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  Report No. 4

  Report October 2007

  The optimistic view of the subprime mortgage sector is that it makes the availability of credit for home purchases more egalitarian, extending it to those otherwise regarded as a high credit risk. The authors of a new Levy Institute Public Policiy Brief, however, are not as sanguine about such developments. Contents: NEW PUBLIC POLICY BRIEF […]
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  Public Policy Brief Highlight No. 91

  Globalization and the Changing Trade Debate

  The failure of the Doha Development Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations in July 2006 was the first major collapse of a multilateral trade round since World War II. Research Associate Thomas Palley sees the failure as an event that could mark the close of a 60-year era of trade policy largely centered on […]
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  Working Paper No. 516

  The Right to a Job, the Right Types of Projects

  There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide jobs while creating public assets. In addition to physical infrastructure, […]
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  Working Paper No. 515

  Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty

  While Hyman P. Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what would become the War on Poverty. Indeed, at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a vehement critic of the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and […]
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  Working Paper No. 514

  The Continuing Legacy of John Maynard Keynes

  This working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of its publication and the 60th anniversary of Keynes’s death. The paper incorporates some of the latest research by prominent followers of Keynes, presented at the 9th International Post Keynesian Conference in […]
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  Working Paper No. 513

  Inequality of Life Chances and the Measurement of Social Immobility

  This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents and the columns to the income distribution of their children, it then highlights the importance of the marginal distributions when comparing social immobility within two […]
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  Working Paper No. 512

  Endogenous Money

  While the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest rate—which has only an indirect impact on the quantity of reserves and the quantity of privately created money. […]
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  Summary No. 3

  Summary Fall 2007

  The Fall issue leads off with the 16th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, in which top policymakers, economists, and analysts explored the impact of global imbalances and whether or not the United States economy was headed for a hard or a soft landing.   Contents:   INSTITUTE RESEARCH Program: The State of the US and […]
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  Prepare for the credit crisis to spread

  FT.com, September 3, 2007. Copyright 2007 The Financial Times Limited. “FT” and “Financial Times” are trademarks of the Financial Times “Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design. . . . The world of finance hails the invention […]
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  In time of tumult, obscure economist gains currency

  By Justin Lahart. The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2007, Page A1 Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. The recent market turmoil is rocking investors around the globe. But it is raising the stock of one person: a little-known economist whose views have suddenly become very popular. Hyman Minsky, who died more than a […]
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  Working Paper No. 511

  The Fed’s Real Reaction Function

  Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to “inflation signals.” Rather, the Fed reacts to the very “real” signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless fear of full employment […]
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  Working Paper No. 510

  A Post-Keynesian View of Central Bank Independence, Policy Targets, and the Rules-versus-Discretion Debate

  This paper addresses three issues surrounding monetary policy formation: policy independence, choice of operating targets, and rules versus discretion. According to the New Monetary Consensus, the central bank needs policy independence to build credibility; the operating target is the overnight interbank lending rate, and the ultimate goal is price stability. This paper provides an alternative […]