Research Papers

Frequent civil conflicts in African countries may erode national identity, thus highlighting a reason why civil conflict is costly for growth and development

A report of the Commission on Global Economic Transformation’s subcommittee on Macroeconomics & Finance

A report of the Commission on Global Economic Transformation’s subcommittee on Inequality, Technology, and the Future of Work

Everyone is waking up to the fact that estimates of what is possible in the economy are way off: this paper explains why

This paper presents an historical analysis of the antitrust laws.

Why Italy’s woes are a warning to the whole Eurozone

Prisoners employed in manufacturing constitute 4.2% of total U.S. manufacturing employment in 2005; they produce cheap goods, creating labor demand shock.

This paper introduces the Knightian Uncertainty Hypothesis (KUH), a new approach to macroeconomics and finance theory.

Asset markets are indispensable in harnessing society’s diverse views and insights about future business performance. But those views are shaped as much by emotion and crowd mentality as by rational expectations.

Economic distress in rural areas and opioid exposure in cities are key indicators of overdose deaths

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

Starting with the literature on the estimates of the natural rate of interest, this paper critically analyzes the modern practice of identifying the benchmark rate of monetary policy with an equilibrium or neutral interest rate reflecting “fundamental forces” unaffected by monetary factors.

The American economy changed rapidly in the last half-century. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) were designed before these changes started. They have stretched to accommodate new and growing service activities, but they are still organized for an industrial economy.

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

We need a new system of rules for the digital 21st century that enhances global digital cooperation and welfare. Nothing less than a historic gathering of the world’s key decision makers will get us there.    

In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. 

Assessing the Peculiarities of Economics from Two Scientometric Perspectives

This paper critically analyzes voting patterns in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments.

This paper concerns itself with the joint effect of implicit subsidies that are built into the US housing-finance system and financial safety net.

This paper adds to the empirical evidence on the extent to which stock-based pay incentivizes and rewards European corporate executives. It shows that the actual realized gains (that is, take-home compensation) from stock-based pay of CEOs in European publicly-listed firms may be underestimated by the use of “estimated fair value” measures. The paper also documents the heterogeneity among countries in terms of the levels and components of CEO take-home pay. We base our work on a sample of 301 large, publicly-traded companies listed in the S&P Europe 350 index from 11 EU countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom for the fiscal year 2015. Through analyzing companies’ annual reports, we have hand-collected data on various elements of compensation of the company’s CEO in 2015, including the gains that executives realize from stock-based pay. We document that on average half of the total compensation of the European CEOs in our sample is stock-based, measured by actual realized gains, with large differences among countries. Although in some European countries the majority of total compensation is stock-based, the proportions are still well below those that prevail in the

“Dualism” in the structure of production across sectors of the US economy, employment by sector, productivity levels and growth, real wages, and intersectoral terms-of trade increased markedly between 1990 and 2016. 

Using datasets on transactions within business groups and social sentiment in China, I show that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) use internal funds to address social unrest, complying with the government’s political goals. 

This paper explains how hedge-fund activists are exerting power over corporate resourceallocation far in excess of the actual voting power of their shareholdings.

Converting an Obscure Agency Footnote into an “At Will” Nullification of Dodd-Frank’s Regulation of the Multi-Trillion Dollar Financial Swaps Market

Labor market regulation is a controversial area of public policy in both developed and developing countries.

A presentation from the panel “Research Evaluation in Economic Theory and Policy Making” at the 2018 G20 Global Solutions Summit in Berlin

Alberto Baccini’s presentation for INET’s panel on research evaluation at the G20 Global Solutions Summit in Berlin, May 2018.

Has the global financial crisis of 2007 had a visible impact on the economics profession?

Adair Turner, Chair of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Lecture at School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC April 10th 2018

“Meso” level analysis of 16 producing sectors sheds light on broad forces shaping growth of employment and profits. 

As early as 1900, German sociologist Georg Simmel identified a central feature of wealth in his seminal work The Philosophy of Money. Simmel writes about the superadditum of wealth for the rich, namely that a great fortune is encircled by innumerable possibilities of use, as though by an astral body.

Over the last four decades, Americans have consistently told pollsters that they favor higher taxes on business and the wealthy, even as tax policy has moved sharply in the other direction.

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre-empt corporate misbehavior?

Money in politics is not a strictly American phenomenon. In France, despite strong campaign finance laws, campaign donations have a direct influence on legislative and municipal election results.

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 strands of literature over the last few decades. Specifically, a recently revived literature on hysteresis finds significant persistence in the effects of negative aggregate demand shocks (e.g. Blanchard et al. 2015; Fatás and Summers 2016; Martin et al. 2015).

A critical analysis of Piketty’s work

A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movement’s success.

To get justice, targets must show measurable harm: economists can help.

The US federal lobbying industry, based in Washington DC, is major focal point for political money and the exercise of influence, with expenditures peaking at approximately $2.5 billion per annum during the first Obama administration. 

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history.

The consensus that reigned in macroeconomics before the financial crisis has come under renewed attack.

One might think of the satisfied consensus reigning in macroeconomics before the financial crisis (and still relatively entrenched) as evidence of “Groupthink” in a “Divided State”

The wind appears to be back in the sails of the Eurozone economy ….

The current crisis is the culmination of a process of integration that has profoundly changed the structure of each member state, their inter-relations and their power relations. One of its side effects was the rediscovery of the terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ to analyse the economic situations of the European countries.

The euro area has been experiencing a prolonged period of weak economic activity and very low inflation.

Some fresh reflections on ECB policy

Veiling among Muslim women is modeled as a commitment mechanism that limits temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior. 

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. 

Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks 

“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?

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.

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.

I have read the various conference papers and am struck by the fact that many use the (omnipresent New-Keynesian) model of an aggregate loanable funds market to diagnose secular stagnation and investigate possible remedies.

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).

The past 30 years has witnessed a worldwide decrease in real interest rates. We demonstrate that a large part of the fall in interest rates can be explained by changes in demography, which are as the result of a sudden fall in fertility rates across all of the advanced economies in the early 1970s.

We examine the hypothesis that the slowdown in productivity following the Great Recession was in significant part an endogenous response to the contraction in demand that induced the downturn.

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 shows that aging has positive effect on output growth per capital at positive interest rates, due to capital deepening.

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.

We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output.

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.

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

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

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.”

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom.

Unpacking the Effect of Trade on Workers and Voters 

Support for populism is often attributed to xenophobia, racism, sexism; to anger and resentment at immigrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or “uppity” non-traditional women. According to these accounts , people who feel socially resentful may reject established politicians as favoring those “others” over people like themselves, and turn to outsider populistic leaders.

This paper discusses what we have learned about the debt build-up in advanced societies over the past century. It shows that the extraordinary growth of aggregate debt in the past century was driven by the private sector.

The debt-growth relationship is complex, varying across countries and being affected by global factors. While there is no simple universal threshold above which debt-to-GDP becomes a significant brake on growth, based on data from the last four decades we show that high and rising public debt burdens slow down growth in the long term.

This paper discusses household debt as a long term phenomenon that influences economies beyond crises.1 In other words, rather than look at how household indebtedness can lead to crises, I will focus on its surprising persistence at very high levels, and its interactions along the way with other key variables, such as public policies and spending. The first section describes some stylized facts and the final section explores the macroeconomic consequences.

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.

Building symbiotic public-private partnerships

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

How far are economists implicated in the rise of ‘fake experts’ and ‘fake news’?

The contemporary literature on neoliberalism has grown so large as to be unwieldy. For some on the left, this has presented an occasion to denounce it altogether.

Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged? 

A better set of approaches for the 21st century.

The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure

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.

Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

In the economic literature, several scholars have addressed the narrative of a two-stage European crisis. In a first stage, the so-called “he-cession”, men would have been hit the most by the economic recession induced by the financial crisis. Shortly thereafter, in the “she-austerity” stage, women would have suffered the heaviest burdens of the fiscal retrenchment measures. If that were the case, the policy response to the crisis would be producing an increase in the – already high pre-existing – gender inequality.

Especially in the wake of the Great Recession, calls for more diversity within economics are usually limited to appealing for greater diversity in the economists’ backgrounds, while diversity of opinion and approaches is often neglected.

The Academic and Professional Performance of the Chicago School, 1960-1985

This paper aims to assess such tendency to return to a supply-determined potential output, independent of aggregate demand, after episodes of demand expansion.

Preliminary draft prepared for INET conference session “A Decade of Stagnation. Why?”

This paper analyzes the link between Kamakura Risk Information Services (KRIS) data on megabank default probabilities and credit spreads.

Economists’ infamous failure at predicting the recent financial crisis has brought new impetus to studies on diversity in the economics profession. Such studies have underlined how diversity plays a prominent role in enriching economic analyses.

The Theory of the Firm, Financial Flows, and Economic Performance

It is commonly overlooked that the concept of market efficiency embowers a time-dimension. Illustrating with an example from the class of persistent random walks, we show that a price process can be a martingale on one time-scale but inefficient on another.