Working Papers

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. 

This paper provides a critique of the DSGE models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter-century.

What does the rise of shadow banking mean for monetary theory and practice? (How) should we change our traditional theories of money to capture the complex practices through which money is created in modern financial systems?

As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.

We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.

We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.

In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.

Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.

It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes.

We study analytically and numerically Minsky instability as a combination of top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer positive feedback loops.

A growth model incorporating dynamics of capital per capita, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and labor and energy productivity is described.

Recent claims, particularly in Paul Krugman’s column and blog, on the superiority of the Hicks-Modigliani version of Keynesian economics calls for a re-thinking of the issues raised in the early controversies over what Joan Robinson called “bastard Keynesianism”.

Household indebtedness in the United States grew dramatically during the decades leading up to the financial crisis.

We develop a three-country, stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances.

The Obama stimulus remains controversial even as we approach the fourth anniversary of its launch.

We estimate the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party.

This chapter discusses different approaches pursued to explore three broad questions related to technology diffusion: what general patterns characterize the diffusion of technologies, and how have they changed over time; what are the key drivers of technology, and what are the macroeconomic consequences of technology.

We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted.

Shadowy banking is safety-net arbitrage. It employs substitutes for products and activities performed within the traditional banking sector.

This paper considers a puzzle in growth theory from a Keynesian perspective.

We derive generalization error bounds — bounds on the expected inaccuracy of the predictions — for traditional time series forecasting models.

The European periphery is qualitatively dierent from the core.

Ireland has experienced a series of interlocking banking, fiscal, unemployment and political crises since 2007.

Contemporary mainstream economics has widely “poisoned the well” from which people get their ideas about the relationship between economics and ethics.

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed.

Ambiguous private information leads to informational inefficiency of asset prices in rational expectations equilibrium.

The purpose of this Chartbook is to present a summary of evidence about changes in economic inequality – primarily income, earnings, and wealth – for 25 countries covering a 100 year period from 1911 to 2010.

While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that women are more risk averse than men, this conclusion merits reconsideration.

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis?

Many public debates about climate change now focus on the economic “costs” of taking action.

This work studies the interactions between income distribution and monetary and fiscal policies in terms of ensuing dynamics of macro variables (GDP growth, unemployment, etc.) on the grounds of an agent-based Keynesian model.

Stock flow consistent macroeconomic models suffer from the lack of a coherent estimation method due to the complicated nature of the modeling process.

The Great Recession seems to be a natural experiment for macroeconomics showing the inadequacy of the predominant theoretical framework — the New Neoclassical Synthesis — grounded on the DSGE model.

Background paper for a presentation to the Seattle University School of Law Berle IV Symposiun, “The Future of Financial/Securities Markets,” London June 14-15, 2012.

This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years.

Revised text of a presentation at the Conference on Microfoundations for Modern Macroeconomics, Columbia University, November 2010. I would like to thank Amar Bhidé, Roman Frydman, and Andy Haldane for helpful comments, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking for research support.

John Kay’s thought-provoking essay The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics argues that economists have been led astray by excessive reliance on formal models derived from assumptions that bear too little similarity to the world we live in.

We investigate the effects of government spending on U.S. economic activity using a threshold version of a structural vector autoregressive model.

The topic of this session of the INET conference is a question: does the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stabilizing an economy depend on the underlying economic context in which the policy is implemented?

The paper deals with the mysterious persistence of the Chicago approach as the main analytical engine driving antitrust enforcement in the US.

The crisis has exposed the failure of economic models to deal sensibly with endogenously generated crises propagating from the financial sectors to the real economy, and back again.