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History of the Think Tank (or, Your Fish)
“A rollicking saga that involves all sorts of things not normally associated with think tanks – chickens, pirate radio, retired colonels, Jean Paul Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and at its heart is a dramatic and brutal killing committed by one of the very men who helped bring about the resurgence of the free market in [...]
Blog
Commodities Bubble Reax
Wray responds to critics of yesterday’s post, and includes an excerpt from his policy brief on the topic (for a more condensed version, highlights of the brief are here).
Blog
The Biggest Speculative Bubble of All
(Cross posted from EconoMonitor) Back in fall of 2008 I wrote a piece examining what was then the biggest bubble in human history: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_96.pdf. Say what? You thought that was tulip bulb mania? Or, maybe the NASDAQ hi-tech hysteria? No, folks, those were child’s play. From 2004 to 2008 we experienced the biggest commodities bubble [...]
Blog
Irving Fisher would have supported QE
If you haven’t already read Fisher’s 1933 article “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” read it today. It contains his theory of booms and busts that later inspired Hyman Minsky to develop the Financial Instability Hypothesis (HM duly acknowledged his debt to Fisher in his 1986 book). Fisher’s article is unfortunately becoming more relevant by [...]
Blog
Not Just a Greek Problem
Dimitri Papadimitriou was interviewed for Ian Masters’ “Background Briefing” segment regarding Greece’s place in the eurozone debt crisis, the inevitability of default (“… it’s going to happen much sooner than we think”), and other issues. Listen here.
Working Paper No. 687
Access to Markets and Farm Efficiency
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the relationship between the spread, spatially and temporally, of market institutions and improvements in the productivity and efficiency of farmers. The data used in this study were collected over two decades in a sample of rice farms in the Bicol Region of the Philippines. Our estimates reveal a […]
Working Paper No. 686
Estimating the Impact of the Recent Economic Crisis on Work Time in Turkey
This paper provides estimates of the impact of the recent economic crisis on paid and unpaid work time in Turkey. The data used in this study come from the first and only time-use survey available at the national level. Infrequency of collection of time-use data in Turkey does not allow us to make a direct […]
Blog
The End (of the Euro) Is Near
Dimitri Papadimitriou writes in the Huffington Post about two different “endgame” scenarios for the euro: The collapse of the euro project will break in one of two ways. Most likely, and least desirable, is that nations will leave the euro in a coordinated dissolution which might ideally resemble an amicable divorce. As with most divorces, [...]
Blog
Conventional approach to central banking needs revision
Brookings issued a report yesterday, called Rethinking Central Banking, by a group of high-profile economists including Eichengreen, Rajan, Reinhart, Rogoff and Shin. The group – called the Committee on International Economic Policy and Reforms – argues that the conventional approach to central banking needs to be rethought. The neat separation between price stability and other [...]
Blog
A Graphical Play in Three Acts
Since graphical information manages to fail less spectacularly at getting people to change their minds, here are three graphs; one addressing what we ought (not) to do, one addressing what we are doing, and the other what we can do. The first comes from the IMF, compiling 30 years of evidence showing that fiscal contraction [...]
Blog
The power of moral framing
Here is an excerpt from the most important article you will read this year, by George Lakoff: Here’s how public intimidation by framing works. The mechanism of intimidation is framing, not just the use of words or slogans, but rather the changing of what voters take as right as a matter of principle. Framing is [...]
Summary No. 3
Summary Fall 2011
In this issue, papers focus on the prospects for US economic growth, including jobs programs and other public-sector initiatives; the euro and sovereign-debt crises in the eurozone, as well as global economic tensions between emerging market and industrialized economies; the nature of global finance and its role in real world economies; the impact of government […]