503 Videos

Climate change policy is caught in a stalemate between those who fear the environmental consequences of not doing enough and those who fear the economic consequences of overreacting. But controversy over the extent and sources of climate change need not stand in the way of a positive economic policy response.

Financial stability, or the lack thereof.

George Soros, Axel Leijonhufvud and Perry Mehrling in Berlin, Germany (2012).

At least since Joseph Schumpeter we know that credit is good for economic growth. At least since 2007 we know that too much credit foreshadows financial turmoil.

Inequality did not increase during the early stages of economic development in Japan and the East Asian Tigers. But in India and China it did. Why is that?

Over the past two hundred years, poor countries have become faster at adopting the technologies of rich countries. So why is it, the economist asks, that poor countries have remained poor, by and large?

Strong enforcement of property rights is good for economic growth, says the conventional wisdom. The link may not be as clear cut, says Suresh Naidu

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff tell the history of financial crisis as a tale of excessive public debt. But what more commonly drives financial instability, says Moritz Schularick, is excessive private debt.

Are there more poor people on our planet today than there were last year? Many economists would approach this question as mainly a technical problem, a matter of counting.

To cure unemployment, mostly we prime the pump: we devise fiscal strategies on the presumption that jobs follow economic growth. But the strategies have not worked, unemployment remains high.

The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World

Most “state of the art” macro models trivialize financial flows and largely neglect the interaction between finance and industry. That is why they failed at predicting and illuminating the collapse of the Irish economy.

Cosma Shalizi urges economists to stop doing what they are doing: Fitting large complex models to a small set of highly correlated time series data.