History

How do we create a “change in culture”?

New topics and approaches make their way into two recent conferences on the history of economics

How do we rebuild trust in financial services?

The former chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and author of the forthcoming book “Between Debt and the Devil” explains why private debt, not banks, deepened the financial crisis and continues to cause trouble today.

Yes, it is a tale of two nations, but in a much broader way than you think. Not just England and Scotland, but an equally salient parallel between Great Britain and Canada.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde joined a renowned group of globally influential women in discussing how the financial system can be re-imagined to truly benefit society.

Writing the history of economic journals is not merely a way to reconstruct the development of new fields and new approaches to economics. It also recasts current debates on peer-review, retractions, open-access, replicability, and bias in scientific publishing in a wider perspective. It answers important questions on the influence of editors, publishers and referees on the development or marginalization of various economic approaches. But such endeavour requires the preservation of journals’ archives, the recognition of historical expertise, and economists’ adoption of a more relaxed and humble approach to their history.

Economists and historians of economics have constructed different (and sometimes conflicting) narratives about the past of their field. In fact what is history for economists may not be what is history for historians. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Economic Journal invited renowned economists to discuss important contributions published in the past by the journal and the works on similar topics by historians of economics are absent from these accounts. History of economics here seems to have the weight of a JEL descriptor attached to an invited contribution, which we ought to agree that it is not much.

In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to matching frictions, and real wealth enters the utility function. These assumptions modify the two core equations of the standard New Keynesian model

Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Stiglitz discuss Greece’s financial challenges and the associated Eurozone politics in this exclusive conversation.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking responds to an evident need for innovative approaches to understanding economic and financial processes.