Working Papers
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Conference paper
Financial Regulation That Might Have a Chance of Working
Apr 2015
Regulation of financial services has been an unmitigated policy disaster.
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Conference paper
The international monetary and financial system: its Achilles heel and what to do about it
Apr 2015
This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead to serious financial crises and macroeconomic dislocations.
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Conference paper
Global Crises, Equalizing and Dis-equalizing Capitalist Regimes: The Case of 20th Century Asian Political Economy
Apr 2015
The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.
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Conference paper
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession
Apr 2015
The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.
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Conference paper
Too much saving... or too few financing channels?
Apr 2015
The global financial crisis led to widespread dislocation. Understanding the forces that led to such a crisis is no easy matter.
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Conference paper
A strategy change for Europe is needed
Apr 2015
Ten hypotheses presented in the session “Beyond Deficits, Austerity and Deflation” at INET Conference 201
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Conference paper
Unpacking and Reorienting Executive Subcultures of Modern Finance
Apr 2015
Recent weeks have surfaced an intense exchange of top-level finger pointing, both between Congress and the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, between Fed officials and executives in the private sector and within the Fed between the Board of Governors and the New York Reserve Bank.
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Conference paper
Inequality: A Neuroscience Perspective
Apr 2015
It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.
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Conference paper
Promoting bank stability through compensation reform: lessons from Iceland
Apr 2015
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Conference paper
Inequality, the crisis, and stagnation
Apr 2015
The inequality of income and wealth is one of the defining issues of our time, in terms of both its social and macroeconomic implications. In this article, I focus on the macroeconomic implications of inequality. In particular, it is possible to identify four themes on which there seems to be growing consensus among many economists especially in the various heterodox traditions, but also increasingly in the mainstream of the economics profession:
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Working Paper Series
Have Large Scale Asset Purchases Increased Bank Profits?
Apr 2015
This paper empirically examines the effects of the Federal Reserve’s Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP) on bank profits.
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Working paper
Large Firm Dynamics and the Business Cycle
Apr 2015
Do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle? We answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm-level disturbances alone. We show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in it a theory of the business cycle, without appealing to aggregate shocks.
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Working Paper Series
Change and Rationality in Macroeconomics and Finance Theory: A New Rational Expectations Hypothesis
Mar 2015
We call attention to the class of models that serve as the foundation for the rational expectations hypothesis (REH). Models in this class rule out completely any structural change that cannot be fully anticipated with a probabilistic or other quantitative rule. REH models are abstractions of rational decision-making, but only in a hypothetical world in which participants can fully anticipate when and how they might revise their understanding of the process driving outcomes.
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Conference paper
What is Real Wealth?
Mar 2015
A Ruskinian framework for economic justice.
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Working paper
An investigation into Multivariate Variance Ratio Statistics and their application to Stock Market Predictability
Mar 2015
We propose several multivariate variance ratio statistics. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the statistics and scalar functions thereof under the null hypothesis that returns are unpredictable after a constant mean adjustment (i.e., under the weak form Efficient Market Hypothesis). We do not impose the no leverage assumption of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) but our asymptotic standard errors are relatively simple and in particular do not require the selection of a bandwidth parameter. We extend the framework to allow for a time varying risk premium through common systematic factors.