Archive

This workshop has the dual aim to expose mathematicians to new research problems in economics and economists to new techniques and developments in mathematics.

The rescue of Cyprus was a microcosm of how the nations of Europe have failed to work together to adequately address their ongoing financial crises.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, distrust in the financial sector was widespread. Even after the mess appeared to be cleaned up, the uncertainty over whether the worst was over remained real.

Finance is built on trust. It is based on promises about tomorrow, often paper promises backed by nothing other than words on a page. When trust in those promises breaks down, so too does the financial system. That is the lesson of thousands of years of history.

In standard economics, inequality in outcomes is typically attributed to inequality of inputs, for example, from differences in education. Yakovenko thinks about inequality in a different way by extending some ideas from statistical physics.

The United States government openly flirting with a default on its debt is, to the financial system, like a Pope wondering out loud about the existence of God.

When Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis threatened the euro’s survival, U.S. officials called their European counterparts to express bewilderment at their inability to resolve the issue.

Inequalities in skills are fundamentally linked to economic and social inequalities.

So, most Nobel Prize exegetes went a long way, this week, toward explaining that asset pricing is not primarily born out of theoretical reflection but out of prize-deserving empirical work.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, few would dispute the risks of excessive borrowing. But which debts should one worry about – public or private? This column presents new research on the interplay of public and private debts since 1870 in 17 advanced economies. History demonstrates that excessive private-sector borrowing plays a greater role than fiscal profligacy in generating financial instability. However, when the credit boom collapses, the government’s capacity to alleviate the downturn is limited by the prevailing level of public debt.

This episode features grantee D’Maris Coffman of the Centre for Financial History talking about her organization’s commitment to a New Financial History and what the fruits of their approach can tell us about modern debt crises and sustainable debt levels.

Advisory Board members Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff today issued a response to recent criticism of their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.”

This episode features Pier Carlo Padoan, Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD, talking about the euro zone crisis, Europe’s structural problems, and how uncertainty has damaged economic growth in Europe.

If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?

This morning, when I woke up a few hours before the Nobel announcement, I felt seriously dissatisfied. I had meant to write a post on Thomson Reuters’s prediction that Card, Angrist and Krueger may win the Nobel for their work on empirical microeconomics.