Working Papers

The US federal lobbying industry, based in Washington DC, is major focal point for political money and the exercise of influence, with expenditures peaking at approximately $2.5 billion per annum during the first Obama administration. 

This paper provides a critique of the DSGE models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter-century.

What does the rise of shadow banking mean for monetary theory and practice? (How) should we change our traditional theories of money to capture the complex practices through which money is created in modern financial systems?

As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.

We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.

We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.

In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.

Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.

It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes.

We study analytically and numerically Minsky instability as a combination of top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer positive feedback loops.

A growth model incorporating dynamics of capital per capita, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and labor and energy productivity is described.

Recent claims, particularly in Paul Krugman’s column and blog, on the superiority of the Hicks-Modigliani version of Keynesian economics calls for a re-thinking of the issues raised in the early controversies over what Joan Robinson called “bastard Keynesianism”.

Household indebtedness in the United States grew dramatically during the decades leading up to the financial crisis.