Finance

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.

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.

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.

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”).

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.

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.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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 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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can we reconnect economic success to socioeconomic outcomes?

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.

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

The solutions to Greece’s crisis challenge many existing economic paradigms, including the concept of “money” itself.

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.

This chapter surveys experimental research on networks in economics.

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.

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.

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.

How can we better protect Main Street from the externalities of Wall Street?

The turmoil of Brexit and the populist challenge across Europe are consequences of austerity policies that have brought misery to millions of ordinary voters. In this interview first published last January, Servaas Storm warned of the dangers of economic decision making divorced from democracy and from the social consequences of its prescriptions

Private data is leaked more and more in our society. Wikileaks, Facebook, and identity theft are just three examples. Network defenses are constantly under attack from cyber criminals, organized hacktivists, and even disgruntled ex-employees.

Repression in China today is at its most severe point since the aftermath of 1989. David Wu discusses the tensions inherent in a one-party state which is struggling to aspire toward a more predictable rule of law.

This research project develops a “Money View” analysis of the recent evolution of China’s financial system.

This research project explores the process of modern (shadow) money creation in hierarchical and interconnected monetary systems. In theorizing the dynamic instability of shadow money, it provides a comparative account of the structural and institutional specifics of shadow money in the US, Eurozone and China, and the policy challenges thereof.

Recent work has highlighted the need for innovation investments to be understood through a mission oriented approach rather than a market failure one (Foray et al. 2012). However, this work has only focused on state agencies, such as DARPA, overlooking the role of public financial institutions such as state investment banks.

This research project models financial interdependencies in the form of dynamic networks and propose policy and risk measurement tools to pre-identify contagion.

This research project provides guidance to policymakers for designing policies that are able to bring economies out of recessions by identifying the best policies to fight unemployment and stabilize the business cycle while alleviating inequality.

This research project provides a better understanding of the processes that accompanied the reforms of the Austrian schilling in 1947 and the birth of the deutschmark in 1948 by merging archival sources with financial data from banks and markets and comparing the two reforms.

This research project brings together ideas from the literature on robustness in macroeconomics, network theory, and evolutionary game theory to study the way in which perceptions of safe asset status evolve among financial market participants.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the rise of China’s shadow banks based on the Modern Money Theory and its extension on the analysis on modern financial systems.

This research project develops a theoretical framework to examine the relation between arbitrage capital and the price properties of different asset markets.

This research project combines interdisciplinary expertise with a wholly unique database on hedge funds compiled by the Foundation for Fund Governance to examine the organization and governance of the offshore hedge fund industry.

This research project employs a new theory and innovative empirical analysis as a new lens for understanding financial instability and financial crises, focusing on the Great Depression.

This research project investigates the rise of federal credit programs in the United States, leading to a better understanding of the development of federal credit programs.

This research project develops a new behavioral paradigm of heterogeneous expectations that can help explain the sources of financial and macroeconomic instability and find possible policy remedies.

This research project studies how the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association operate and the factors that help shape the extent to which they are able to ensure financial stability from a public-interest standpoint.

This research project establishes the conditions under which international capital flows are a force for stability, thereby improving the capacity for macroeconomic policy to avoid large boom-bust cycles.

This research project develops a rigorous new theoretical way to study controls of international capital flows and determine their optimal magnitude using a promising new empirical methodology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This research project builds a new generation of models fit to analyze and manage the challenges of governing globalized and interconnected economies.

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.

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.

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.

How should the Eurozone handle unemployment and other immediate hurdles?

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.

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.

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.

How can we better integrate history into economic analysis?

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.

Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980.

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.”

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.