Technology & Innovation

Margaret Heffernan on her latest book, A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.

The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.

Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.

“Because many interests come into play in the financing of an election campaign and then they ask you to pay back. So the election campaign should be independent from anyone who may finance it.” - Pope Francis

The Cyclically Adjusted Budget (CAB) is the estimated size of the public budget at some previously defined level of output which may represent the ‘normal’ output or a policy target and that usually is considered to be unaffected by business fluctuations or cycles. Such an estimate is supposed to isolate the automatic movements of revenues and expenditures, given the current structure of tax and transfers, from discretionary fiscal interventions and indicate the “impact” and sustainability of fiscal action.

Inequality has emerged as a major economic issue: sharp increases in the share of income going to those at the very top of the income distribution, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages, and a fall in median family income have raised concern over the sustainability of our economies and societies.

The modern individual is the point of intersection of the processes of consumption and production. The subjective representation of these processes has been determined by two branches of the modern middle class, the bourgeoisie, which has privileged consumption, and the bureaucracy, which has privileged production.

What is at stake : Increasing doubt over the virtue of democracy. One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of confidence and hope in the so-called democratic institutions by a large majority of the people. The fundamental cause is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule and thereby the welfare of the people, and the indomitable tendency of rising and unsustainable inequality in terms of income, standard of living and wealth.

In this paper, we deal with the complex relationship connecting inequality to innovation, and the ways through which public investment, in particular public participation to R&D initiatives, may affect it. We first stress that multiple different equilibria may exist in the inequality-innovation space.

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

We develop a novel stress-test framework to monitor systemic risk in financial systems. The modular structure of the framework allows to accommodate for a variety of shock scenarios, methods to estimate interbank exposures and mechanisms of distress propagation.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:

When the adoption of a new labor‐saving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium‐term by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.

Individuals derive benefits from their connections, but these may, at the same time, transmit external threats. Individuals therefore invest in security to protect themselves. However, the incentives to invest in security depend on their network exposures. We study the problem of designing a network that provides the right individual incentives.

The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.

Private data is leaked more and more in our society. Wikileaks, Facebook, and identity theft are just three examples. Network defenses are constantly under attack from cyber criminals, organized hacktivists, and even disgruntled ex-employees.

This research project improves our understanding of the effects of intellectual property rights—and in particular copyrights—on creativity and innovation.

This research project develops a “Money View” analysis of the recent evolution of China’s financial system.

This research project uses information from digitized Google books and library catalogues to create new measures of technological innovation and diffusion for OECD countries from 1850 to the present.

This research project offers a historical taxonomy of organizational ways that governments fund and implement industrial and innovation policy as well as a taxonomy of contemporary implementation practices.

This research project examines the long process of innovation at Fair Isaac, the analytics firm behind the FICO scoring system.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

Few would argue that America’s fortunes rise and fall on its ability to generate technological innovations — to put bold ideas to work and then bring them to market.

There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find.

An Open Letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

Apple should be returning profits to workers who have invested their time and effort into generating its products and to taxpayers who have funded the investments in the physical infrastructure and human knowledge so critical to Apple’s success.

Improved access to education is often touted as the key to addressing racial inequality in the economy, but Lisa Cook’s research into the innovation economy shows that women and African-Americans are underrepresented despite their educational qualifications.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.

The Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) organises its 18th annual conference on Inequality and the Future of Capitalism with introductory lectures on heterodox economics for graduate students.

A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper.

This paper is based on a social accounting matrix (SAM) which incorporates the size distribution of income based on data from the BEA national accounts, the widely discussed 2012 CBO distribution study, and BLS consumer surveys.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent worldwide economic depression and continuing dislocation, have made little to no impression on the way macroeconomics is taught at the university level, from Economics 101 through graduate school. It has been “business as usual’, which (it seems to me) means an almost studious avoidance of any attempt to acquire knowledge of how monetary economies actually work.

How to rebalance Chinese economy has become a topic of heated discussion. After years of fast economic expansion, now China faces a difficult crossroad. The global financial crisis provided clear evidence that China’s traditional export-driven strategy is vulnerable to slumps of the external demand.

When the Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project launched on 11 November 2013 at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, we promised that we would be ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. The last six months have shown us that this is challenging but we are well on our way to doing it.

Economics has advanced an enormous distance from the Walrasian paradigm and the Neoclassical synthesis. However, undergraduate curriculums continue to heavily favour these views of what economics is and what tools it provides for understanding contemporarypublic problems.

The president of INET, Johnson(2013) emphasized the importance of Asian tradition for building up the New Economic Thinking. “It ismy sense that the Asian tradition of thought and philosophical perspective are better suited to embracing this radical uncertainty and living in the experimentation of the adaptive complex system that our world appears to resemble than are the Western mindsets that are the product of the Cartesian Enlightenment.” In the summary he argues that “As the Asian societies continue to evolve the architects will be better served by an new economics for Asia and from Asia that is based on the notions of radical uncertainty, complex adaptive systems, mimetic desire, the inseparability of politics and economics, and a vision of a world where policy makers are themselves less knowing and less capable of control than we often yearn to believe is within their power.”

The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.

In the United States achieving equal opportunity in postsecondary education is typically described in terms of enrolling more underrepresented groups into the selective colleges. The belief is that if this step is accomplished it will have a fundamental impact on the problem of inequality at the national level. However, what if there are not enough places in selective colleges to accomplish this goal? What if the selective colleges do not have enough capacity to make a significant impact in the problem of serving students from underrepresented groups withdemonstrated high abilities?

The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.

The term human capital describes a set of skills, strengths and know-how that are valuable—both in the narrow sense of being “commercially valuable” (Lindsey, 2013), and the wider one of contributing to a flourishing, deliberate, purposeful life.As Heckman (2014) puts it: “Skills are capacities to act [emphasis added]…They shapeexpectations, constraints, and information” (p. 6).

While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.

Debate about the pension crises has centered on certain questions such as: Are greedy government workers bankrupting states? Arepension-slashing politicians backed by big money saving the day? Or do the budget problems of state and localgovernments have more to do with wasteful corporate subsidies than pensions? What are the real policy solutions to the pressures placed on pensions?”

Economists discussing the problem of radical uncertainty commonly invoke Frank Knight’s classic definition in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but only rarely venture to explore the broader contours of his argument.

Cyberwar is very much in the news these days. It is tempting to try to understand the economics of such an activity, if only qualitatively. What effort is required? What can such attacks accomplish? What does this say, if anything,about the likelihood of cyberwar?

Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.

This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.

Adair Turner at the Institute’s #HumanAfterAll conference in Toronto, CA (2014).

The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.

Innovation, the commercialization of invention, is both desirable and necessary for growth and higher living standards in modern economies. Innovation’s contribution to the economy is being measured increasingly more precisely, and its contribution has been assessed aseconomically important and growing.

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.

This paper analyzes equilibrium, dynamics, and optimal decisions on the factor bias of innovation in a model of induced innovation.

This research project integrates two research paradigms to understand the degree to which financial markets can be reformed in order to nurture value creation and :capital development” rather than value extraction and destruction.

This research project analyzes the role of investment in the operation and performance of three broad high-technology sectors: communication technology, biopharmaceutical drugs and medical technologies, and wind power, solar power, electric vehicles, and the smart grid.

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.

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.

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.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Can China lead the way on innovation?

Can China lead the way on innovation?

Every nation faces the challenge of imagining what a good life means. Sound nutrition, shelter, health care, personal safety, social stability, security of savings, clean air and water, and the development of children are among the elements of what many envision as vital to a happy and healthy society.

Where will today’s innovation come from?

A review of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, the new book by Mariana Mazzucato

We estimate the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party.

is the public sector really sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector?