The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce that it will hold the second annual Minsky Summer Seminar June 18�26, 2011. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky�s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial crisis.

The Summer Seminar will be of particular interest to graduate students, recent graduates, and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff will include well-known economists concentrating on and expanding Minsky�s work.

Applications may be made to Susan Howard at the Levy Institute ([email protected]), and should include a current curriculum vitae. Admission will include provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. A limited number of small travel reimbursements of $100 for U.S. fellows and $300 for foreign fellows, respectively, will be available to participants.

Due to limited space availability, the deadline for applications is March 31, 2011.

The summer seminar program will be organized by Jan Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and L. Randall Wray.

Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray examines the later works of Hyman P. Minsky, with a focus on Minsky�s general approach to financial institutions and policy. In terms of financial institutions, Minsky distinguished between traditional commercial banking, investment banking, universal banking, and public holding company models.

Minsky recognized that the development of money manager capitalism led to a convergence of models�an insight that helps to explain the current economic crisis. Minsky would have increased the Fed�s role and used the discount window as an important tool for oversight, says Wray. Moreover, downsizing the financial industry and reducing its share of corporate profits are necessary in order to serve the public purpose.

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A Levy Institute project with support from the Sloan Foundation analyzes economic well-being at the international level. Research Scholar Thomas Masterson describes the construction of synthetic datasets used in estimating the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for Canada in 1999 and 2005. The estimation process at the household level requires information about demographics, income, transfers, taxes, time use, and wealth.

Since no single dataset has all of the required information, Masterson uses various Statistics Canada surveys. He compares and aligns the distribution of households between datasets in order to minimize the difference between the source and match files, and is able to accurately preserve, at a detailed level, the distribution of household production in the matching process.

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According to Andrea Terzi, Franklin College, Switzerland, Keynes�s vision has been misrepresented by government policies that are merely �short-term fixes� aimed at reversing the business cycle during an economic crisis. She claims that government actions only marginally reflect Keynes�s theoretical framework and are destined to be ineffective if the political tolerance for fiscal deficits is too low for full employment.

The author contrasts the short-run character of the emergency policies with the long-run properties of Keynesian policy propositions, discusses the consequences of fiscal actions within a simple flow-of-funds model�and exposes a crucial flaw in the euro area�s institutional structure.

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In association with Working Papers no. 609 and no. 611, these authors from the Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines, develop an �Index of Opportunities� based on a country�s accumulated capabilities to undergo structural transformation. In the long run, a country�s income is determined by the variety and sophistication of its products, and by the accumulation of new capabilities with comparative advantage.

The authors show that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between country capabilities and per capita GDP growth. They find that countries such as China, India, Poland, Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil have a significant number of capabilities today that portend positive economic performance in the long run. Good policies and incentives, however, should supplement their capabilities.

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This working paper provides the background information and data for Public Policy Brief no. 115 (see above).

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