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BlogNo More Fiscal Policy Bank Shots
May 25, 2012 A little while back the Wall Street Journal observed that if there were as many people employed by government today as there were in the last month of George W. Bush’s tenure, the unemployment rate would be around 7.1 percent. Job creation policy, in other words, can sometimes be quite simple. Step One: stop firing [...] Blog -
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Public Citizen on the Repo Ruse
May 24, 2012 Whether or not you already know what a “repo” is, Public Citizen’s new report on repurchase agreements, which played a part in the recent financial crisis (as well as the collapse of MF Global), is well worth reading. Here’s their introduction: In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks depended increasingly on an unreliable [...] Blog -
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How’s That “Make People Poorer” Strategy Working Out?
May 24, 2012 There is no shortage of viable economic solutions for the eurozone. But as Martin Wolf points out in his FT column, once you strike all of the solutions that have been declared politically unacceptable (eurobonds, a stronger EU-level fiscal authority), there aren’t too many policy levers left to pull. One possibility Wolf mentions is to [...] Blog -
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Can the Eurozone Be Saved without Treaty Changes or New Institutions?
May 22, 2012 Yanis Varoufakis and Stuart Holland have updated their “Modest Proposal” for overcoming the eurozone crisis (they call it version 3.0). They took on the challenge of coming up with proposals for addressing the eurozone’s tripartite crisis (sovereign debt, banking, and underinvestment) in a way that avoids any treaty changes or the creation of new EU [...] Blog -
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“A New Frontier of Economic Nonsense”
May 21, 2012 In an interview with Helen Artopoulou that was posted on Capital.gr, Levy Institute president Dimitri Papadimitriou discusses the failure of the austerity policies imposed on Greece and the uncertain future of the euro project. Q. The political impasse in Greece, largely the outcome of the recent elections, had led to some reconsideration of the austerity policy [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 725Problems with Regional Production Functions and Estimates of Agglomeration Economies
May 17, 2012 Over the last 20 years or so, mainstream economists have become more interested in spatial economics and have introduced largely neoclassical economic concepts and tools to explain phenomena that were...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 724
Post-Keynesian Institutionalism after the Great Recession
May 17, 2012 This paper surveys the context and contours of contemporary Post-Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI). It begins by reviewing recent criticism of conventional economics by prominent economists as well as examining, within the...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 724
Ο Θεσμικός μετα-Κεϋνσιανισμός μετά τη Μεγάλη Κάμψη
May 17, 2012 Η εργασία αυτή ερευνά το πλαίσιο και το περίγραμμα του σύγχρονου Θεσμικού μετα-Κεϋνσιανισμού (ΘΜΚ). Ξεκινά με την ανασκόπηση της πρόσφατης κριτικής διακεκριμένων οικονομολόγων στα παραδοσιακά οικονομικά και εξετάζει, εντός του...more Publication -
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Did Tax Reform Contribute to Soaring CEO Pay?
May 16, 2012 Mark Thoma has posted the English transcripts of a three–part interview of James Galbraith by the German website NachDenkSeiten. In the first interview there is a brief exchange with Roger Strassburg in which Galbraith discusses the idea that the 1986 tax reforms, which followed the “lower the rates, broaden the base” mantra that we’re still [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 723
Fiscal Policy, Unemployment Insurance, and Financial Crises in a Model of Growth and Distribution
May 14, 2012 Recently, some have wondered whether a fiscal stimulus plan could reduce the government’s budget deficit. Many also worry that fiscal austerity plans will only bring higher deficits. Issues of this...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 722
Guaranteed Green Jobs
May 11, 2012 In most economies, the potential of saving energy via insulation and more efficient uses of electricity is important. In order to reach the Kyoto Protocol objectives, it is urgent to...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 721
The Euro Debt Crisis and Germany’s Euro Trilemma
May 11, 2012 This paper investigates the causes behind the euro debt crisis, particularly Germany’s role in it. It is argued that the crisis is not primarily a “sovereign debt crisis” but rather...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 721
Η κρίση ευρω-χρέους και το ευρωτρίλλημα της Γερμανίας
May 11, 2012 Η εργασία εξετάζει τα αίτια της κρίσης χρέους στην ευρωζώνη, κυρίως τη συμβολή της Γερμανίας σε αυτή. Η εργασία προβάλλει το επιχείρημα ότι η κρίση δεν είναι πρωτίστως «κρίση δημοσίου...more Publication -
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Galbraith Appears Before Ron Paul Hearing on the Federal Reserve
May 10, 2012 Congressman Ron Paul held a subcommittee hearing on reform of the Federal Reserve system a couple days ago that featured testimony from Senior Scholar James Galbraith, Alice Rivlin, John Taylor, Jeffrey Herbener, and Peter Klein. There were a wide variety of topics addressed, including the size of the Fed’s balance sheet, proposals to make the [...] Blog -
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Will Greece “Muddle Through”?
May 10, 2012 The recent Greek elections, which did not produce a party (or a viable coalition) with a majority in Parliament, have occasioned a lot of excited speculation about Greece either leaving the eurozone or being nudged out. Dimitri Papadimitriou comments today in a CNN Money piece about this possibility and offers a slightly more sober assessment, [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 719
Reorienting Fiscal Policy after the Great Recession
May 09, 2012 The paper evaluates the fiscal policy initiatives during the Great Recession in the United States. It argues that, although the nonconventional fiscal policies targeted at the financial sector dwarfed the...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 719
Επαναπροσδιορίζοντας τη δημοσιονομική πολιτική μετά τη Μεγάλη Κάμψη
May 09, 2012 Το κείμενο αξιολογεί τις πρωτοβουλίες δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής που εφαρμόστηκαν κατά τη διάρκεια της Μεγάλης Κάμψης στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες. Η συγγραφέας του θεωρεί ότι, παρά το γεγονός ότι οι μη συμβατικές...more Publication -
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Taking Finance Seriously in 2007
May 08, 2012 “In late 2007,” writes Peter Orszag, “the midpoint of the range that the Fed projected for real gross-domestic-product growth in 2008 was more than 2 percent.” Most analysts were still expecting the fallout from the subprime crisis to be largely contained because, as Orszag puts it, their models “had at best a very rudimentary financial [...] Blog -
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It’s Hard to Fix What You Don’t Think Is Broken
May 07, 2012 In last week’s Bloomberg column, Peter Orszag (former head of CBO and OMB) lamented that most “official forecasters” relied (and still rely) on economic models that led them to completely underestimate the severity of the downturn that resulted from the subprime mortgage crisis. These “bad models,” as Bloomberg‘s headline writers call them, whiffed badly on [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 30Building Effective Regulation Requires a Theory of Financial Instability
May 04, 2012 Hyman Minsky had particular views about how the regulatory system and financial architecture should be reformulated, and one of the many lessons we can learn from his work is that...more Publication -
One-Pager No. 30
Η οικοδόμηση ενός αποτελεσματικού ρυθμιστικού συστήματος απαιτεί μια θεωρία χρηματοοικονομικής αστάθειας
May 04, 2012 Ο Χάιμαν Μίνσκυ είχε συγκεκριμένες απόψεις για το πώς θα έπρεπε να αναδιαμορφωθεί το ρυθμιστικό σύστημα και η χρηματοοικονομική αρχιτεκτονική, και ένα από τα πολλά μαθήματα που μπορούμε να αντλήσουμε...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 718
Aggregate Production Functions and the Accounting Identity Critique
May 04, 2012 In a reply to Felipe and McCombie (2010a), Temple (2010) has largely ignored the main arguments that underlie the accounting identity critique of the estimation of production functions using value...more Publication -
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Galbraith: Addressing Inequality Means Addressing Instability
May 03, 2012 Levy Institute Senior Scholar James Galbraith was interviewed by the Washington Post‘s Brad Plumer about his new book Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis. Galbraith explains that the rises in inequality we’ve witnessed globally since the 1980s can be traced to changes in finance and the macroeconomy [...] Blog -
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What’s Happening Now at the Fed?
May 03, 2012 If there is a pundit on the topic of the Federal Reserve, surely William Greider is one. (Recall his famous book, Secrets of the Temple.) This recent piece from Greider in the progressive magazine the Nation offers some helpful historical perspective on the role of the nation’s central bank in recent years. Blog