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Working Paper No. 947

Ages of Financial Instability

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, this paper analyzes two periods of financial instability connected with financial globalization. The first culminates with the 1929 crisis, while the second characterizes the more recent experience starting from the 1970s. The period in between is divided into two subperiods. The first goes up to World War II and sees […]

Blog

Tcherneva on the Green New Deal and Job Guarantee in France

Pavlina Tcherneva recently participated in a hearing before a parliamentary group (La France insoumise) of France’s National Assembly on the subject of the Green New Deal and the job guarantee (the intro is in French; Tcherneva’s testimony is in English): [iframe width=”485″ height=”274″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/csyE46OeS8Q” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe]

Working Paper No. 946

The Relationship between Technical Progress and Employment

We show that Autor and Salomons’ (2017, 2018) analysis of the impact of technical progress on employment growth is problematic. When they use labor productivity growth as a proxy for technical progress, their regressions are quasi-accounting identities that omit one variable of the identity. Consequently, the coefficient of labor productivity growth suffers from omitted-variable bias, […]

Working Paper No. 945

Demand, Distribution, Productivity, Structural Change, and (Secular?) Stagnation

The present paper emphasizes the role of demand, income distribution, endogenous productivity reactions, and other structural changes in the slowdown of the growth rate of output and productivity that has been observed in the United States over the last four decades. In particular, it is explained that weak net export demand, fiscal conservatism, and the […]

Public Policy Brief No. 148

Can We Afford the Green New Deal?

In this policy brief, Yeva Nersisyan and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray argue that assessing the “affordability” of the Green New Deal is a question of whether there are suitable and sufficient real resources than can be mobilized to implement this ambitious approach to climate policy. Only after a careful resource accounting can we address […]

Summary No. 1

Summary Winter 2020

This issue of the Summary features L. Randall Wray’s written testimony submitted for a November 20, 2019 hearing before the US House of Representatives’ Budget Committee, where he urged a reexamination of the economic impact of public debt and deficits; prepared by Wray and Yeva Nersisyan, the testimony explains why federal deficits have become the […]

Strategic Analysis

Prospects and Challenges for the US Economy

This Strategic Analysis examines the US economy’s prospects for 2020–23 and the risks that lie ahead. The baseline projection generated by the Levy Institute’s stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model shows that, given current fiscal arrangements and the slowdown in the global economy, the pace of the US recovery will slacken somewhat, with a growth rate that […]

Strategic Analysis

Greece: In Search of Investors

2019 marked the third year of the continuing economic recovery in Greece, with real GDP and employment rising, albeit at modest rates. In this Strategic Analysis we note that the expansion has mainly been driven by net exports, with tourism playing a dominant role. However, household consumption and investment are still too far below their […]

Working Paper No. 944

The Empirics of Canadian Government Securities Yields

Keynes argued that the short-term interest rate is the main driver of the long-term interest rate. This paper empirically models the relationship between short-term interest rates and long-term government securities yields in Canada, after controlling for other important financial variables. The statistical analysis uses high-frequency daily data from 1990 to 2018. It applies both the […]

Working Paper No. 943

Is China’s Low Fertility Rate Caused by the Population Control Policy?

Whether China’s low fertility rate is the consequence of the country’s strict population control policy is a puzzling question. This paper attempts to disentangle the Chinese population control policy’s impacts on the fertility rate from socioeconomic factors using the synthetic control method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003). The results indicate that the population control […]

Book Series

A Great Leap Forward

A Great Leap Forward: Heterodox Economic Policy for the 21st Century investigates economic policy from a heterodox and progressive perspective. Author Randall Wray uses relatively short chapters arranged around several macroeconomic policy themes to present an integrated survey of progressive policy on topics of interest today that are likely to remain topics of interest for […]

Working Paper No. 942

An Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Macroeconomic Model for Denmark

This paper emphasizes the need for understanding the interdependencies between the real and financial sides of the economy in macroeconomic models. While the real side of the economy is generally well explained in macroeconomic models, the financial side and its interaction with the real economy remains poorly understood. This paper makes an attempt to model […]