Summary Spring 2021

A trio of publications in this Summary explores how the plumbing of an existing cross-border payment system associated with a private company provides the operational blueprints for a potential revival of John Maynard Keynes’s international clearing union proposal, and how the willingness of central banks to consider electronic currency provides an opening to reconsider this reform. Working papers in this issue argue that once we understand the purposes and incidence of corporate taxation, it is revealed to be a particularly inefficient tax; explain that while Japan, which is occasionally held up as a poster child for Modern Money Theory (MMT), helps demonstrates some of the errors of mainstream thinking concerning sovereign budgeting, policy-wise the country has not been in line with MMT prescriptions; investigate the impact of pandemic-associated daycare closures on the time parents of young children dedicate to caregiving in Turkey; apply Hyman Minsky’s work on public employment programs to demonstrate how jobs that generate socially useful output can help us face today’s challenges and create a greener tomorrow; analyze factors that may explain the gendered differences in household production burdens to identify where policy can help achieve a more egalitarian distribution and reduce women’s time poverty; review three strands of literature on the Palestinian labor market over the past three decades, illustrating how the ongoing conflict in the region impacts decisions around education and employment; build stock-flow consistent (SFC) models for Latin American economies to demonstrate the balance sheet effects of currency depreciation and test the impact of alternative policy scenarios; reflect on Keynes’s writings on the state theory of money, financial markets, and uncertainty; and consider the empirics of long-term bond yields in Mexico.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies
LORENZO NALIN and GIULIANO TOSHIRO YAJIMA, Balance Sheet Effects of a Currency Devaluation: A Stock-Flow Consistent Framework for Mexico
 
SEBASTIAN VALDECANTOS, Argentina’s (Macroeconomic?) Trap: Some Insights from an Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Model
 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure
JAN KREGEL, Keynes’s Clearing Union Is Alive and Well and Living in Your Mobile Phone
 
JAN KREGEL, Another Bretton Woods Reform Moment: Let Us Look Seriously at the Clearing Union
 
L. RANDALL WRAY and YEVA NERSISYAN, Has Japan Been Following Modern Money Theory Without Recognizing It? No! And Yes.
 
TANWEER AKRAM and SYED AL-HELAL UDDIN, The Empirics of Long-Term Mexican Government Bond Yields
 
JAN KREGEL, The Economic Problem: From Barter to Commodity Money to Electronic Money
 
TANWEER AKRAM, A Note Concerning Government Bond Yields
 
Program: Distribution of Wealth and Income
FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, ABENA D. ODURO, and LUIZA NASSIF PIRES, Intrahousehold Allocation of Household Production: A Comparative Analysis for Sub-Saharan African Countries
 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets
DANIEL HAIM, What Jobs Should a Public Job Guarantee Provide? Lessons from Hyman P. Minsky
 
SAMEH HALLAQ, The Palestinian Labor Market over the Last Three Decades
 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy
EMEL MEMIŞ and EBRU KONGAR, Potential Impact of Daycare Closures on Parental Child Caregiving in Turkey
 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century
EDWARD LANE and L. RANDALL WRAY, Is It Time to Eliminate Federal Corporate Income Taxes?
 
INSTITUTE NEWS
UPCOMING EVENTS
29th Annual Hyman. P. Minsky Conference