Working Papers
-
Working Paper Series
Political Lending
Aug 2016
Using a unique dataset provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), we document a direct channel through which financial institutions contribute to the net worth of members of the U.S. Congress, particularly those sitting on the finance committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
-
Working Paper Series
How Money Drives US Congressional Elections
Aug 2016
Social scientists have stubbornly held that money and election outcomes are at most weakly linked. New research provides clear evidence to the contrary.
-
Working Paper Series
Latent Instrumental Variables: A Critical Review
Jul 2016
This paper considers the estimation problem in linear regression when endogeneity is present, that is, when explanatory variables are correlated with the random error, and also addresses the question of a priori testing for potential endogeneity.
-
Working Paper Series
Ethics vs. Ethos in US and UK Megabanking
May 2016
Company law in the US and UK fails to acknowledge that authorities’ propensity to rescue giant banks from the consequences of insolvency assigns taxpayers a coerced and badly structured equity stake in too-big-to-fail institutions.
-
Working Paper Series
Stock-Market Expectations: Econometric Evidence that both REH and Behavioral Insights Matter
May 2016
Behavioral finance views stock-market investors’ expectations as largely unrelated to fundamental factors. Relying on survey data, this paper presents econometric evidence that fundamentals are a major driver of investors’ expectations.
-
Working Paper Series
On Historical Household Budgets
May 2016
The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries.
-
Working Paper Series
Luigi Pasinetti and the Political Economy of Growth and Distribution
Mar 2016
This paper provides a careful and synthetic overview of his contributions as well as a reconstruction of Pasinetti’s philosophical approach to economics as a science meant to serve humanity.
-
Working Paper Series
A Method for Agent-Based Models Validation
Mar 2016
This paper proposes a new method to empirically validate simulation models that generate artificial time series data comparable with real-world data.
-
Working Paper Series
Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production-based versus Consumption-based Evidence on Decoupling
Mar 2016
We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).
-
Working Paper Series
Comments on Paul Davidson’s “Full Employment, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Keynes’ General Theory: Does the Swan Diagram Suffice?”
Feb 2016
This is a response to a critique by Paul Davidson of our 2013 book Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy and related work, where we describe, amongst other things, how the Swan diagram can be used to show how economies can use policy tools to achieve internal and external balance.
-
Working Paper Series
Full Employment, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Keynes’ General Theory: Does the Swan Diagram Suffice?
Feb 2016
This paper provides critical comments on the Peter Temin - David Vines promotion of the basic Swan Diagram as (1) a policy tool to encourage any individual debtor nation experiencing balance of payment deficits to reduce its exchange rate in order to expand exports and reduce imports and (2) the Swan Diagram as a simple model for understanding Keynes’s General Theory for an Open Economy.
-
Working Paper Series
Household Borrowing and the Possibility of “Consumption- Driven, Profit-Led Growth”
Jan 2016
We first show that, with a Kaleckian structure that is consistent with Pasinetti (1962), the relationship between distribution and growth is more robust than conventional wisdom suggests. Next, we extend our model by incorporating borrowing and emulation effects into workers’ consumption behavior, under different assumptions about how debt is serviced.
-
Working Paper Series
Understanding the Great Recession
Dec 2015
Some Fundamental Keynesian and Post-Keynesian Insights, with an Analysis of Possible Mechanisms to Achieve a Sustained Recovery
-
Working Paper Series
A Theory of How and Why Central-Bank Culture Supports Predatory Risk-Taking at Megabanks
Dec 2015
This paper applies Schein’s model of organizational culture to financial firms and their prudential regulators.
-
Working Paper Series
Veiled Repression: Mainstream Economics, Capital Theory, and the Distributions of Income and Wealth
Dec 2015
The Cambridge UK vs USA capital theory debates of the 1960s showed that the workhorse mainstream growth model relies on unsustainable assumptions. Its standard interpretation is not consistent with the last four decades of data.