Macroeconomics

The deadline for submission of paper proposals and complete sessions for the 20th FMM conference is approaching: 30 June 2016. Proposals (extended abstracts, max. 400 words) have to be submitted electronically via this web application. Please find more information in the Call for Papers.

What we’re reading: Recent statements from the IMF and the OECD highlight a growing call for new economic policy thinking in response to the specter of long-term stagnation

Book review: Michel De Vroey and the problems of macroeconomics

What we’re reading: A weekly scan of published items relevant to the Institute’s work

Eight years after the 2008 crisis the global economy is still stuck with low growth, too low inflation, and rising debt burdens. Massive monetary stimulus has failed to generate adequate demand, and some commentators suggest that we are “out of ammunition” with which to counter deflationary pressures.

If the government/CB together finance an increased fiscal deficit with permanent non-interest-bearing fiat money, then some private sector agents have to hold non-interest-bearing monetary base, and must continue to do so even when policy and market interest rates have moved away from the ZLB. How is this possible in an environment where most bank deposit money is potentially interest-bearing?

In the growing debate about the pros and cons of a monetary financed fiscal stimulus (a.k.a. helicopter money) it is argued by some participants that a money-financed stimulus will have no more effect than a debt financed stimulus since:

Amid the ongoing research interest in questions of inequality, it is important to examine the question of access to housing — and how that has changed over the decades. The specific question I have sought to answer, here, is whether the real cost (measured against income) of buying the average home has risen.

Orthodox macroeconomics has become a place where visions die and hopes are banished, for both liberals and conservatives.

How Gerald Friedman’s assessment of Bernie Sanders economic proposals prompted a rare public political spat among economists.

Struggles over shadow money today echo 19th century struggles over bank deposits.

This paper proposes a new method to empirically validate simulation models that generate artificial time series data comparable with real-world data.

What can we learn from the Vietnamese, Cuban, Rwandan, and Syrian refugees crisis?

This is a response to a critique by Paul Davidson of our 2013 book Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy and related work, where we describe, amongst other things, how the Swan diagram can be used to show how economies can use policy tools to achieve internal and external balance.

This paper provides critical comments on the Peter Temin - David Vines promotion of the basic Swan Diagram as (1) a policy tool to encourage any individual debtor nation experiencing balance of payment deficits to reduce its exchange rate in order to expand exports and reduce imports and (2) the Swan Diagram as a simple model for understanding Keynes’s General Theory for an Open Economy.