Working Papers
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Working Paper Series
Household Income, Demand, and Saving: Deriving Macro Data with Micro Data Concepts
Mar 2015
We develop adjustments to align the NIPA measures of key household flows with cash flow concepts that better reflect household budgets and demand.
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Conference paper
Income Inequality and Growth: Problems with the Orthodox Approach
Mar 2015
This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.
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Working paper
Networks in the Laboratory
Feb 2015
This chapter surveys experimental research on networks in economics.
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Conference paper
Precarious Condition: A Challenge For New Forms Of Struggle
Feb 2015
This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:
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Conference paper
Should heterodox economics be taught in economics departments, or is there any room for backwater economics?
Feb 2015
It is highly fitting to have a panel devoted to ‘teaching economics’ in Paris. No less than 15 years ago, in 2000, in downtown Paris, a group of students from the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s élite schools, wrote a petition asking economics teaching to be devoted to the study of real-world problems, with an instrumental use of mathematics rather than to the description of imaginary worlds based on meaningless formalizations.
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Conference paper
Rising Inequality, Demand, and Growth in the US Economy
Feb 2015
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Working paper
Social Structure, Markets and Inequality
Feb 2015
The interaction between social structure and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. In some instances, markets can build on and enhance social networks’ economic role; in other contexts, markets appear to be in direct competition with social networks. The impact of markets on inequality and welfare is also varying: while markets can sometimes offer valuable outside options to marginalised individuals, in other situations only well connected and better off individuals can benefit from them.
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Working paper
The Labor Market Consequences of Electricity Adoption: Concrete Evidence from the Great Depression
Feb 2015
When the adoption of a new labor‐saving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium‐term by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.
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Working paper
Contagion Risk and Network Design
Feb 2015
Individuals derive benefits from their connections, but these may, at the same time, transmit external threats. Individuals therefore invest in security to protect themselves. However, the incentives to invest in security depend on their network exposures. We study the problem of designing a network that provides the right individual incentives.
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Working paper
Networks in Economics: A Perspective on the Literature
Feb 2015
It is instructive to view the study of networks in economics as a shift in paradigm, in the sense of Kuhn (1962). This perspective helps us locate the innovation that networks bring to economics, appreciate different strands of the research, assess the current state of the subject and identify the challenges.
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Working Paper Series
New Evidence for the Present-Value Model of Stock Prices: Why the REH Version Failed Empirically
Feb 2015
Shiller (1981) and others have shown that the quantitative predictions of the REH present-value model are inconsistent with time-series data on stock prices and dividends. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the model without explicitly representing how a rational market participant forecasts dividends and interest rates.
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Working Paper Series
Labor in the Twenty-First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing Middle-Class
Jan 2015
The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.
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Working Paper Series
Beyond Market Failures The Market Creating and Shaping Roles of State Investment Banks
Jan 2015
Recent work has highlighted the need for innovation investments to be understood through a mission oriented approach rather than a market failure one (Foray et al. 2012). However, this work has only focused on state agencies, such as DARPA, overlooking the role of public financial institutions such as state investment banks.
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Working paper
Efficiency and Equilibrium in Network Games: An Experiment
Dec 2014
The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. In many contexts, social networks mediate this trade-off: an individual’s network position determines equilibrium play, and social relations allow coordination on an efficient norm.
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Working paper
The New Economics of Religion
Dec 2014
The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world.