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  Working Paper No. 513

  Inequality of Life Chances and the Measurement of Social Immobility

  This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents and the columns to the income distribution of their children, it then highlights the importance of the marginal distributions when comparing social immobility within two […]
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  Working Paper No. 512

  Endogenous Money

  While the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest rate—which has only an indirect impact on the quantity of reserves and the quantity of privately created money. […]
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  Summary No. 3

  Summary Fall 2007

  The Fall issue leads off with the 16th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, in which top policymakers, economists, and analysts explored the impact of global imbalances and whether or not the United States economy was headed for a hard or a soft landing.   Contents:   INSTITUTE RESEARCH Program: The State of the US and […]
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  Prepare for the credit crisis to spread

  FT.com, September 3, 2007. Copyright 2007 The Financial Times Limited. “FT” and “Financial Times” are trademarks of the Financial Times “Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design. . . . The world of finance hails the invention […]
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  In time of tumult, obscure economist gains currency

  By Justin Lahart. The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2007, Page A1 Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. The recent market turmoil is rocking investors around the globe. But it is raising the stock of one person: a little-known economist whose views have suddenly become very popular. Hyman Minsky, who died more than a […]
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  Working Paper No. 511

  The Fed’s Real Reaction Function

  Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to “inflation signals.” Rather, the Fed reacts to the very “real” signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless fear of full employment […]
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  Working Paper No. 510

  A Post-Keynesian View of Central Bank Independence, Policy Targets, and the Rules-versus-Discretion Debate

  This paper addresses three issues surrounding monetary policy formation: policy independence, choice of operating targets, and rules versus discretion. According to the New Monetary Consensus, the central bank needs policy independence to build credibility; the operating target is the overnight interbank lending rate, and the ultimate goal is price stability. This paper provides an alternative […]
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  Working Paper No. 509

  On Various Ways of Measuring Unemployment, with Applications to Switzerland

  This paper begins with an examination of various ways of measuring unemployment and, borrowing ideas from the poverty measurement literature, proposes four new general unemployment indices. The first of these is parallel to the Sen poverty index; the second, to the Sen index’s generalization by Shorrocks; the third, to the FGT poverty index; and the […]
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  Press Release

  Housing Slump and Subprime Mortgage Crisis Pose Serious Danger to US Economy, New Levy Institute Study Says

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  Working Paper No. 508

  The American Jewish Committee’s Annual Opinion Surveys

  The American Jewish Committee (AJC) surveys of Jewish opinion are unique both in being conducted annually and in the subject matter covered. This paper assesses the quality of these samples. I first summarize my earlier findings on the implications of limiting a sample to respondents who answered “Jewish” when asked a screening question about their […]
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  Working Paper No. 507

  Who’s a Jew in an Era of High Intermarriage?

  The old ways in which surveys of Jews handled marginal cases no longer make sense, and the number of cases involved is no longer small. I examine in detail the public-use samples of the two recent national surveys of Americans of recent Jewish origin—the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) and the American Jewish Identity Survey […]
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  Working Paper No. 506

  The Effects of a Declining Housing Market on the US Economy

  Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing price decreases on real private […]