Summary Fall 2019

This issue of the Summary features a Strategic Analysis identifying the four main structural problems for the US economy and how the feedback effects between them explain the 2007–9 crisis and account for the weak recovery that followed, as well as offering an estimate of the macroeconomic benefits of recent proposals designed to reduce inequality through changes in tax policy. Two policy notes explore the reform of the international financial system undertaken to address global imbalances, and present a proposal to increase the supply of safe European assets to remedy imbalances inherent in the eurozone setup.

Working papers included in this issue estimate the costs of the Green New Deal in terms of resource requirements; examine the spread between 10-year Treasury notes and the federal funds rate to gain a better understanding of when to reduce interest rates to prevent recessions; extend the concept of “shifting involvements” to the relationship between capital and labor to ascertain its effects on distribution and growth; consider the basic principles behind our understanding of money and how to apply them to money’s democratization; focus on fiscal policy’s role in stabilization following a shock; trace the evolution of China’s monetary policy framework to assess the effects of recent reforms; outline experiments with economic planning in the United States and France in the early 20th century to determine their applicability in modern capitalist societies; evaluate the effects of the education-occupation mismatch on both employees and employers; assess obesity’s impact on wages; and investigate changes in inequality in the United States using recentered influence functions.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Can Redistribution Help Build a More Stable Economy?
• JAN KREGEL, Global Imbalances and the Trade War
• PAOLO SAVONA, A Proposal to Create a European Safe Asset
• L. RANDALL WRAY and YEVA NERSISYAN, How to Pay for the Green New Deal
• HAROLD HASTINGS, TAI YOUNG-TAFT, and THOMAS WANG, When to Ease Off the Brakes (and Hopefully Prevent Recessions)
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, Induced Shifting Involvements and Cycles of Growth and Distribution

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, Democratizing Money
• PLAMEN NIKOLOV and PAOLO PASIMENI, Fiscal Stabilization in the United States: Lessons for Monetary Unions
• ZENGPING HE and GENLIANG JIA, An Institutional Analysis of China’s Reform of their Monetary Policy Framework
• FERNANDO CARDIM DE CARVALHO, Economic Planning under Capitalism: The New Deal and Postwar France Experiments

Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, It Pays to Study for the Right Job: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of Education-Occupation Job Mismatch

Program: Distribution of Wealth and Income

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, A Semi-Parametric Approach to the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition with Continuous Group Variable and Self-Selection
• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Recentered Influence Functions in Stata: Methods for Analyzing the Determinants of Poverty and Inequality

INSTITUTE NEWS

• Workshop: Gender and Macroeconomics