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  Working Paper No. 449

  The Temporal Welfare State: A Cross-national Comparison

  Welfare states contribute to people’s well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of “temporal autonomy”: the freedom to spend one’s time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, Australia, […]
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  Working Paper No. 448

  Gibson’s Paradox II

  The Gibson paradox, long observed by economists and named by John Maynard Keynes (1936), is a positive relationship between the interest rate and the price level. This paper explains the relationship by means of interest-rate, cost-push inflation. In the model, spending is driven in part by changes in the rate of interest, and the central […]
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  Public Policy Brief No. 84

  Can Basel II Enhance Financial Stability?

  Even as the United States enjoys an economic expansion, there is an undercurrent of concern among economic analysts who follow financial markets. Some feel that the expansion of the credit derivatives markets poses the threat of a crisis similar to the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 1998. Credit derivatives allow banks to share risks with […]
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  Strategic Analysis

  Can the Growth in the US Current Account Deficit Be Sustained?

  Can the growth in the current account deficit be sustained? How does the flow of deficits feed the stock of debt? How will the burden of servicing this debt affect future deficits and economic growth? President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Research Scholars Edward Chilcote and Gennaro Zezza address these and other questions in a new […]
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  Summary No. 2

  Summary Spring 2006

  The latest Strategic Analysis by the Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team suggests that much of the recent growth in GDP can be attributed to house price appreciation and private sector borrowing. However, rising house prices have not improved the equity position of households.   INSTITUTE RESEARCH Program: The State of the US and World Economies, and Strategic […]
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  Working Paper No. 447

  Household Wealth and the Measurement of Economic Well-Being in the United States

  The standard official measure of household economic well-being in the United States is gross money income. The general consensus is that such measures are limited because they ignore other crucial determinants of well-being. We modify the standard measure to account for one such determinant: household wealth. We then analyze the level and distribution of economic […]
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  Working Paper No. 446

  Feminist-Kaleckian Macroeconomic Policy for Developing Countries

  This paper reviews evidence of the gender effects of globalization in developing economies. It then outlines a set of macroeconomic and trade policies to promote gender equity. The evidence suggests that while liberalization has expanded women’s access to employment, the long-term goal of transforming gender inequalities remains unmet and appears unattainable without stateintervention in markets. […]
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  Public Policy Brief Highlight No. 84

  Can Basel II Enhance Financial Stability?

  Even as the United States enjoys an economic expansion, there is an undercurrent of concern among economic analysts who follow financial markets. Some feel that the expansion of the credit derivatives markets poses the threat of a crisis similar to the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 1998. Credit derivatives allow banks to share risks with […]
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  Policy Notes No. 4

  Debt and Lending

  Many papers published by the Levy Institute during the last few years have emphasized that the American economy has relied too much on the growth of lending to the private sector, most particularly to the personal sector, to offset the negative effect on aggregate demand of the growing current account deficit. Moreover, this growth in […]
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  Audio

  Government Spending on the Elderly

  The aging of the American population will be a primary domestic public policy issue during the next decades. According to Census Bureau projections, the proportion of the elderly in the total population will increase from its 2002 level of under 13 percent to slightly more than 16 percent by 2020. Concomitantly, the proportion of working-age […]
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  Policy Notes No. 3

  Twin Deficits and Sustainability

  In the mid-to-late 1980s, the American economy simultaneously produced—for the first time in the postwar period—huge federal budget deficits as well as large current account deficits, together known as the “twin deficits”. This generated much debate and hand-wringing, most of which focused on supposed “crowding-out” effects. Many claimed that the budgetdeficit was soaking up private […]
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  Working Paper No. 445

  A Random Walk Down Maple Lane?

  The development of the permanent income/life cycle consumption hypothesis was a key blow to Keynesian and Kaleckian economics. According to George Akerlof, it "set the agenda" for modern neoclassical macroeconomics. This paper focuses on the relationship of housing wealth to neoclassical consumption theory, and in particular, the degree to which homes can be treated collectively […]