Archive

There is no good case for major deregulation of the US financial sector, warns INET Board Chairman Adair Turner, and any backsliding by a Trump administration on banks’ capital requirements instituted globally after 2008 will be very dangerous

Evidence thus far questions the assumption that robotics are eliminating jobs. INET Senior Vice President for Programs Rick McGahey says the UBI debate should focus on the long-term weakening of labor’s bargaining power

Beijing’s leaders face a critical dilemma over a credit boom that imperils China’s prospects for a smooth transition to a sustainable economic path

Extract from the keynote speech by the Rev. Dr. William Barber III at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference on race and economics in Detroit on November 11

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

Campaign promises aside, the policies favored by President-elect Donal Trump are likely to bring more pain than gain to  working-class Americans 

The prominence of the debate over ‘reswitching’ has obscured the importance of Piero Sraffa’s profound contribution to economics. It’s time to revisit and build on that body of work

Beneath the heated political rhetoric over U.S.-China economic ties lies an increasingly complex reality

Research funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking has revealed that the SEC reports executive compensation using a formula that routinely undercounts it

Milwaukee-born short-seller Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner of New York-based Kynikos Associates, teaches University of Wisconsin and Yale business students about corporate fraud. During his life and career, he has witnessed seismic shifts in economic thinking and the relationship between labor and capital. Chanos shares his thoughts on the world emerging from the election of Donald Trump and the tumultuous political events of 2016. 

Students in Europe have created an important resource for those seeking alternative curricular materials

Institute for New Economic Thinking-backed research into inequality explores how taxes and government policy have contributed to deepening economic inequality   

In the 40th anniversary year of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, the 1970s look remarkably stable in comparison with today’s turbulent world 

Amid heightened focus on conflicts of interests, new research shows how legislators’ votes on the 2008 bank bailout tracked with the exposure to peril of their personal stock portfolios

The big question in Asian countries right now is what lesson to take from Donald Trump’s victory in the United States’ presidential election, and from the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, in which British voters opted to leave the European Union. Unfortunately, the focus is not where it should be: geopolitical change.

New research by Nobel Laureate and Institute for New Economic Thinking Advisory Board member James Heckman finds strong economic gains from birth-to-five education programs 

The Institute for New Economic Thinking’s recent Detroit event on race and economics noted both the structural impediments faced by African-Americans, and the impressive gains made in some communities despite those headwinds

As the world turns upside down, Mariana Mazzucato discusses how to shape an economy that works for everyone

Slight increases in national-average earnings for older workers mask long-run stagnation and decline in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states that unexpectedly voted for Donal Trump

Remedies have failed to produced growth and reduce indebtedness because they’re focused on protecting toxic behavior by banks in Europe’s core countries

The Volcker Alliance has launched a series of new papers with important proposals for reforming financial regulations to guard against future crises 

Nobel laureate argues that the party’s adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy has hurt its prospects

Neither do rapid growth in government debt, declining interest rates, or rapid increases in a central bank’s balance sheet

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

Real existing neoliberalism as a set of social facts distinct from a purist ideology has proven remarkably adaptable and politically resilient 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies allowed the United States to avoid the perils of right-wing populism that plunged Europe into war in the 1930s — Europe should learn from his example

What we’re reading: Some analysts expect dramatic changes and a short-term boost to the US economy, others predict continuity — and see Trump’s election reflecting a sea change in the global order

By suddenly eliminating two widely used bank notes, India’s government risks undermining public confidence in the basic means of exchange

Surviving the geopolitical and economic challenges of the coming years requires a world order less vulnerable to the vagaries of U.S. elections

How orthodox economics paved the way for the political shocks of 2016

By suppressing important questions in favor of being cheerleaders for globalization, economists failed to influence the public conversation

How economics underperforms in diversity, and some potential remedies

The TPP is dead, as is the assumption that future free-trade agreements can be negotiated by experts alone

Mission-oriented public investment is vital to spur a revival of private-sector investment

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, shares a vision of how to bring economic opportunity to women of color

Getting rid of barriers to economic security is possible with the right policies at the right time. 

Hoping to learn from other countries’ experiences in organizing finance for agriculture, more than 150 Americans were sent abroad in the summer of 1913 to investigate the minutiae of farm-credit systems in and around Europe.

Language has always been a way to divide, conquer, classify, and control, but it also helps to constitute who we are and what we think. 

Economists offer widely different explanations for the decline in trade between nations, in a debate that remains unresolved but is increasingly urgent

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Seven dangers of chronically low interest rates amid austerity and fiscal-policy phobia

Black Americans remain second-class citizens in access to housing finance

Oral contraception created a population that, today, is disproportionately inclined to save, resulting in low to negative real interest rates. Excess eurozone savings can only be accomodated by raising sovereign debt levels

Young women of all races and gender identities are powering movements from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform to reproductive justice to minimum wage and beyond. Researchers need to support their progress with metrics that capture the spirit they are building

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Wired profiles Color of Change leader Rashad Robinson and explores the challenges of movement-building in an era of digital activism

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

Like the Great Depression and the stagflation of the ’70s, the anemic growth of the U.S. economy can’t be understood or remedied without changes in economists’ thinking

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

William Darity, Jr. has a new key to unlocking the mystery of inequality: stratification economics.

Social safety nets don’t always need to come with a dark side

Institute grantee Boyce cited for integrating ‘ecological, developmental and justice-oriented approaches’ into economics

Justice requires that the media, policy makers, and the public understand why corporations engage in misconduct and fraud

Economists honored for their work on contract theory, which has important implications for issues such as executive compensation that have been a focus of Institute research

Eight years after the crisis erupted, what the global economy is experiencing is starting to look less like a slow recovery than like a new low-growth equilibrium. With monetary policy unable to stimulate demand, or even inflation, it’s time for fiscal authorities to relieve the burden on central banks.

A new paper by Nancy Folbre offers an evidence-based refutation of ‘just-world’ assumptions

Past failures, present uncertainty, and a challenging political environment have vastly complicated the central bank’s task, says Institute President Rob Johnson

Research by INET grantees Atkinson, Casarico and Voitchovsky shows that women are starkly underrepresented in top earning brackets across a range of different countries

The idea that economics has recently gone through an empirical turn –that it went from theory to data– is all over the place. I argue that this transformation has been oversimplified and mischaracterized.

In a Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit Debate, Institute board chairman Adair Turner explains why extraordinary monetary policy isn’t working

Vice President warns that corporate stock buybacks restrict America’s long-term prosperity, citing the research of Institute grantee William Lazonick who has long argued the same

An award created as a concession to market-minded bankers needs to recognize the centrality of social-democratic policies to the wellbeing of industrialized economies

While many countries throughout the world have faced severe financial crises over the last decades, and while the Japanese stagnation and the 1997 Asian financial crisis did induce some additional interest for the introduction of banking and finance in macroeconomic theory, it is only with the advent of the US subprime financial crisis that macroeconomic and monetary theories put forward by mainstream economists have started to be questioned.

Remarks by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde remind us why gender remains a major research and policy focus for the Fund — and for the Institute for New Economic Thinking

The Eurozone is (quietly) disintegrating as ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries continue on paths of economic divergence. That disintegration is reinforced by self-defeating policies shaped by a macroeconomic model that mimics and reinforces the divisions between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

We are happy to announce that we are offering a second run of the online course which aims to introduce graduate students and interested persons generally to the basic methods and topics of standard microeconomics as taught at the Ph.D. level — with a bit of ‘attitude’!

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

An Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper by William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins reveals that much reporting on executive pay relies on systems of measurement that underreport real compensation

Newspaper’s probe amplifies questions raised by our research into the impact of corporate donations onU.S. elections

Painting economics as blind to inequality may be overstating matters, but for too long efforts to explain it have been self limiting. Now, new economic thinkers are willing to pose uncomfortable questions.

We know about emergency lending, but what we are missing is the macroeconomic framework to guide a new rule for stabilization policy

There is much for U.S. authorities to learn from the European example of forcing corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, but more far-reaching oversight of executives’ allocation of resources is also required

Like any family reunion, the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium may have been as significant for what was said as it was for what was not discussed

In June of this year, Swiss voters saw an initiative on their ballots calling for an “unconditional basic income” that would “allow the whole population to lead a decent life and participate in public life.” Put on the ballot by a petition drive after it was rejected in parliament, the initiative was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters, with 23 percent approving.

The US stands out as an outlier: the US spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less.

The debate about so-called helicopter money is burdened by deep fears and unnecessary confusions: some worry that monetary finance is bound to produce hyperinflation; others argue that, in terms of increasing demand and inflation, it would be no more effective than current policies. Both cannot be right.

Renewed attention on America’s stark and growing racial wealth divide requires critical thinking on policy remedies

Does general equilibrium theory sufficiently enhance our understanding of the economic process to make the entire exercise worthwhile, if we consider that other forms of thinking may have been ‘crowded out’ as a result of its being the ‘dominant discourse’? What, in the end, have we really learned from it?

The untold story of shadow banking

There is a mix of common-sense opinions, political prejudices, conventional business practice, and pragmatic rules of thumb, supported in an ad hoc, opportunistic way by bits and pieces of economic theory.

How economists turned to the study of collective decision-making after World War II, faced many impossibilities, and lost interest after solving them

Oversights of two generations of social scientists have weakened democracy.

The Economist pays tribute to Hyman Minsky, whose ideas on financial instability have not been given the attention and prominence they deserve

Focusing on what money really is – whether gold or state fiat – shifts attention away from what credit really is, which is to say away from the center of discontent.

On George Akerlof’s “The Market for Lemons”

We are grateful to Michael Grubb, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Igor Bashmakov, and Richard Wood for their interesting, empirically rich and structurally insightful commentary on our paper on the production-based and the consumption-based Carbon Kuznets Curve (CKC).

A comment on Goher-Ur-Rehman Mir and Servaas Storm’s Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production Based vs Consumption-Based Evidence on Decoupling

Average U.S. household loses over $100,000 to destructive activities of bankers and financiers

Evidence from Insider Trading in Banks

Inflation, the euro crisis – for years there has been one worry hype after another. Yet fear frequently turns out to be wrong. We need a committee of wise men in charge of dealing with the real risks.

In the past month, analysts from all disciplines have tried to make sense out of shooting deaths of blacks by police and also ambush attacks of police.

One thing is now certain about the upcoming presidential election in the United States: the next president will not be a committed free trader.

It was during a year in residency at Tokyo’s Hitotsuabashi University in 1995 that Jim Crotty first “met” John Maynard Keynes.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Roland Fryer’s working paper on police use of force, prompted by this thread by Europile and excellent posts by Michelle Phelps and Ezekeil Kweku.

Europe’s leaders must recognize that the EU is on the verge of collapse. Instead of blaming one another, they should pull together and adopt exceptional measures.

The EU is preparing to take a tough line with Britain, in order to deter other member states from following it out of the Union. But it is the neoliberal agenda that has prevailed for last four decades, benefiting only the top 1%, that is fueled voter anger on both sides of the Atlantic.

Business school students are taught to extract resources instead of creating value.