Research Papers

The concern that an economy could experience persistent, and in some sense unusual, weakness goes back to Keynes’s General Theory and led Alvin Hansen to coin the term “secular stagnation.”

This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century.

Long-term real interest rates across the world are low, having fallen by about 450 basis points (bps) over the past thirty years.

We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by high unemployment and weak growth.

This paper replaces an earlier version of a paper released in 2014 under the title “A Model of Secular Stagnation.”

The prevailing wisdom that aggregate demand ‘shocks’ determine short-run cyclical fluctuations around a supply-determined equilibrium growth rate and an associated equilibrium unemployment rate (or NAIRU) has been called into question by various streams of literature in the last decades. Specifically, a recently revived literature on hysteresis finds significant persistence in the effects of recessions and negative aggregate demand shocks (Blanchard et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).

Given that this is a panel on that quintessential Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, I can think of no better way to begin my remarks than to invoke that most enlightened of modern economists, Kenneth Boulding, who in 1971 penned the delightful essay, “After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?” 

When priests and princes lost their monopoly over the big questions of human existence over the course of the Enlightenment, philosophers, poets, and ordinary people struggled to find out the answers on their own. 

Adam Smith’s modern fame as the founding father of economics has, until relatively recently, obscured the fact that he saw himself as a moral philosopher.

The road towards a decent society; lessons from classical political economy

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

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

The Death of the Seventy-year American Empire  

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

An Assessment and Some Policy Implications