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Blog
Greek for “default”
As the European financial crisis continues to percolate, by now a few irreducible facts are distressingly clear: First, Greece has no hope of repaying its debts as they are now constituted. Thus, the much-contested 110 billion euro bailout plan and the wider subsequent trillion-dollar bailout proferred by the Eurozone countries and the IMF are doomed [...]
Blog
A plague of debt
The Financial Times reports that the European Central Bank (ECB) has warned of a “financial contagion” risk from concerns about the debt of some European governments. Many readers of this blog will recall that a similar concern was important in the late 1990s, when debt and currency problems seemed to spread among Asian and Latin [...]
Blog
Wynne Godley, continued
The Economist has published this obituary of the late economist, whose career included a lengthy stint as head of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team. In the small world dept.: After a spell in business and a few years at the Treasury, he was enticed to King’s College, Cambridge, which 61 years earlier another economist-aesthete, John [...]
Blog
Why do women earn less?
In a paper called “Gender Segregation by the Clock,” Casey B. Mulligan of the University of Chicago has come out with some interesting new research on gender inequality in the labor market. It is a fascinating study showing that women are more likely to choose a regular 9 to 5 job. Prof. Mulligan says this may contribute [...]
Working Paper No. 600
Time and Poverty from a Developing Country Perspective
This study is concerned with the measurement of poverty in the context of developing countries. We argue that poverty rankings must take into account time use dimensions of paid and unpaid work jointly. Reviewing the current state of the literature on this topic, our methodology introduces a critical but missing analytical distinction between time poverty […]
Blog
The rain in Spain
A new report from the International Monetary Fund has turned attention, at least temporarily, from Greece to the larger potential problem of Spain, where unemployment is roughly 20 percent. A nice (if unsettling) summary: Spain’s economy needs far-reaching and comprehensive reforms. The challenges are severe: a dysfunctional labor market, the deflating property bubble, a large [...]
Blog
Promises, promises, and more promises
From today’s NY Times: The cost of public pensions has been systemically underestimated nationwide for more than two decades, say some analysts. By these estimates, state and local officials have promised $5 trillion worth of benefits while thinking they were committing taxpayers to roughly half that amount. As Dimitri Papadimitriou said on this blog recently, we [...]
One-Pager No. 3
“The Spectre of Banking”
A year and a half after the collapse in the financial markets, the debate about necessary “reforms” is still in its early stages, and none of the debaters seriously claims that his solution will in fact prevent a new crisis. The problem is that the proposed remedies deal with superficial matters of industrial organization and […]
Blog
Funding child labor
The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth has issued a report on an unintended consequence of women-empowering microfinance: an increase in child labor. The report underscores the importance of unpaid work–work performed mostly by women. A development program, small or big, should consider the constraint that unpaid care duties impose on women, and provide assistance through [...]
One-Pager No. 2
Reforms Without Politicians
Congress is currently debating new regulations for financial institutions in an effort to avoid a repeat of the recent crisis that brought the banking system to the brink. Some of those proposed changes would be valuable. But what nobody seems to have noticed is that the government already has the power to address some of […]
Blog
Promises, promises
An earlier Levy post outlined America’s multi-dimensional pension crisis. Now comes this paper from economist Joshua Rauh, who says that at least seven states may be unable to pay their public-pension obligations during the next decade–and by 2030 that number could reach 31 states. Barring reforms, Rauh says, a federal bailout could be needed, possibly [...]
Working Paper No. 599
Racial Preferences in a Small Urban Housing Market
This paper use spatial econometric models to test for racial preferences in a small urban housing market. Identifying racial preferences is difficult when unobserved neighborhood amenities vary systematically with racial composition. We adopt three strategies to redress this problem: (1) we focus on housing price differences across microneighborhoods in the small and relatively homogenous city […]