Archive
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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.
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Conference Session
Worldwide Revolutions: Is History Repeating Itself?
Apr 11, 2014 | 11:00—12:30
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Conference Session
Innovation and Inequality: Cause or Cure
Apr 11, 2014 | 11:00—12:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperMethodological Problems in Macroeconomics: Curriculum and Computers
Apr 2014
The financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent worldwide economic depression and continuing dislocation, have made little to no impression on the way macroeconomics is taught at the university level, from Economics 101 through graduate school. It has been “business as usual’, which (it seems to me) means an almost studious avoidance of any attempt to acquire knowledge of how monetary economies actually work.
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Working Paper
Conference paperCan Structural Reform Boost Economic Growth?
Apr 2014
How to rebalance Chinese economy has become a topic of heated discussion. After years of fast economic expansion, now China faces a difficult crossroad. The global financial crisis provided clear evidence that China’s traditional export-driven strategy is vulnerable to slumps of the external demand.
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Working Paper
Conference paperNew Economic Teaching -Bridging Four Gaps
Apr 2014
When the Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project launched on 11 November 2013 at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, we promised that we would be ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. The last six months have shown us that this is challenging but we are well on our way to doing it.
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Working Paper
Conference paperNarrative in Teaching Economics
Apr 2014
Economics has advanced an enormous distance from the Walrasian paradigm and the Neoclassical synthesis. However, undergraduate curriculums continue to heavily favour these views of what economics is and what tools it provides for understanding contemporarypublic problems.
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Conference Session
Economic Progress and Financial Reform in China
Apr 11, 2014 | 07:00—07:00
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Conference Session
New Economic Thinking
Apr 11, 2014 | 03:45—05:00
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Conference Session
Finance and the Real Economy
Apr 11, 2014 | 05:15—06:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Chinese Economic Model Revisited: Any Implications for the New Economic Thinking?
Apr 2014
The president of INET, Johnson(2013) emphasized the importance of Asian tradition for building up the New Economic Thinking. “It ismy sense that the Asian tradition of thought and philosophical perspective are better suited to embracing this radical uncertainty and living in the experimentation of the adaptive complex system that our world appears to resemble than are the Western mindsets that are the product of the Cartesian Enlightenment.” In the summary he argues that “As the Asian societies continue to evolve the architects will be better served by an new economics for Asia and from Asia that is based on the notions of radical uncertainty, complex adaptive systems, mimetic desire, the inseparability of politics and economics, and a vision of a world where policy makers are themselves less knowing and less capable of control than we often yearn to believe is within their power.”
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Arab Spring is Genuine Revolution, But a Bumpy and Arduous Road Ahead
Apr 2014
The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.
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Working Paper
Conference paperLeveling the Playing Field From College To Career
Apr 2014
In the United States achieving equal opportunity in postsecondary education is typically described in terms of enrolling more underrepresented groups into the selective colleges. The belief is that if this step is accomplished it will have a fundamental impact on the problem of inequality at the national level. However, what if there are not enough places in selective colleges to accomplish this goal? What if the selective colleges do not have enough capacity to make a significant impact in the problem of serving students from underrepresented groups withdemonstrated high abilities?
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Working Paper
Conference paperSocial Power and Development in the Middle East: a transnational perspective
Apr 2014
The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.
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Working Paper
Conference paperVague Hopes, Active Aspirations and Equality
Apr 2014
The term human capital describes a set of skills, strengths and know-how that are valuable—both in the narrow sense of being “commercially valuable” (Lindsey, 2013), and the wider one of contributing to a flourishing, deliberate, purposeful life.As Heckman (2014) puts it: “Skills are capacities to act [emphasis added]…They shapeexpectations, constraints, and information” (p. 6).
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Arab revolutions: any new paths from here?
Apr 2014
While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.
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Conference Session
The Problem of the Predator State: Fostering Innovation While Facilitating Corporate Predation
Apr 11, 2014 | 07:00—08:30
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Conference Session
Law and Innovation: Is Intellectual Property a Path to Progress
Apr 11, 2014 | 07:00—08:30
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Conference Session
Education and Human Development: What are the Questions?
Apr 11, 2014 | 09:00—10:45
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Conference Session
Secular Stagnation? The Future Challenge for Economic Policy
Apr 11, 2014 | 03:15—05:00
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Conference Session
The Environment and Innovation: What Are The Real Costs?
Apr 11, 2014 | 12:45—02:15
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Conference Session
Beyond Austerity: Default, Debt Restructuring or Recovery?
Apr 10, 2014 | 07:00—08:30
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Conference Session
Reflexivity and Knightean Uncertainty: Implications for Economics
Apr 10, 2014 | 02:45—04:00
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Conference Session
Speculation and Innovation
Apr 10, 2014 | 04:15—05:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperPressures on Pensions
Apr 2014
Debate about the pension crises has centered on certain questions such as: Are greedy government workers bankrupting states? Arepension-slashing politicians backed by big money saving the day? Or do the budget problems of state and localgovernments have more to do with wasteful corporate subsidies than pensions? What are the real policy solutions to the pressures placed on pensions?”
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Working Paper
Conference paperToward an Intellectual History of Uncertainty
Apr 2014
Economists discussing the problem of radical uncertainty commonly invoke Frank Knight’s classic definition in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but only rarely venture to explore the broader contours of his argument.
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Economics of Cyberwar
Apr 2014
Cyberwar is very much in the news these days. It is tempting to try to understand the economics of such an activity, if only qualitatively. What effort is required? What can such attacks accomplish? What does this say, if anything,about the likelihood of cyberwar?
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Conference Session
Cyber War, Cyber Space: National Security and Privacy in the Global Economy
Apr 10, 2014 | 12:45—02:15
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Conference Session
Innovation and Globalization: Playing Catch-up v. Pushing the Frontier
Apr 10, 2014 | 06:00—07:30
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Conference Session
Integration, Currency Unions, and Balance of Payments
Apr 10, 2014 | 09:00—10:45
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Conference Session
Explorations in New Economic Thinking
Apr 10, 2014 | 11:00—12:30
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Conference Session
Pressures on Pensions
Apr 10, 2014 | 07:00—08:30
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Conference Session
The Economics of Radical Uncertainty
Apr 10, 2014 | 11:00—12:30
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Working Paper
Conference paperProfits Without Prosperity: How Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market, and Leave Most Americans Worse Off
Apr 2014
Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.
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Working Paper
Conference paperWho should do R and who should do D?
Apr 2014
This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.
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Video
What Are the Moral Limits of Markets?
Apr 10, 2014
In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?
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Conference Session
What Are the Moral Limits of Markets?
Apr 10, 2014 | 03:15—05:00
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Webinars and Events
Human After All
PlenaryApr 10–12, 2014
The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.
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Video
Innovation & Financial Reform
Apr 9, 2014
Adair Turner at the Institute’s #HumanAfterAll conference in Toronto, CA (2014).
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Conference Session
Innovation: To What Purpose?
Apr 9, 2014 | 02:15—04:00
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Persistence of a Reckless Banking System
Apr 2014
The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.
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Working Paper
Conference paperIs Innovation a Good Thing? The Innovation Gap in Pink and Black
Apr 2014
Innovation, the commercialization of invention, is both desirable and necessary for growth and higher living standards in modern economies. Innovation’s contribution to the economy is being measured increasingly more precisely, and its contribution has been assessed aseconomically important and growing.
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Conference Session
Have We Repaired Financial Regulations since Lehman?
Apr 9, 2014 | 11:45—01:15
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Conference Session
Do Private Returns Produce the Social Returns We Need?
Apr 9, 2014 | 10:00—11:30
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Conference Session
Is Innovation always a good thing?
Apr 9, 2014 | 08:00—09:45
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Article
Charles Babbage and the History of Innovative Thinking
Apr 7, 2014
The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperFiscal and Monetary Policies in Complex Evolving Economies
Mar 2014
In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperMinsky Financial Instability, Interscale Feedback, Percolation and Marshall-Walras Disequilibrium
Mar 2014
We study analytically and numerically Minsky instability as a combination of top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer positive feedback loops.
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Working Paper
Conference paperDebt Restructuring versus Monetary Easing: The Eurozone Experiment
Mar 2014
Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.
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Article
Kapital for the Twenty-First Century?
Mar 30, 2014
What is “capital”? To Karl Marx, it was a social, political, and legal category—the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. Capital could be money, it could be machines; it could be fixed and it could be variable. But the essence of capital was neither physical nor financial. It was the power that capital gave to capitalists, namely the authority to make decisions and to extract surplus from the worker.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesCrisis and Recovery in the German Economy: The Real Lessons
Mar 2014
Owing to its strong dependence on exports, Germany was among the economies hit hardest by the financial crisis.
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Article
Dancing in the Dark: Creating an Economics for the 21st Century
Mar 27, 2014
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Article
Economics as engineering III: Carnegie stories
Mar 23, 2014
The “economics and engineering” line of argument is part of economists’ rhetoric.
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Article
The Chartbook of Economic Inequality
Mar 18, 2014
We are not “all in it together.”
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Video
The Challenges of Europe's Monetary Union
Mar 9, 2014
Pisani-Ferry discusses the challenges facing the creation of a common monetary union in the form that was eventually agreed in the 1990s absent a political union.
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Article
The Exchange Rate as a Monetary Phenomenon
Mar 6, 2014
What exactly is an exchange rate?
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Article
Macrowars, economists' narratives, and my dreamed history of macro
Mar 2, 2014
The last straw in the enduring blog debate over microfoundations has taken a decisive historical turn.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperGreenhouse Gas and Cyclical Growth
Feb 2014
A growth model incorporating dynamics of capital per capita, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and labor and energy productivity is described.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperVarieties of Keynesianism
Feb 2014
Recent claims, particularly in Paul Krugman’s column and blog, on the superiority of the Hicks-Modigliani version of Keynesian economics calls for a re-thinking of the issues raised in the early controversies over what Joan Robinson called “bastard Keynesianism”.
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Article
Adair Turner’s Debt Addiction Remarks Turn Heads
Feb 27, 2014
Adair Lord Turner’s powerful comments about the global economy’s addiction to private debt are continuing to reverberate around the world.
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Article
German Court decision: Legal authority and deep power implications
Feb 26, 2014
Who wields supreme power over the ECB? This column analyses the recent ruling by the German Constitutional Court that the ECB cannot act as lender of last resort. Although seemingly couched by the referral of this decision to the European Court of Justice, this is a bid for power and the return to the pre-crisis paradigm of ‘ultra posse nemo obligatur’.
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Video
Building a Bridge Between Political And Economic Reform
Feb 23, 2014
In this “New Economic Thinking” interview, EBRD Chief Economist and Special Adviser to the President Erik Berglof, who also is a member of the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Governing Board, discusses the report’s findings with Institute President Rob Johnson.
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Article
Is Italy's New Government Just More of the Same?
Feb 22, 2014
A showdown has taken place within Italy’s governing coalition.
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Video
Inequality and the Current Account
Feb 17, 2014
Institute for New Economic Thinking grantees Christian Belabed and Thomas Theobald and their co-authors have revived this old theory as a hypothesis to explain the apparent statistical link between rising income inequality and current account deficits.
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Article
Thomas Scheiding: A history of scholarly communication in economics
Feb 10, 2014
We invited Thomas Scheiding from Cardinal Stritch University to review what we know about the scholarly communication process in economics. Tom has written forcefully on the history and economics of economic literature (see for instance, his 2009 JEM article). His latest is a study of the scholarly communication process in physics (an article in Studies).
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Article
Escaping The Addiction to Private Debt Is Essential for Long-Term Economic Stability
Feb 10, 2014
Inflation targeting insufficient: central banks and governments must manage the quantity and mix of credit created
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Video
A Computer Simulation of Monetary Dynamics
Feb 1, 2014
Sometimes new tools are what we need to create new thinking.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesSovereigns versus Banks: Credit, Crises and Consequences
Feb 2014
Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One interpretation speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the risks of lax fiscal policies. However, the two may interact in important and understudied ways.
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Article
Macroeconomics in Perspective
Jan 31, 2014
Last week the “Macroeconomics in Perspective Workshop” was held at the Department of Economics of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), in Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium
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Article
Macroeconomics in Perspective
Jan 31, 2014
Reflections of the Université Catholique de Louvain “Macroeconomics in Perspective Workshop”
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Article
Roiling India Politics Risks Economic Reforms
Jan 24, 2014
India’s economic leaders are determined to rein in skyrocketing inflation, but the country’s volatile political landscape may prevent reforms from taking hold.
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Video
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Jan 22, 2014
Lazonick discusses how we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics.
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Article
Capital Markets Balkanization Should Not Prevent Regulation
Jan 13, 2014
Fears that bank regulation or capital controls could lead to a “balkanisation” of global capital markets are overstated and should not constrain policy action to address the problems created by volatile short term capital flows and excessive credit creation, says Adair Turner, Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and former chairman of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority.
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Article
When is a Bubble a Bubble?
Jan 11, 2014
Bubbles have become a major focus of discussion in today’s financial markets. But very few people actually define what they mean when describing this financial phenomenon.
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Webinars and Events
Winter School on Law and Finance
WorkshopJan 5–8, 2014
The Institute will host the Winter School on Law and Finance at Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris on January 6-9, 2014.
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Video
Financial Reform in a Crisis: The Swedish Solution
Jan 3, 2014
Did the so-called “Scandinavian approach” offer a better alternative than the Geithner plan?
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Video
Beyond Representative-Agent Macroeconomics
Jan 3, 2014
Corrado DiGuilmi and Laura Carvalho, grantees of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, have individually been exploring two possible alternative analytical entry points: mean field methods from physics and stock flow consistent modeling from accounting. The idea behind their grant is to work together to combine these two approaches, the first bottom-up and the second top-down.
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Working Paper
Working Paper SeriesUnemployment and Innovation
Jan 2014
This paper analyzes equilibrium, dynamics, and optimal decisions on the factor bias of innovation in a model of induced innovation.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013, 2014Voter and Consumer Behavior toward Energy Policy through the Lens of New Behavioral Paradigms: A Path to a Sustainable Economy?
This research project discovers how real people, not just the abstractions of traditional economic theory, respond to various possible policy interventions aimed to bring climate change under control and thus which policies will have the biggest impact.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014Contagion of Sentiment, Investor Trading Activities, and Financial Crises
This research project studies the pricing and liquidity implications of sentiment and disagreement as origins of radical uncertainty in financial markets.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014Managing Uncertainty: An Anthropology of Financialization in post-Mao China
This research project develops a new field of anthropology: the anthropology of financialization, focusing on China and two main institutions of financialization, management consultancies and fund managers.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014Countervailing Monetary Power: Emerging Markets and the Re-Regulation of Cross-Border Finance
This resarch project examines the economic theory, policy, and international political economy of cross border finance in the run up to and in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013, 2014A Theory of Financial Market Instability Even Under Perfect Conditions: Bubbles and Crashes in Rational Belief Equilibrium
This research project seeks to develop a theory of how bubbles and crashes can arise even when all agents are rational, informed, and trading in perfect markets.