014
Bill Mitchell presents a coherent analysis of how money is created, how it functions in global exchange rate regimes, and how the mystification of the nature of money has constrained governments, and prevented states from acting in the public interest.
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Article
By the Way, Why Does the History of the JEL Codes Matter ?
Dec 21, 2014
Full paper is here. Comments are much welcome.And because it’s an epic story (and because I suck at writing abstracts), here is an audio trailer. I thank Paul for his beautiful Memphis accent.
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Video
Identifying Weaknesses in the Eurozone
Dec 19, 2014
How should the Eurozone handle unemployment and other immediate hurdles?
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Article
A sparsity based model of bounded rationality
Dec 17, 2014
A more realistic version of how people “maximize utility”
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Video
New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth Among Individuals
Dec 17, 2014
The recently observed surge in wealth doesn’t equate to growth of productive capital. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Branko Milanovic, Paul Krugman and Duncan Foley discuss these issues and more.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesIntra-Financial Lending, Credit, and Capital Formation
Dec 2014
This paper examines the effects of intra-financial lending – claims between financial institutions – on aggregate investment and credit to the non-financial sector in the United States.
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Article
Stiglitz: Economics Has to Come to Terms with Wealth and Income Inequality
Dec 15, 2014
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Article
How Superstar Companies Like Apple Are Killing America’s High-Tech Future
Dec 8, 2014
Few would argue that America’s fortunes rise and fall on its ability to generate technological innovations — to put bold ideas to work and then bring them to market.
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Article
They called it a sunspot
Dec 7, 2014
One of the earliest attempts to tackle the problem of multiple equilibria in Macroeconomics was a byproduct of David Cass and Karl Shell’s engagement with Robert Lucas’s 1972 paper on ‘Expectations and the Neutrality of Money.’
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesSkill Development and Sustainable Prosperity: Cumulative and Collective Careers versus Skill-Biased Technical Change
Dec 2014
There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find.
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Video
Lessons from the Great Depression
Dec 5, 2014
How can we better integrate history into economic analysis?
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesLong-term trends in intra-financial sector lending in the U.S. 1950 - 2012
Nov 2014
This paper examines the evolution of intra-financial sector lending in the United States, 1950- 2012, presenting estimates constructed from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Accounts.
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Article
Why is the U.S. Economy Underperforming? Rising Inequality is the Key.
Nov 18, 2014
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Video
Financial Regulations In Paralysis
Nov 14, 2014
Bill Black knows banks.
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Video
Governing With A Higher Purpose To Spur Innovation
Nov 7, 2014
How can the state manage its central role in the innovation economy if the state itself has become an instrument for facilitating corporate predation?
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Video
Government Risk and Private Sector Reward
Oct 29, 2014
How should the government recoup the benefits from the fruits of its research? And what role should the government play going forward in important areas such as clean tech?
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Article
Why Keynes is Important Today
Oct 28, 2014
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Article
Income and Wealth Distribution in Germany: A Macroeconomic Perspective
Oct 26, 2014
Household economic surveys, such as the German Socio-Economic Panel, notoriously underestimate the degree of income and wealth inequality at the upper end of the distribution.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesInequality, the Great Recession, and Slow Recovery
Oct 2014
Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980.
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Article
Nobel Win Doesn’t Equate To Policy Prescriptions
Oct 21, 2014
The “keys under the streetlight story” is well known among economists, but in case you haven’t heard it, it goes like this.
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Video
The Consequences of Money-Manager Capitalism
Oct 20, 2014
In the wake of World War II, much of the western world, particularly the United States, adopted a new form of capitalism called “managerial welfare-state capitalism.”
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Article
What Apple Should Do with Its Massive Piles of Money
Oct 19, 2014
An Open Letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
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Article
Adam Smith's first - and last! - book: what rational choice?
Oct 18, 2014
I was going to call this blog post ‘Utility maximising agents in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’ but realised that was much too dull - even if it accurately describes my bedtime reading at the present moment.
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Article
Numbers Show Apple Shareholders Have Already Gotten Plenty
Oct 16, 2014
Apple should be returning profits to workers who have invested their time and effort into generating its products and to taxpayers who have funded the investments in the physical infrastructure and human knowledge so critical to Apple’s success.
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Article
How Financialization Leads To Income Inequality
Oct 16, 2014
The paper referenced in this post, “Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008,” recently was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Article Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association.
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Video
Two Hundred Years of Politics and High Finance
Oct 16, 2014
These videos cover not only Dr. de Cecco’s seminal research on the international gold standard, but his views on the international monetary system between the wars, the formation of the Bretton Woods system, and its breakdown – all topics on which Dr. de Cecco has written copiously.
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Article
A History of the JEL Codes: Classifying Economics During the War [Part 1]
Oct 15, 2014
In the spring of 1940, as the war in Europe escalated and the likelihood of American involvement grew greater and greater, scientists understood that they would soon be drafted to help national defense planning.
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Article
The IMF and Human Development: Little Progress and Worrisome Trends
Oct 13, 2014
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, yet few countries have been eager to join the festivities.
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Article
The man who will not win the Nobel
Oct 9, 2014
Last Spring Larry Summers wounded Thomas Piketty in a friendly embrace.
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Video
Fixing The Eurozone Architecture
Oct 8, 2014
Has the euro experiment largely failed to meet the needs of the people who use it? If so, what can be done? Andrea Terzi suggests innovative ways to repair the Eurozone’s flawed fiscal architecture.
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Article
Development and Underdevelopment in Postwar Europe
Oct 1, 2014
The question of underdevelopment and development policies in postwar Europe will be the theme of a workshop organized by Michele Alacevich, Sandrine Kott, and Mark Mazower, at Columbia University, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Friday, October 10, 2014. The program is available here. Below are some of Alacevich’s insights on the issue leading up the event:
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Video
What’s the Difference Between Growth and Prosperity?
Sep 30, 2014
Peter Victor challenges the basis of our obsession with economic growth
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Working Paper
Working paperCommunity Networks and the Process of Development
Sep 2014
Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.
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Article
The torch that wouldn't burn - UCLA in 1968
Sep 29, 2014
Employment as University Professor is by comparison with the grind of the professional world a peaceful, perhaps even relaxing, assignment.
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Article
New Research Shows Pollution Inequality in America is Even Worse Than Income Inequality
Sep 28, 2014
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Video
The Tenacity of the Free Market Ideology
Sep 23, 2014
Fred Block discusses his book, “The Power of Market Fundamentalism”.
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Article
The Flummery of Capital-Requirement Repairs Since The Crisis
Sep 15, 2014
Government safety nets give protected institutions an implicit subsidy and intensify incentives for value-maximizing boards and managers to risk the ruin of their firms. Standard accounting statements do not record the value of this subsidy and forcing subsidized institutions to show more accounting capital will do little to curb their enhanced appetite for tail risk.
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Article
To Boost Investment, End SEC Rule Encouraging Buybacks
Sep 14, 2014
The New York Times is having a “Room For Debate” discussion on its Opinion Page about how corporations should handle profits based on the Harvard Business Review article “Profits Without Prosperity” by William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The discussion features contributions by Bruce Greenwald, Peter Thiel, and Lazonick, among others. Lazonick argues that the capital being used for stock buybacks would be better spent on investment. Lazonick’s “Room For Debate” piece is below. To read the full discussion on The New York Times, click here.
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Video
Austerity Defangs the Celtic Tiger
Sep 11, 2014
Will the “Celtic Tiger” re-emerge or is Ireland’s recovery stunted by austerity programs?
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Article
All Together Now?: Inequality and Growth in US Metro Areas
Sep 10, 2014
With the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the American public has become increasingly concerned about the scale and impact of inequality in economic life.
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Working Paper
Working paperPlease Don't Throw Me In The Briar Patch
Sep 2014
The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.
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Video
Creating A Legal Foundation For Finance
Sep 4, 2014
How does the law interact with finance? Katharina Pistor on the paradoxical relationship between law and finance.
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Video
Early Interventions Lead To Higher IQs
Sep 2, 2014
We can change who we are. We can improve ourselves in various ways, and we can give ourselves possibilities to grow intellectually.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperThe Emergence of a Finance Culture in American Households, 1989-2007
Aug 2014
As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperFinancial Crises, Political Constraints, and Policy Responses
Aug 2014
We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperVisualising Stock-Flow-Consistent Models as Directed Acyclic Graphs
Aug 2014
We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperU.S. Public Pension Funds and Alternative Investments
Aug 2014
In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesThe Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure
Aug 2014
Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?
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Video
Cyber Security & Centralized Data, What Could Go Wrong?
Aug 26, 2014
What is the scale of effort that is actually required to initiate global cyber warfare? Amir Herzberg elaborates on cyber security, cyber warfare and basic privacy in the global digital age.
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Article
How to Make Economics Students More Critical and Adaptive Thinkers?
Aug 14, 2014
Can we learn something from philosophy students?
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Video
Healthcare In The 21st Century
Aug 9, 2014
Many believe that we already have a healthcare problem. But let’s get this straight: healthcare is a solution. Joon Yun posits a new way of thinking about health, illness and aging.
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Video
Beyond Dodd-Frank
Aug 3, 2014
Has the Dodd-Frank Act had its intended effect?
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Working Paper
Grantee paperThe Rich Stay Richer: The Effects of the Financial Crisis on Household Well-being, 2007-2009
Jul 2014
The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.
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Article
What's Holding Back Reform in Economics?
Jul 31, 2014
Before reforming economics, we need to reform the discourse.
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Article
Pasinetti on Institutional Forces and the Discipline of Economics
Jul 29, 2014
Ever since 2008, increasing numbers of economists, students, and even market professionals have protested the way economics is currently taught and practiced.
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Article
Destabilizing A Stable Crisis
Jul 28, 2014
Readers of Minsky are familiar with the idea that governments should act as financial stabilizing agents for their economies by running surpluses in times of boom and deficits in times of crises.
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Video
Creating a Culture of Entrepreneurship in India
Jul 23, 2014
Ajay Kela on creating a culture of entrepreneurship in India.
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Article
Top incomes and the glass ceiling
Jul 17, 2014
The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.
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Article
Self-Control and Public Pensions
Jul 13, 2014
Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.
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Article
HES 2014: It made a happy man very old!
Jul 1, 2014
This year, the History of Economics Society (HES) meeting was organized at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The meeting was, on the whole, a nice affair, there were plenty of interesting sessions, I reconvened with old friends and was able to present there my latest work and receive constructive comments.
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Video
Who Wins and Loses From Innovation?
Jul 1, 2014
Improved access to education is often touted as the key to addressing racial inequality in the economy, but Lisa Cook’s research into the innovation economy shows that women and African-Americans are underrepresented despite their educational qualifications.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperNetwork Efficiency and the Banking System
Jun 2014
Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperClassical Competition and Freedom of Contract in American Laissez Faire Constitutionalism
Jun 2014
It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.
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Webinars and Events
Azim Premji Summer School 2014
WorkshopJun 30–Jul 6, 2014
India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.
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Article
The Nature of Invention
Jun 26, 2014
The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.
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Article
Inequality and the Future of Capitalism
Jun 25, 2014
The Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) organises its 18th annual conference on Inequality and the Future of Capitalism with introductory lectures on heterodox economics for graduate students.
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Article
Why Standard Macro Models Fail During Crises
Jun 25, 2014
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Article
Why Economics Curriculum Needs Historical Context?
Jun 24, 2014
Can Economists Be Adequate Without Studying History?
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Video
Economic Thinking in A Fallible World
Jun 21, 2014
Eric Weinstein of Thiel Capital, a mathematician, physicist, and economist, explains the issues around economic thought and their potential consequences.
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Article
Post-Crash Economics
Jun 18, 2014
Robert Skidelsky knocks the scientific halo off mainstream economists’ teaching and research
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Video
Preparing For The Next Financial Crisis
Jun 14, 2014
So how far have we come since Lehman? How much more do we have to do?
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Video
Innovation And Its Potential To Damage Society
Jun 6, 2014
What if innovation is not an unalloyed good for society? What if it simply adds to our current dystopian dysfunction?
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Video
The Perils Of Our Growing Inequality
May 31, 2014
Institute President Rob Johnson interviews David Cay Johnston about his new book, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.
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Article
Piketty Responds in Detail to FT Criticism
May 29, 2014
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesWho Invests in the High-Tech Knowledge Base?
May 2014
A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper.
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Article
We Can Blog it!
May 6, 2014
The more reflexive mode brought by the financial crisis to macroeconomics made economists more outspoken about methodological, historical and sociological issues: how have we come to the DSGE dogma? What are its limitations? How can we produce alternative knowledge? Do publishing practices favor a “monolithic” thinking, and if so, how can we change it? What about the graduate training in economics?
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Working Paper
CommentaryThe Triumph of the Rentier?
May 2014
Thomas Piketty vs. Luigi Pasinetti and John Maynard Keynes
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesWage Increases, Transfers, and the Socially Determined Income Distribution in the USA
Apr 2014
This paper is based on a social accounting matrix (SAM) which incorporates the size distribution of income based on data from the BEA national accounts, the widely discussed 2012 CBO distribution study, and BLS consumer surveys.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesThree Measures of Environmental Inequality
Apr 2014
Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.
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Article
A Fight Over Inequality: The 5% Vs. The Rest
Apr 29, 2014
In late 2007, the United States started feeling the effects of the Great Recession. And over the ensuing two years the economic disaster spread across the globe.
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Article
Piketty and thinking about economics
Apr 18, 2014
There is a new economics rock-star touring the US by all accounts, and his name is Thomas Piketty.