Grants

Note: As of March 2019, the Imperfect Knowledge Economics(IKE) Program has been re-launched as the INET Program on Knightian Uncertainty Economics (KUE). Please see the KUE page for updates on this body of work.

This project brings new mathematical tools and ideas from high-dimensional statistics to bear on the problem of creating reliable macroeconomic forecasting models.

This research project explores Chinese economic thought of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with direct relevance to the present day, and in particular focuses on one specific thinker, Wang Yanan, and the intellectual debates he animated and in which he participated as a major theorist.

This research project creates a new database of international capital flows from the early 19th century, when London became the financial capital of the world, until 1931, when international capital markets collapsed.

This research project examines the role of political and social unrest by analyzing their effects on bond and stock markets over the period 1900-2000.

This research project investigates how economists sought to make their science more relevant to real-world issues and policy design from the mid-1960s on, by becoming “applied economists.”

This research project focuses mainly on whether the wealth of the United States middle class recovered and whether wealth inequality continued to rise or moderated over the years 2010 to 2013 following the financial crisis of 2008.

This research project develops an intellectual biography of the Hungarian economist Tibor Scitovsky (1910-2002), who is known primarily for his path breaking 1976 book, The Joyless Economy.

This research project studies the innovation of mortgage-backed securities in the 18th century in order to understand the effects of securitization on financial and real markets.

This research project investigates whether rising inequality has contributed to the macroeconomic imbalances that erupted in the present crisis, based on a Kaleckian macroeconomic model.

This research project focuses on the sustainability of economic growth and implications for distribution, employment, stability, and economic policy.

This research project formulates a new model of bounded rationality, based on the idea that agents will keep a simple, or “sparse,” model of the world.

This research project aims at analyzing the role of economic models in economic policy-making. Specifically, we investigate the impact of CGE models, related to the TTIP debate, and potential output models, related to fiscal policy in the EU, on politicial decision-making and public debate.

This research project posits that increasing income concentration and erosion of the middle class are interrelated results of a change in the dominant corporate resource-allocation regime from “retain-and-reinvest” to “downsize-and-distribute,” manifested by massive distributions to shareholders and the disappearance of “collective and cumulative” careers.

This research project traces the history of German energy policy from 1945 to the present. It explores the political economy behind Germany’s transition from coal, to oil, to green energy, the crises driving these shifts, and the evolving efforts to balance affordability with security and environmental protection.