Government & Politics

We investigate the claim that the way in which debtor households service their debts matters for macroeconomic performance.

The impact of the post-meltdown Federal Reserve policy of ultra-low interest rates and Quantitative Easing (QE) on income and wealth inequality has become an important policy and political issue.

A combination of leeway within the government and constitutional immunity during incumbency enables office holders to abuse their budget at will, which in turn creates a crisis of growth in Africa, relative to other parts of the world.

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang.

This paper traces the evolution of the concept of the cyclically adjusted budget from the 1930s to the present.

The Institute extends its congratulations to Philip Lane, who has been named to succeed Patrick Honohan as the Irish central bank chief, and inherit his role on the council of the ECB.

Adair Turner discusses his new book, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance.

John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.

The World Bank’s global poverty estimates suffer from deep-seated problems arising from a single source, the lack of a standard for identifying who is poor and who is not that is consistent and meaningful.

Economists’ assumptions, even about seemingly “small” matters, make an enormous difference to global poverty estimates but their impact often goes unnoticed, and the choices made have been badly justified. We must stop pretending that the World Bank’s “$1 per day” estimates are at all reliable.

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

Professor Richard Portes discusses the problems of Europe and then specifically drills down into Greece itself.

This paper proposes a theoretically based and easy-to-implement way to measure the systemicrisk of financial institutions using publicly available accounting and stock market data.

As I write this it would be appear that the Greek crisis is finally coming to an end. In this report I would like to discuss why the negotiations were so fraught and what an agreement actually means. In a nutshell, the EU sought to address matters with the same kinds of measures that had been tried in the past, while Greece argued that doing so would not make things any better—and would in fact make them far worse.

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?