History

Recent austerity policies have been guided by ideology rather than research. This column discusses research that reconciles disparate estimates of fiscal multipliers in the literature. It finds that common identification assumptions are problematic. Matching methods based on propensity scores show how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential.

Economic theories are powerful things, to be used and misused. Those who write economic theory and do economic policy need to be aware of the consequences of what they are doing.

Between July 5th and 12th, the second annual summer school in development economics, jointly sponsored by Azim Premji University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, was held in Bangalore, India.

is the public sector really sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector?

How does debt influence growth?

‘Helicopter money’ may in some circumstances be the only certain way to stimulate nominal demand

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many of our policy makers and top economists are still stumbling in the dark.

Recovery from recessions takes longer than it has in the past.

Looming behind the aforementioned narratives of postwar economics is a notion – economics as engineering – which at times appears as a metaphor and at times stands for a straight depiction of economists’ professional milieu and practices.

The rise of the economist as engineer is, economists and historians say, an essential characteristic of the development of economics in the postwar period.

To illustrate the previous post on the difficulties in putting together a chronology, here is tentative chronology of economics at Carnegie. It’s still in process, and links, sources and entries will be updated as I read.

This year, I’m sharing an office with an econometrician on Mondays and with a geographer on Fridays (you don’t want to go into the subtleties of the French educational system).

There is a “tendency to neglect applied economics in writing the history of economic thought,” Roger Backhouse and Jeff Biddle remarked in 2000. They then followed the “applied” trail back into the XIXth and early XXth centuries, at a time the scope and nature of economics were debatted by continental and especially British political economists

INET Advisory Board members Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff today issued a response to recentcriticism of their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their response in full is below.

It is often argued that in recent years the question of the ‘dissemination’ of economic knowledge has been increasingly addressed by historians of economics.