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BlogPromises, promises, and more promises
May 21, 2010 From today’s NY Times: The cost of public pensions has been systemically underestimated nationwide for more than two decades, say some analysts. By these estimates, state and local officials have promised $5 trillion worth of benefits while thinking they were committing taxpayers to roughly half that amount. As Dimitri Papadimitriou said on this blog recently, we [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 3“The Spectre of Banking”
May 20, 2010 A year and a half after the collapse in the financial markets, the debate about necessary “reforms” is still in its early stages, and none of the debaters seriously claims...more Publication -
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Funding child labor
May 19, 2010 The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth has issued a report on an unintended consequence of women-empowering microfinance: an increase in child labor. The report underscores the importance of unpaid work–work performed mostly by women. A development program, small or big, should consider the constraint that unpaid care duties impose on women, and provide assistance through [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 2
Reforms Without Politicians
May 19, 2010 Congress is currently debating new regulations for financial institutions in an effort to avoid a repeat of the recent crisis that brought the banking system to the brink. Some of...more Publication -
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Promises, promises
May 19, 2010 An earlier Levy post outlined America’s multi-dimensional pension crisis. Now comes this paper from economist Joshua Rauh, who says that at least seven states may be unable to pay their public-pension obligations during the next decade–and by 2030 that number could reach 31 states. Barring reforms, Rauh says, a federal bailout could be needed, possibly [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 599Racial Preferences in a Small Urban Housing Market
May 18, 2010 This paper use spatial econometric models to test for racial preferences in a small urban housing market. Identifying racial preferences is difficult when unobserved neighborhood amenities vary systematically with racial...more Publication -
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A gloomy assessment
May 17, 2010 Jan Kregel and Rob Parenteau, respectively senior scholar and research associate at the Levy Institute, offer this analysis of the current crisis in Europe, observing that investor behavior in this case isn’t just moved by animal spirits or orneriness: This is about more than just testosterone counts. Some wing of the professional investing world is [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 598
The Economic and Financial Crises in CEE and CIS
May 17, 2010 This paper looks at the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), where economies have been most dramatically hit by the global crisis...more Publication -
One-Pager No. 1
A Balancing Act
May 17, 2010 Now that America’s financial institutions have been brought back from the brink, the greatest threat to global economic stability is the gigantic trade imbalance between the United States, China, and...more Publication -
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Get it out of the office
May 17, 2010 Getting medical insurance out of the workplace would have been a grand idea. But bowing to practicality, the Obama administration pushed through a good-enough plan that leaves it there. Let’s not make the same mistake twice when it comes to pensions. America and its retirees are facing a multi-dimensional pension crisis—one that, even more than [...] Blog -
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How many economists are out there?
May 14, 2010 The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its occupational employment and wages summary today. With a surge of interest in economics in the general public, I wondered how many of us are hired to work (search Economists and Economics Teacher, Postsecondary). What is your guess? (Hint: for every 5,021 hired workers, one economist is at work) Blog -
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Wynne Godley
May 14, 2010 Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley, longtime head of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, died on May 13. He was 83. At the time of his death, Godley was professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College. He was formerly a senior visiting research fellow at the Cambridge Endowment [...] Blog -
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What if women ran Wall Street?
May 13, 2010 Michael Scherer at Time has a fascinating story on three women in Washington–Sheila Bair, Elizabeth Warren and Mary Schapiro–who have risen from the ashes of the financial meltdown. If nothing else, the crisis has at least helped put some women in charge of Wall Street. Blog -
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Dean Baker on the ‘credit squeeze’
May 13, 2010 Dean Baker debunks the myth that banks are failing to lend money. Long story short: it's the recession! Businesses are looking less like good credit risks because they have less revenue. What bank would be lending more in this atmosphere? A foolish bank. Blog -
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Prometheus bound
May 11, 2010 Any time you talk about a contagion, it’s sensible to ask: where did the infection come from? The European debt crisis may look like it started in Greece, but really it began with the Stability and Growth Pact, the final framework of the European Monetary Union (EMU) that gave us the euro. That agreement is [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 597
Bretton Woods 2 Is Dead, Long Live Bretton Woods 3?
May 11, 2010 This paper sets out to investigate the forces and conditions that led to the emergence of global imbalances preceding the worldwide crisis of 2007–09, and both the likelihood and the...more Publication -
Public Policy Brief No. 111Επιστροφή στην υστερία του ελλείμματος στις ΗΠΑ;
May 11, 2010 Στο κείμενο αυτό, οι Yeva Nersisyan και ο L. Randall Wray υποστηρίζουν ότι τα ελλείμματα δεν επιβαρύνουν τις μελλοντικές γενεές με χρέη και δεν περιορίζουν τις ιδιωτικές δαπάνες. Οι συγγραφείς...more Publication -
Public Policy Brief No. 111
Deficit Hysteria Redux?
May 11, 2010 This brief by Yeva Nersisyan and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray argues that deficits do not burden future generations with debt, nor do they crowd out private spending. The authors...more Publication -
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European Union’s mega-loan fund is no panacea
May 11, 2010 From the way markets reacted, the trillion-dollar rescue package hurled by European leaders at the continent’s growing debt crisis might well have been code-named Panacea. Stocks rose all over the place while Greek bond yields tumbled on Monday. But this is far from the end of the story. The rescue package alleviated the growing Eurozone [...] Blog -
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Not just jobs, but the right kind
May 10, 2010 The good news on U.S. employment is that we added 290,000 nonfarm jobs in April. The bad news is that unemployment rose as well, to 9.9%, because more people entered the labor force and many more returned to seeking work. So unfortunately, the employment picture remains grim, with a level of unemployment we might have [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 596
Infinite-variance, Alpha-stable Shocks in Monetary SVAR
May 10, 2010 The process of constructing impulse-response functions (IRFs) and forecast-error variance decompositions (FEVDs) for a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) usually involves a factorization of an estimate of the error-term variance-covariance matrix...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 595
The Recycling Problem in a Currency Union
May 09, 2010 The recycling problem is general, and is not confined to a multicurrency setting: whenever there are surplus and deficit units—that is, everywhere—adjustment in real terms can be either upward or...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 594
Revisiting “New Cambridge”: The Three Financial Balances in a General Stock-flow Consistent Applied Modeling Strategy
May 08, 2010 This paper argues that modified versions of the so-called “New Cambridge” approach to macroeconomic modeling are both quite useful for modeling real capitalist economies in historical time and perfectly compatible...more Publication -
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A crisis of evasion
May 08, 2010 I’m Italian, and I’m an economist, so as European leaders work feverishly to save the Euro, I’ve been wondering: what would happen if the feared contagion occured and my own country saw its finances melt down just as Greece’s have? The short answer is that this would generate a fatal shock to the Euro, given the size [...] Blog