Working Papers
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Working paper
Discrimination, Social Identity, and Coordination: An Experiment
Apr 2015
This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate
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Working Paper Series
An Economical Business-Cycle Model
Apr 2015
In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to matching frictions, and real wealth enters the utility function. These assumptions modify the two core equations of the standard New Keynesian model
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Conference paper
A New Rational Expectations Hypothesis: What Can Economists Really Know 八卦爆料 the Future?
Apr 2015
John Muth proposed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) to represent how the market (an aggregate of its participants) understands and forecasts outcomes. REH imposes internal consistency between the market’s forecasts and “the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961, p. 316).
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Conference paper
Change of Course: a Journalist鈥檚 Perspective
Apr 2015
I first came across economics students’ campaigns to revolutionise their education in that bastion of radical thought: the newsroom of the Financial Times.
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Conference paper
From Terrible to Terrific Undergraduate Economics Curricula
Apr 2015
Among the areas left largely unscathed by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent never-颅鈥恊nding recession, the teaching of economics ranks high.
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Conference paper
The Eurozone crisis: A debt shortage as the final cause
Apr 2015
This paper proposes a different interpretation of the Eurozone crisis, seeing as its “final” cause European policies which have forced private savings down too low.
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Conference paper
What's Wrong With Economics?
Apr 2015
Hubris might well head the list
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Conference paper
Austeritarianism in Europe: What Options for Resistance?
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Embedding GroupThink
Apr 2015
This memo outlines key concepts and the methodological approach involved in a recently funded 八卦爆料 project. Our aim is to pinpoint the relationship between the reception of academic ideas, traced by citation networks with qualitative coding, and positions of institutional and political power.
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Conference paper
Reflexivity, expectations feedback and almost self-fulfilling equilibria: economic theory, empirical evidence and laboratory experiments
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Linking Individual and Community Economic Mobility: The Spatial Foundations of Persistent Inequality in the United States
Apr 2015
Considerable academic and public attention has been drawn to the pulling away of the very rich鈥攖he so-called “one percent” whose gains have far outpaced those of everyone else (Piketty 2014). But the debate has reached well beyond the very top, especially in the United States.Indeed, the hollowing out of the middle class, continuing stagnation of wages, and new evidence on the lack of upward mobility across generations all strike at the very heart of the American ideal.
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Conference paper
Italy's Crisis: Neither Fiscal Profligacy nor Capital Flows
Apr 2015
Italy was one of the worst hit during the 2007鈥2009 global financial crisis (GFC) among the major advanced economies. By year-end 2009, Italy’s economy had contracted by 6.6 percent; significantly larger than the recessions in the euro zone and the United States, for example, which saw their GDPs shrink by 4.4 and 3.1 percent, respectively.
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Conference paper
Reviving Debate In Economics: Motivations and Methods of the International Student Movement
Apr 2015
In the past three years, students around the world have turned the heat of scrutiny onto our economics departments. Our call is strikingly uniform across our diverse cultures and languages: we want critical debate back in the economics curriculum.
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Conference paper
How Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence
Apr 2015
“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
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Conference paper
Gordian knot: A panoramic perspective on stemming illicit financial flows from Africa
Apr 2015
Pushing this strand of research brings a certain feeling of trepidation. It comes from recognizing that by openly elaborating on how to catch or deter a criminal, you thereby confer an undue advantage on the criminal through forewarning.
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Conference paper
Towards a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Framework
Apr 2015
Initiatives to improve sovereign debt restructuring (“SDR”) began long before recent Argentine bond decisions but were redoubled in the aftermath of these rulings. At first glance, these cases identify problematic contract language that could be rectified by re-drafting critical boilerplate provisions such as the pari passu and collective action clauses (“CAC”).
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Conference paper
The Prince('s) Rules: Economic Theories and Political Struggle in Europe.
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Social investment for inclusive growth: a Southern European perspective
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Capital Flight from Africa and Development Inequality: Domestic and Global Dimensions
Apr 2015
Over the past decades African economies have exhibited two stunning paradoxes: growth acceleration coexisting with stubbornly high poverty rates; increasing capital flight along with widening development financing gaps. There has been no attempt to link the two in the literature.
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Conference paper
Goethe鈥檚 Faust and the socioeconomic roots of modern subjectivity
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Twisting the economic tale: what literature can do that political economy can鈥檛
Apr 2015
This paper will address the problem of how we might gain economic understanding from literature. It will look at the aesthetic form of literature as being an efficient vehicle for economic thinking.
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Conference paper
Information and Economics: A New Way to Think 八卦爆料 Expectations and to Improve Economic Prediction.
Apr 2015
The largely unexpected arrival of the global economic crisis and the largely unpredicted slowness of the recovery from the Great Recession should be precipitating an intellectual crisis across economics and policy making. We require additional theories and additional methods to detect how an economy is evolving and to provide the basis for policy intervention (Haldane, 2014).
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Conference paper
Two Paths to War: The Origins of the First World War versus the Dynamics of Contemporary Sino-American Confrontations
Apr 2015
During the past year, there have been numerous and somber reflections, rather like those during a traditional period of mourning, about the great and tragic events that occurred just 100 years ago 鈥 the beginning of the First World War. And in the course of these melancholy reflections about the past, there naturally have arisen anxious concerns about the future.
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Conference paper
How the Planned Perversion of Democracy generated accelerating inequalities
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Social Interaction Models and Keynes' Macroeconomics
Apr 2015
The central concepts of Keynes’ macroeconomic theories concerning the behavior of labor markets, aggregate demand, and asset pricing can be formulated as special cases of a general social interaction model.
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Conference paper
Perverse and virtuous feedbacks between inequality and innovation: Which role for public institutions and public investment?
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Top incomes and the glass ceiling
Apr 2015
This paper studies the glass ceiling by analyzing the presence of women at the top of the income distribution using tax record data reported for a sample of countries with individual taxation.
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Conference paper
Board Gender Diversity, Audit Fees and Auditor Choice
Apr 2015
Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice.
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Conference paper
Pseudo-wealth Fluctuations and Aggregate Demand Effects
Apr 2015
This paper presents a theory of pseudo-wealth in a model that displays aggregate demand externalities.
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Conference paper
The New York Times and American Tax Policy: Representing Citizens or Echoing Elites?
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Labour in Europe鈥檚 crisis.
Apr 2015
A structural transformation is investing labour in Europe, accelerated by the crisis started in 2008. Job destruction is dominating employment trends in most EU countries and deep changes are taking place in labour relations, labour market institutions and wage regimes.
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Conference paper
Leveraging the network: a stress-test framework based on DebtRank
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
Severing the Innovation-Inequality Link: Distribution Sensitive Science, Technology and Innovation Policies in Developed Nations
Apr 2015
Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies have aggravated inequality. Inequality is an increasingly contentious political issue in both wealthy and emerging economies.
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Conference paper
Anarchic East Asia on an American Tether鈥攁nd Cushion
Apr 2015
“Oh, the Chinese hate the Japanese and the Japanese hate the Chinese鈥攖o hate all but the right folks is an old established rule. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and the North Koreans hate them all. Oh, the People hate the Communists and the Communists hate the People. The Nationalists hate the Communists and the Communists hate themselves. The Confucians hate the Buddhists and the Muslims hate them all. All of my folks hate all of your folks. But during National Brotherhood Week, be nice to people who are inferior to you. It’s only for a week, so have no fear鈥攂e grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”
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Conference paper
Income Distribution, Rentiers and their Role in a Capitalist Economy: A Keynes-Pasinetti Perspective
Apr 2015
This paper finds its origins in two important developments within mainstream economics since the financial crisis, both of which analyze the economy from the viewpoint of what Schumpeter (1954) referred to as the domain of “real” analysis of a modern market economy in contrast to “monetary” analysis.
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Conference paper
Caring Economics
Apr 2015
Caring Economics is about a new way of thinking about human prosperity. In mainstream economics, prosperity is a matter of consumption, income and wealth. By contrast, Caring Economics conceives of prosperity in terms of deeper sources of durable human wellbeing.
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Conference paper
FAQs about 鈥淕WAS of 126,559 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment鈥
Apr 2015
The SSGAC is a research infrastructure designed to stimulate dialogue and cooperation between medical researchers and social scientists. The SSGAC facilitates collaborative research that seeks to identify associations between specific genetic markers (segments of DNA) and behavioral traits, such as preferences, personality and social-science outcomes.
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Conference paper
The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics
Apr 2015
Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics” based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.”
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Conference paper
Central banks and distribution
Apr 2015
Income and wealth inequality have been rising in the past three decades. Surprisingly, inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy. However, due to the crisis, this question has been gaining more attention.
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Conference paper
Distributional Considerations in Climate Change Mitigation: Policy Design as if the Present Generation Matters
Apr 2015
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Conference paper
The Value of Political Connections in Fascist Italy 鈥 Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks
Apr 2015
Recent years have witnessed the flourishing of a body of economic literature concerned with the search for empirical evidence of a positive relation between political connections, economic rent and the value of firms. The present paper contributes to the strand of this literature that deals with the quantitative measurement of the value of the political connections of firms.
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Conference paper
Financial Regulation That Might Have a Chance of Working
Apr 2015
Regulation of financial services has been an unmitigated policy disaster.
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Conference paper
The international monetary and financial system: its Achilles heel and what to do about it
Apr 2015
This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead to serious financial crises and macroeconomic dislocations.
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Conference paper
Global Crises, Equalizing and Dis-equalizing Capitalist Regimes: The Case of 20th Century Asian Political Economy
Apr 2015
The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.
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Conference paper
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession
Apr 2015
The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.
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Conference paper
Too much saving... or too few financing channels?
Apr 2015
The global financial crisis led to widespread dislocation. Understanding the forces that led to such a crisis is no easy matter.
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Conference paper
A strategy change for Europe is needed
Apr 2015
Ten hypotheses presented in the session “Beyond Deficits, Austerity and Deflation” at INET Conference 201
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Conference paper
Unpacking and Reorienting Executive Subcultures of Modern Finance
Apr 2015
Recent weeks have surfaced an intense exchange of top-level finger pointing, both between Congress and the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, between Fed officials and executives in the private sector and within the Fed between the Board of Governors and the New York Reserve Bank.
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Conference paper
Inequality: A Neuroscience Perspective
Apr 2015
It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.
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Conference paper
Promoting bank stability through compensation reform: lessons from Iceland
Apr 2015
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Conference paper
Inequality, the crisis, and stagnation
Apr 2015
The inequality of income and wealth is one of the defining issues of our time, in terms of both its social and macroeconomic implications. In this article, I focus on the macroeconomic implications of inequality. In particular, it is possible to identify four themes on which there seems to be growing consensus among many economists especially in the various heterodox traditions, but also increasingly in the mainstream of the economics profession:
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Working Paper Series
Have Large Scale Asset Purchases Increased Bank Profits?
Apr 2015
This paper empirically examines the effects of the Federal Reserve’s Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP) on bank profits.
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Working paper
Large Firm Dynamics and the Business Cycle
Apr 2015
Do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle? We answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm-level disturbances alone. We show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in it a theory of the business cycle, without appealing to aggregate shocks.
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Working Paper Series
Change and Rationality in Macroeconomics and Finance Theory: A New Rational Expectations Hypothesis
Mar 2015
We call attention to the class of models that serve as the foundation for the rational expectations hypothesis (REH). Models in this class rule out completely any structural change that cannot be fully anticipated with a probabilistic or other quantitative rule. REH models are abstractions of rational decision-making, but only in a hypothetical world in which participants can fully anticipate when and how they might revise their understanding of the process driving outcomes.
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Conference paper
What is Real Wealth?
Mar 2015
A Ruskinian framework for economic justice.
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Working paper
An investigation into Multivariate Variance Ratio Statistics and their application to Stock Market Predictability
Mar 2015
We propose several multivariate variance ratio statistics. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the statistics and scalar functions thereof under the null hypothesis that returns are unpredictable after a constant mean adjustment (i.e., under the weak form Efficient Market Hypothesis). We do not impose the no leverage assumption of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) but our asymptotic standard errors are relatively simple and in particular do not require the selection of a bandwidth parameter. We extend the framework to allow for a time varying risk premium through common systematic factors.
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Working Paper Series
Household Income, Demand, and Saving: Deriving Macro Data with Micro Data Concepts
Mar 2015
We develop adjustments to align the NIPA measures of key household flows with cash flow concepts that better reflect household budgets and demand.
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Conference paper
Income Inequality and Growth: Problems with the Orthodox Approach
Mar 2015
This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.
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Working paper
Networks in the Laboratory
Feb 2015
This chapter surveys experimental research on networks in economics.
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Conference paper
Precarious Condition: A Challenge For New Forms Of Struggle
Feb 2015
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:
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Conference paper
Should heterodox economics be taught in economics departments, or is there any room for backwater economics?
Feb 2015
It is highly fitting to have a panel devoted to ‘teaching economics’ in Paris. No less than 15 years ago, in 2000, in downtown Paris, a group of students from the 脡cole Normale Sup茅rieure, one of France’s 茅lite schools, wrote a petition asking economics teaching to be devoted to the study of real-world problems, with an instrumental use of mathematics rather than to the description of imaginary worlds based on meaningless formalizations.
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Conference paper
Rising Inequality, Demand, and Growth in the US Economy
Feb 2015
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Working paper
Social Structure, Markets and Inequality
Feb 2015
The interaction between social structure and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. In some instances, markets can build on and enhance social networks’ economic role; in other contexts, markets appear to be in direct competition with social networks. The impact of markets on inequality and welfare is also varying: while markets can sometimes offer valuable outside options to marginalised individuals, in other situations only well connected and better off individuals can benefit from them.
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Working paper
The Labor Market Consequences of Electricity Adoption: Concrete Evidence from the Great Depression
Feb 2015
When the adoption of a new labor鈥恠aving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium鈥恡erm by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.
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Working paper
Contagion Risk and Network Design
Feb 2015
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.
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Working paper
Networks in Economics: A Perspective on the Literature
Feb 2015
It is instructive to view the study of networks in economics as a shift in paradigm, in the sense of Kuhn (1962). This perspective helps us locate the innovation that networks bring to economics, appreciate different strands of the research, assess the current state of the subject and identify the challenges.
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Working Paper Series
New Evidence for the Present-Value Model of Stock Prices: Why the REH Version Failed Empirically
Feb 2015
Shiller (1981) and others have shown that the quantitative predictions of the REH present-value model are inconsistent with time-series data on stock prices and dividends. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the model without explicitly representing how a rational market participant forecasts dividends and interest rates.
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Working Paper Series
Labor in the Twenty-First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing Middle-Class
Jan 2015
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.
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Working Paper Series
Beyond Market Failures The Market Creating and Shaping Roles of State Investment Banks
Jan 2015
Recent work has highlighted the need for innovation investments to be understood through a mission oriented approach rather than a market failure one (Foray et al. 2012). However, this work has only focused on state agencies, such as DARPA, overlooking the role of public financial institutions such as state investment banks.
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Working paper
Efficiency and Equilibrium in Network Games: An Experiment
Dec 2014
The tension between efficiency and equilibrium is a central feature of economic systems. In many contexts, social networks mediate this trade-off: an individual’s network position determines equilibrium play, and social relations allow coordination on an efficient norm.
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Working paper
The New Economics of Religion
Dec 2014
The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes 鈥 it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world.
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Working Paper Series
Intra-Financial Lending, Credit, and Capital Formation
Dec 2014
This paper examines the effects of intra-financial lending 鈥 claims between financial institutions 鈥 on aggregate investment and credit to the non-financial sector in the United States.
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Working Paper Series
Skill Development and Sustainable Prosperity: Cumulative and Collective Careers versus Skill-Biased Technical Change
Dec 2014
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.
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Working Paper Series
Long-term trends in intra-financial sector lending in the U.S. 1950 - 2012
Nov 2014
This paper examines the evolution of intra-financial sector lending in the United States, 1950- 2012, presenting estimates constructed from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Accounts.
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Working Paper Series
Inequality, the Great Recession, and Slow Recovery
Oct 2014
Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980.
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Working paper
Community Networks and the Process of Development
Sep 2014
Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.
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Working paper
Please Don't Throw Me In The Briar Patch
Sep 2014
The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.
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Grantee paper
The Emergence of a Finance Culture in American Households, 1989-2007
Aug 2014
As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.
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Grantee paper
Financial Crises, Political Constraints, and Policy Responses
Aug 2014
We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.
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Grantee paper
Visualising Stock-Flow-Consistent Models as Directed Acyclic Graphs
Aug 2014
We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.
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Grantee paper
U.S. Public Pension Funds and Alternative Investments
Aug 2014
In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.
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Working Paper Series
The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure
Aug 2014
Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?
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Grantee paper
The Rich Stay Richer: The Effects of the Financial Crisis on Household Well-being, 2007-2009
Jul 2014
The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.
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Grantee paper
Network Efficiency and the Banking System
Jun 2014
Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.
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Grantee paper
Classical Competition and Freedom of Contract in American Laissez Faire Constitutionalism
Jun 2014
It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.
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Working Paper Series
Who Invests in the High-Tech Knowledge Base?
May 2014
A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper.
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Commentary
The Triumph of the Rentier?
May 2014
Thomas Piketty vs. Luigi Pasinetti and John Maynard Keynes
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Working Paper Series
Wage Increases, Transfers, and the Socially Determined Income Distribution in the USA
Apr 2014
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.
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Working Paper Series
Three Measures of Environmental Inequality
Apr 2014
Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.
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Conference paper
Methodological Problems in Macroeconomics: Curriculum and Computers
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
Can Structural Reform Boost Economic Growth?
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
New Economic Teaching -Bridging Four Gaps
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
Narrative in Teaching Economics
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
The Chinese Economic Model Revisited: Any Implications for the New Economic Thinking?
Apr 2014
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.”
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Conference paper
The Arab Spring is Genuine Revolution, But a Bumpy and Arduous Road Ahead
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
Leveling the Playing Field From College To Career
Apr 2014
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?
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Conference paper
Social Power and Development in the Middle East: a transnational perspective
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
Vague Hopes, Active Aspirations and Equality
Apr 2014
The term human capital describes a set of skills, strengths and know-how that are valuable鈥攂oth 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).
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Conference paper
The Arab revolutions: any new paths from here?
Apr 2014
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.
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Conference paper
Pressures on Pensions
Apr 2014
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?”