Archive

This research project analyzes the history of the concentration of bank regulatory authority within the Federal Reserve and explores the public policy issues arising from that concentration.

This research project examines the value of political connections between corporate groups in Italy and the National Fascist Party (PNF) during the years of Mussolini’s rise to power (1921-1929).

This research project uses reflexivity thinking to develop a theory of reflexive economic agents whose behavior is central to both the theory of innovation and to the explanation of phenomena such as bubbles, cascades, and herding that are inconsistent with DSGE/rational expectations macroeconomics.

This research project focuses on the role of the representative agent in recent macroeconomics and general equilibrium theory, with a particular emphasis on how different the situation was in the economic theorizing of the first neoclassical synthesis during the 1950s.

Does it matter if the Rational Expectations Hypothesis is unrealistic?

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account for the period 1972-2007. We find that rising (top-end) personal inequality leads to a decrease of the current account, ceteris paribus.

Given the choice, would you accept to live in a society where happiness and prosperity is guaranteed for all on the condition that one single person be kept permanently unhappy? Is the well-being of thousands of people “worth” the sacrifice and suffering of a single innocent child? Such is the dilemma to which the inhabitants of the utopian city of Omelas are confronted in Ursula Le Guin’s philosophical short-story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. In her parable, most people are ultimately able to come to terms with the atrocity. The few citizens who cannot end up walking away from the city — nobody knows where they go and they are never heard from again.

What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?

More than five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers we are still dealing with the problem of high unemployment, the worst kind of “waste” in economic theory. Is there a better approach?

The main goal of the macroeconomist is to understand the sources behind business cycles and the behavior of financial markets in the modern economy.

I’ve already blogged on how undergraduate education evolved at MIT in the postwar era here and here, but since Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman make the case that, to bring introductory economics closer to the real world, macro should be taught before micro as Samuelson did in the first 13 editions of his Economics textbook, it may be worth returning to it.

What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?

In the past decade, the volume of literature in the history of economics has been of 500 articles and just under 50 books a year. The graph below traces the count in two year intervals (articles left axis, books right axis). The absolute volume is stable but given the growth of economic literature in the period, stable might be rebranded as static.

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

The Bank of England took the first step in putting the brakes on the surging property market as it scrapped the United Kingdom’s flagship initiative that encourages mortgage lending, introduced earlier this year by Treasury minster George Osborne.