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  Working Paper No. 515

  Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty

  While Hyman P. Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what would become the War on Poverty. Indeed, at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a vehement critic of the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and […]
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  Working Paper No. 514

  The Continuing Legacy of John Maynard Keynes

  This working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of its publication and the 60th anniversary of Keynes’s death. The paper incorporates some of the latest research by prominent followers of Keynes, presented at the 9th International Post Keynesian Conference in […]
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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 […]