Working Papers
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Working paper
Beyond Competitive Devaluations: The Monetary Dimensions of Comparative Advantage
May 2015
Motivated by the long-standing debate on the pros and cons of competitive devaluation, we propose a new perspective on how monetary and exchange rate policies can contribute to a country’s international competitiveness. We refocus the analysis on the implications of monetary stabilization for a country’s comparative advantage.
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Working paper
Contagion Exposure and Protection Technology
May 2015
People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.
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Working paper
Input Diffusion and the Evolution of Production Network
Apr 2015
The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.
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Working paper
Laid Low: The IMF, The Eurozone and the First Rescue of Greece
Apr 2015
As Greece descended into a financial maelstrom in the spring of 2010, a small group of staffers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held top-secret talks with officials from the German and French finance ministries to discuss the idea of restructuring Greece’s debt.
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Working paper
Discrimination, Social Identity, and Coordination: An Experiment
Apr 2015
This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate
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Working Paper Series
An Economical Business-Cycle Model
Apr 2015
In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to matching frictions, and real wealth enters the utility function. These assumptions modify the two core equations of the standard New Keynesian model
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Conference paper
A New Rational Expectations Hypothesis: What Can Economists Really Know About the Future?
Apr 2015
John Muth proposed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) to represent how the market (an aggregate of its participants) understands and forecasts outcomes. REH imposes internal consistency between the market’s forecasts and “the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961, p. 316).
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Conference paper
Change of Course: a Journalist’s Perspective
Apr 2015
I first came across economics students’ campaigns to revolutionise their education in that bastion of radical thought: the newsroom of the Financial Times.
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Conference paper
From Terrible to Terrific Undergraduate Economics Curricula
Apr 2015
Among the areas left largely unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent never-‐ending recession, the teaching of economics ranks high.
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Conference paper
The Eurozone crisis: A debt shortage as the final cause
Apr 2015
This paper proposes a different interpretation of the Eurozone crisis, seeing as its “final” cause European policies which have forced private savings down too low.
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Conference paper
What's Wrong With Economics?
Apr 2015
Hubris might well head the list
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Conference paper
Austeritarianism in Europe: What Options for Resistance?
Apr 2015
In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.
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Conference paper
Embedding GroupThink
Apr 2015
This memo outlines key concepts and the methodological approach involved in a recently funded Institute for New Economic Thinking project. Our aim is to pinpoint the relationship between the reception of academic ideas, traced by citation networks with qualitative coding, and positions of institutional and political power.
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Conference paper
Reflexivity, expectations feedback and almost self-fulfilling equilibria: economic theory, empirical evidence and laboratory experiments
Apr 2015
We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.
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Conference paper
Linking Individual and Community Economic Mobility: The Spatial Foundations of Persistent Inequality in the United States
Apr 2015
Considerable academic and public attention has been drawn to the pulling away of the very rich—the so-called “one percent” whose gains have far outpaced those of everyone else (Piketty 2014). But the debate has reached well beyond the very top, especially in the United States.Indeed, the hollowing out of the middle class, continuing stagnation of wages, and new evidence on the lack of upward mobility across generations all strike at the very heart of the American ideal.