Working Papers

The path to holding fossil fuel producers accountable for climate change & climate damages 

The deregulatory zeal of the 1990s and 2000s has returned to the US and the post-Brexit plans to protect the City in the UK sound like the pre-crash light-touch mentality that fueled global regulatory arbitrage.  As a result, a foremost “challenge of our time” is to stop “subsidizing more one-way bets” and “doubling down on failure.”

As globalization proceeds rapidly, manufacturing industry in most of developed countries declined steadily. 

The Death of the Seventy-year American Empire  

An Assessment and Some Policy Implications

What economics can – and can’t – tell us about climate change 

We want an economy that generates stable and equitable growth—or what I call “sustainable prosperity.” We want productivity growth that makes it possible for the population to have higher living standards over time. We want an equitable sharing of the gains from productivity growth among those whose work efforts and financial resources contribute to that growth. And we want sufficient job stability to enable workers to remain in productive employment for some four decades at work while providing them with enough savings to provide them with adequate incomes over some two decades of retirement.

Can a Policy of Guaranteed Basic Income Return Mature Market Economies to les Trente Glorieuses?

Building symbiotic public-private partnerships

Decomposition by such an important category as gender helps us understand the economy at the macro level, and design macroeconomic policy, better. It also provides the foundation for advocating equal gender rights and outcomes. But, where gendered policy issues arise in mainstream macroeconomics (income maldistribution, labour market composition, etc.) the subject matter is narrowed by its microfoundations, by focusing on GDP growth and on suboptimal outcomes being explained by market imperfections.

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies, had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Firms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperforming unconnected ones by 5% to 8% between January and March 1933. These results are not driven by sectoral composition and are robust to alternative estimators and definitions of affiliation. 

After re-iterating five well-known theorems about the properties of conditional expectations in stationary settings—such as providing unbiased minimum mean square error predictions despite in- complete information, and the law of iterated expectations—we clarify unpredictability and illustrate its prevalence empirically.

In the paper that we present this afternoon, Soren Johansen, Anders Rahbek, Morten Tabor, and I introduce the Qualitative Expectations Hypothesis (QEH) as a new approach to modeling macroeconomic and financial outcomes.

“The Failure of Democracy” – “The weaknesses of Weimar” Do headlines such as these suggest that the whole architecture of the first German republic was wrong, that it was doomed right from the start, that the “collapse” was unavoidable?

Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks