Government & Politics

How should the Eurozone handle unemployment and other immediate hurdles?

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.

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.

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.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, yet few countries have been eager to join the festivities.

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:

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.

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.

The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.

Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?

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.

Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

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.