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BlogStormy Fantasies about Labor Cost Competitiveness
Lamenting that intellectual inertia is responsible for slow progress in economics, Servaas Storm sets out to teach a lesson to everyone who may still be foolish enough to believe that relative labor costs matter for international competitiveness and that diverging unit labor cost trends – specifically persistent wage moderation in Europe’s largest economy, Germany – [...] -
The Fed Puts Rates on Ice
Federal Reserve Blog, January 27, 2016. All Rights Reserved. After raising interest rates in December for the first time since the financial crisis and Great Recession, the Federal Reserve has gone into a January freeze. The central bank on Wednesday announced no change in interest rates, meaning the target for the Fed’s benchmark federal funds […] -
One-Pager No. 52
A Complementary Currency and Direct Job Creation Hold the Key to Greek Recovery
Even under optimistic assumptions, the policy status quo being enforced in Greece cannot be relied upon to help recover lost incomes and employment within any reasonable time frame. And while a widely discussed public investment program funded by European institutions would help, a more innovative, better-targeted solution is required to address Greece’s protracted unemployment crisis: […] -
Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist (a Review)
CFA Institute, January 20, 2016. All Rights Reserved. A few decades ago, Paul Samuelson wrote a letter to Robert Shiller and John Campbell in which he discussed the notion that while the stock market was “micro efficient,” it was also “macro inefficient,” by which he meant that although profitable security choices were swiftly arbitraged away, […] -
Blog
Why Minsky Matters, Reviewed in Times Higher Education
L. Randall Wray’s recently published book on the work of Hyman Minsky (Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist) was reviewed by Victoria Bateman for Times Higher Education. Here’s a taste: Having experienced the pain of a new Great Depression, the very least we should expect is that economists try to learn from it. [...] -
Working Paper No. 858Gender Dimensions of Inequality in the Countries of Central Asia, South Caucasus, and Western CIS
The collapse of the Soviet Union initiated an unprecedented social and economic transformation of the successor countries and altered the gender balance in a region that counted gender equality as one of the key legacies of its socialist past. The transition experience of the region has amply demonstrated that the changes in the gender balance […] -
Blog
The Only Graph Needed to Explain the New Year’s Dive of 2016: Larry Summers Sort-Of Gets It, the Fed Doesn’t Seem to Get It, and the Media Seems Hardly Aware of It
by Daniel Alpert A practically unnoticed phenomenon underpins the negative U.S. economic data trends we saw in Q4 2015 and the enormous increase in market volatility in the first week of 2016: the United States’ global competitors are—once again—using vast pools of low-wage, underutilized labor, a huge excess of domestic production capacity, and/or the ever-stronger [...] -
Summary No. 1Summary Winter 2016
The Winter 2016 Summary opens with a policy brief discussing the implications for euro-area member-states’ fiscal rules should the European Central Bank (ECB) advance the project of a single financial market through the creation of debt certificates. A policy note follows with proposals to ensure that the most recent round of recapitalizations of Greek banks […] -
Strategic Analysis
How Long Before Growth and Employment Are Restored in Greece?
The Greek economy has not succeeded in restoring growth, nor has it managed to restore a climate of reduced uncertainty, which is crucial for stabilizing the business climate and promoting investment. On the contrary, the new round of austerity measures that has been agreed upon implies another year of recession in 2016. After reviewing some […] -
Blog
Registration Now Open for 25th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
The 2016 Minsky Conference will address whether what appears to be a global economic slowdown will jeopardize the implementation and efficiency of Dodd-Frank regulatory reforms, the transition of monetary policy away from zero interest rates, and the “new” normal of fiscal policy, as well as the use of fiscal policies aimed at achieving sustainable growth [...] -
Policy Notes No. 8The US Census Asks About Race and Ethnicity: 1980–2020
This policy note examines the formulation and reformulation of questions deployed by the US Census Bureau to gather information on racial and ethnic origin in recent decades. The likely outcome for the 2020 Census is that two older questions on race and Hispanic origin will be combined into a single question on ethno-racial origin. The […] -
Working Paper No. 857
Ethno-Racial Origin in US Federal Statistics: 1980–2020
This paper describes the transformations in federal classification of ethno-racial information since the civil rights era of the 1960s. These changes were introduced in the censuses of 1980 and 2000, and we anticipate another major change in the 2020 Census. The most important changes in 1980 introduced the Hispanic Origin and Ancestry questions and the […]