This issue of the Summary features two Strategic Analyses, which are focused on the United States and Greece. In the report for the United States the likely impact of President Biden’s infrastructure and families plans is examined to highlight persistent structural weaknesses that continue to threaten the US economy’s stability; the report on the Greek economy examines the Greek experience to analyze its state of acute macrofinancial instability and evaluate different policy scenarios for the near term. A public policy brief urges the Biden administration to reconsider its commitment to the “pay-for” approach to budgeting for its social and physical infrastructure packages, while a policy note explains that corporate taxes are poorly suited to either containing inflationary pressures or reducing inequality. Continuing the Institute’s work on tracing the COVID-19 crisis’s impact on inequality, a second policy note assesses the importance of the “emergency benefit” (Auxílio Emergencial) in containing increases in poverty and extreme poverty in Brazil, and analyzes changes in poverty gaps based on race and gender. Working papers in this issue contribute to the literature on whether utilization is endogenous to demand in the long run by examining the potential determinants of capacity utilization over the period 1989–2019; examine the Keynesian nature of the relationship between the short- and long-term interest rate in new models that incorporate the Keynesian approach while allowing other macroeconomic factors, such as the central bank’s policy rate, inflation targets, and inflation expectations to have a role; compare the trajectory of the Souk al-Manakh, an over-the-counter market in Kuwait, to US markets today, where both featured historically low official interest rates and elevated moral hazard; discuss the important turning points in the evolution of Keynes’s business cycle theory; and assesses the fly-paper effects of ecological fiscal transfers in India.
 
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
The State of the US and World Economies
DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, The Pandemic, the Stimulus, and the Future Prospects for the US Economy
 
DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, CHRISTOS PIERROS, NIKOLAOS RODOUSAKIS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Restarting the Greek Economy?
 
YEVA NERSISYAN and L. RANDALL WRAY, Can Biden Build Back Better?
 
LUIZA NASSIF PIRES, LUÍSA CARDOSO, and ANA LUÍZA MATOS DE OLIVEIRA,
Gender and Race in the Spotlight during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Impact of the Emergency Benefit on Poverty and Extreme Poverty in Brazil
 
MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, The Endogeneity-to-Demand of the National Emergency Utilization Rate
 
Monetary Policy and Financial Structure
TANWEER AKRAM, Multifactor Keynesian Models of the Long-Term Interest Rate
 
TANWEER AKRAM, A Keynesian Approach to Modeling the Long-Term Interest Rate
 
FRANK VENEROSO and MARK PASQUALI, The Souk Al-Manakh: The Anatomy of a Pure Price-Chasing Bubble
 
PABLO GABRIEL BORTZ, Keynes’s Theories of the Business Cycle: Evolution and Contemporary Relevance
 
Economic Policy for the 21st Century
EDWARD LANE and L. RANDALL WRAY, Why President Biden Should Eliminate Corporate Taxes to Build Back Better
 
AMANDEEP KAUR, RANJAN KUMAR MOHANTY, LEKHA CHAKRABORTY, and DIVY RANGAN, Ecological Fiscal Transfers and State-level Budgetary Spending in India: Analyzing the Flypaper Effects
 
 
INSTITUTE NEWS
Minsky Conference Video and Audio Available Online
Save the Date: Minsky Summer Seminar
Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray Wins Veblen–Commons Award
 

Download Volume 30, No. 3 PDF (6.46 MB)

Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been frequently mentioned in recent media—first as “crazy talk” that if followed would bankrupt the nation and then, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, as a way to finance an emergency response. In recent months, however, Washington seems to have returned to the old view that government spending must be “paid for” with new taxes. This raises the question: Has MMT really made headway with policymakers? This e-pamphlet examines the extraordinary interview given recently by Representative John Yarmuth’s (D, KY-03), Chair of the House Budget Committee, in which he explicitly adopts an MMT approach to budgeting. Chairman Yarmuth also lays out a path for realizing the major elements of President Biden’s proposals. Finally, Wray summarizes a recent presentation he gave to the Congressional Budget Office’s Macroeconomic Analysis section that urged reconsideration of the way that fiscal policy impacts are assessed.

Download e-pamphlet, August 2021 PDF (3.84 MB)

A trio of publications in this Summary explores how the plumbing of an existing cross-border payment system associated with a private company provides the operational blueprints for a potential revival of John Maynard Keynes’s international clearing union proposal, and how the willingness of central banks to consider electronic currency provides an opening to reconsider this reform. Working papers in this issue argue that once we understand the purposes and incidence of corporate taxation, it is revealed to be a particularly inefficient tax; explain that while Japan, which is occasionally held up as a poster child for Modern Money Theory (MMT), helps demonstrates some of the errors of mainstream thinking concerning sovereign budgeting, policy-wise the country has not been in line with MMT prescriptions; investigate the impact of pandemic-associated daycare closures on the time parents of young children dedicate to caregiving in Turkey; apply Hyman Minsky’s work on public employment programs to demonstrate how jobs that generate socially useful output can help us face today’s challenges and create a greener tomorrow; analyze factors that may explain the gendered differences in household production burdens to identify where policy can help achieve a more egalitarian distribution and reduce women’s time poverty; review three strands of literature on the Palestinian labor market over the past three decades, illustrating how the ongoing conflict in the region impacts decisions around education and employment; build stock-flow consistent (SFC) models for Latin American economies to demonstrate the balance sheet effects of currency depreciation and test the impact of alternative policy scenarios; reflect on Keynes’s writings on the state theory of money, financial markets, and uncertainty; and consider the empirics of long-term bond yields in Mexico.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies
LORENZO NALIN and GIULIANO TOSHIRO YAJIMA, Balance Sheet Effects of a Currency Devaluation: A Stock-Flow Consistent Framework for Mexico
 
SEBASTIAN VALDECANTOS, Argentina’s (Macroeconomic?) Trap: Some Insights from an Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Model
 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure
JAN KREGEL, Keynes’s Clearing Union Is Alive and Well and Living in Your Mobile Phone
 
JAN KREGEL, Another Bretton Woods Reform Moment: Let Us Look Seriously at the Clearing Union
 
L. RANDALL WRAY and YEVA NERSISYAN, Has Japan Been Following Modern Money Theory Without Recognizing It? No! And Yes.
 
TANWEER AKRAM and SYED AL-HELAL UDDIN, The Empirics of Long-Term Mexican Government Bond Yields
 
JAN KREGEL, The Economic Problem: From Barter to Commodity Money to Electronic Money
 
TANWEER AKRAM, A Note Concerning Government Bond Yields
 
Program: Distribution of Wealth and Income
FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, ABENA D. ODURO, and LUIZA NASSIF PIRES, Intrahousehold Allocation of Household Production: A Comparative Analysis for Sub-Saharan African Countries
 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets
DANIEL HAIM, What Jobs Should a Public Job Guarantee Provide? Lessons from Hyman P. Minsky
 
SAMEH HALLAQ, The Palestinian Labor Market over the Last Three Decades
 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy
EMEL MEMIŞ and EBRU KONGAR, Potential Impact of Daycare Closures on Parental Child Caregiving in Turkey
 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century
EDWARD LANE and L. RANDALL WRAY, Is It Time to Eliminate Federal Corporate Income Taxes?
 
INSTITUTE NEWS
UPCOMING EVENTS
29th Annual Hyman. P. Minsky Conference

Download Volume 30, No. 2 PDF (1.55 MB)

This issue features two strategic analyses: the first finds that while the disbursement of EU funds would help hasten Greece’s recovery, getting closer to the pre-pandemic growth trend requires further fiscal action; the second, for Italy, cautions that the government’s seeming commitment to use European funds to reduce public debt through expenditure cuts aims at the wrong target and projects the impact of an alternative scenario that increases Italy’s public sector employment. Public policy briefs consider the moral hazard of leaving federal fiscal aid to state and local governments dependent on shifting political winds and address the interactions between the COVID-19 crisis and overlapping inequalities in Brazil. Policy notes propose an alternative to fiscal stimulus for COVID-19 relief—one centered on direct “social provisioning” to support a strict lockdown—and use the work of Michał Kalecki to develop a framework for analyzing the impact of government debt management to enable more effective fiscal policy.
 
Working papers in this issue discuss evidence of inequality in the disproportionate burden the government-mandated shutdowns have placed on Black women in the United States; outline a Minskyan approach to the post-pandemic recovery to meet the challenges that still lay ahead; apply network dynamics observed in ecosystems to investigate the role networks play in stabilizing and destabilizing economic systems; describe the evolution of John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of instability, illustrating that the General Theory is indeed a general theory; focus on the implications of Keynes’s “beauty contest” metaphor in the modern economy; trace the “Kansas City” approach to Modern Money Theory (MMT) from its origins in the mid-1990s through today; apply an MMT approach to an open economy to ascertain its effect in non-dollar economies; and apply a Keynesian perspective to an exploration of bond yields in the UK and Japan. Several papers employ methodologies developed at the Levy Institute. The first two evaluate the quality of match used to create synthetic datasets for studying time poverty effects: one for data used in the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) for Ethiopia and South Africa and the second evaluates the match for the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for Italy; a third applies a version of the Levy Institute’s macrosimulation method developed for South Africa, Turkey, and the United States to create a macro-micro model for assessing the gendered employment impacts of government expenditure. Two final working papers addressing fiscal issues round out this issue: the first evaluates budget credibility at the subnational level in India and the other advocates for fiscal policies grounded in the principles of functional finance to foster equality in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies
Strategic Analysis
DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU CHRISTOS PIERROS NIKOLAOS RODOUSAKIS and GENNARO ZEZZA, What’s Ahead for the Greek Economy?
 
Strategic Analysis
DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, FRANCESCO ZEZZA, and GENNARO ZEZZA, When Will Italy Recover?
 
JAN KREGEL, Alternative Macro Policy Response for a Pandemic Recession
 
HAROLD M. HASTINGS, TAI YOUNG-TAFT, and CHIH-JUI TSEN, Ecology, Economics, and Network Dynamics
 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure
JÖRG BIBOW, The General Theory as “Depression Economics”?: Financial Instability and Crises in Keynes’s Monetary Thought
 
EMILIO CARNEVALI and MATTEO DELEIDI, The Trade-off between Inflation and Unemployment in an MMT World: An Open Economy Perspective
 
LORENZO ESPOSITO and GIUSEPPE MASTROMATTEO, In the Long Run We Are All Herd: On the Nature and Outcomes of the Beauty Contest
 
TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, The Empirics of UK Gilts’ Yields
 
LEONARDO BURLAMAQUI and ERNANI T. TORRES FILHO, The COVID-19 Crisis: A Minskyan Approach to Mapping and Managing the (Western?) Financial Turmoil
 
TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, Some Empirical Models of Japanese Government Bond Yields Using Daily Data
 
L. RANDALL WRAY, The "Kansas City" Approach to Modern Money Theory
 
Program: The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty
FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Quality of Match for Statistical Matches Used in the Development of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) for Ethiopia and South Africa
 
Program: Distribution of Wealth and Income
LUIZA NASSIF PIRES, LAURA CARVALHO, and EDUARDO RAWET, Multidimensional Inequality and COVID-19 in Brazil
 
ALEX WILLIAMS, Moral Hazard in a Modern Federation
 
ERICA ALOÈ, Quality of Statistical Match Used in the Estimation of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for Italy 2008 and 2014 and Preliminary Results
 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets
MICHELLE HOLDER, JANELLE JONES, and THOMAS MASTERSON, The Early Impact of COVID-19 on Job Losses among Black Women in the United States
 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy
JEROME DE HENAU and SUSAN HIMMELWEIT, Developing a Macro-Micro Model for Analyzing Gender Impacts of Public Policy
 
Program: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Structure
SAMEH HALLAQ, First Palestinian Intifada and Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital
 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century
LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, PINAKI CHAKRABORTY, and RUZEL SHRESTHA, Budget Credibility of Subnational Governments: Analyzing the Fiscal Forecasting Errors of 28 States in India
 
BENDREFF DESILUS, Fiscal Policy in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
 
Program: Federal Budget Policy
JAN TOPOROWSKI, Debt Management and the Fiscal Balance
 
INSTITUTE NEWS
Upcoming Events
Call for Applications: Virtual Seminar on Gender-Sensitive Macroeconomic Modeling for Policy Analysis
New Research Associates
Appreciation for Donors
 

Download Volume 30, No. 1 PDF (1.71 MB)

This issue of the Summary features a Strategic Analysis focused on Greece’s economy in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two public policy briefs also highlight pandemic-related issues, with the first focusing on the impact in Greece in light of deep cuts in healthcare expenditures and the second dealing with the implications with respect to inequality in the United States. The other brief featured in this issue addresses the threats and opportunities represented by cryptocurrencies and related technological innovations. Policy notes also focus on the pandemic’s impact, the first from a Minskyan perspective, another through the lens of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and a third supporting the job guarantee as a policy for restarting the economy in the post-pandemic era. A final policy note explores the reform of fiscal federalism in the United States, proposing intergovernmental automatic stabilizers for avoiding procyclical cuts at the state and local levels.
 
Working papers in this issue discuss a stock-flow consistent quarterly model for Italy, detailing the over two-hundred equations that address the missing links between the real and financial sectors; the short-term interest rate’s impact on the long-term rate, with one paper focusing on a general model and another on an empirical model for Brazil; the impact of various institutional factors on educational outcomes in the West Bank; the role of James Dusenberry’s relative income hypothesis and the “keeping-up-with-the-Jonses-effect” in the rise in debt-driven consumption in Turkey; income distribution’s effect on aggregate demand and growth by class and gender, and the role power dynamics between labor and capital play in their determination; the noneconomic sphere’s role in creating the necessary conditions for a properly functioning economic sphere from a feminist-Marxist standpoint; and some theoretical and empirical issues on the accumulation and utilization of capital, highlighting utilization’s role in bridging the gap between mainstream and alternative theories of growth and distribution.

Download Volume 29, No. 3 PDF (1.20 MB)

This issue of the Summary features two Strategic Analyses. The first assesses the trends impacting the US economy’s sectoral balances in the context of overvalued asset markets and overleveraged corporate balance sheets; the second, for Greece, identifies the necessary conditions for achieving the government’s campaign promise of 4 percent GDP growth in 2020 and 2021, forecasting that even with an improvement in global conditions, Greece would still need private expenditure to surge to make more meaningful progress toward restoring household economic well-being to its precrisis levels. A policy brief presents an alternative approach to budgeting for the Green New Deal, much like the one outlined in John Maynard Keynes’s 1940 pamphlet, How to Pay for the War, that contrasts traditional questions about the program’s financial affordability with an approach that asks whether there are sufficient real resources that can be marshalled for its implementation.
 
Working papers included in this issue addresses how Germany’s social and cultural values have affected European integration, while leaving them better able to weather the asymmetric effects of the eurocrisis they played a part in creating; examine four decades of demand shocks and their effect on output and productivity growth to ascertain if the recovery fits Alvin Hansen’s definition of “secular stagnation”; respond to a critique of a 2016 Cambridge Journal of Economics article on utilization in Kaleckian models of growth and distribution; explore two periods of financial instability associated with financial globalization in the modern era and how institutions meant to control financial fragility instead contributed to its development; investigate the Keynesian nature of the relationship between short- and long-term interest rates using data on daily yields of Canadian government securities; present an empirical stock-flow model for Denmark using data for 1995–2016 to demonstrate the effects of real economic behavior on balance sheets and vice versa; extend the Levy Institute’s model for Greece (LIMG) to assess the effectiveness of Greece’s internal devaluation policy; empirically model the wage differential between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip based on refugee status; consider previous investigations of the impact of technical progress on employment growth; and question the origin of China’s low fertility rate in an attempt to disentangle the impacts of population control policies from the socioeconomic changes that accompany economic development.
 
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
 
Program: The State of the US and World Economies
Strategic Analysis

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Prospects and Challenges for the US Economy: 2020 and Beyond
• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Greece: In Search of Investors
• YEVA NERSISYAN and L. RANDALL WRAY, Can We Afford the Green New Deal?
• GEORGE ZESTOS and RACHEL N. COOKE, Challenges for the EU as Germany Approaches Recession
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, Demand, Distribution, Productivity, Structural Change, and (Secular?) Stagnation
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, On the “Utilization Controversy”: A Rejoinder and Some Comments

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• MARIO TONVERONACHI, Ages of Financial Instability
• TANWEER AKRAM and ANUPAM DAS, The Empirics of Canadian Government Securities Yields
• MIKAEL RANDRUP BYRIALSEN and HAMID RAZA, An Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Macroeconomic Model for Denmark

 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• CHRISTOS PIERROS, A Labor Market–Augmented Empirical Stock-Flow Consistent Model Applied to the Greek Economy
• JESUS FELIPE, DONNA FAYE BAJARO, GEMMA ESTRADA, and JOHN MCCOMBIE, The Relationship between Technical Progress and Employment: A Comment on Autor and Salomons
• SAMEH HALLAQ, Wage Differential between Palestinian Non-refugees and Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank and Gaza

 
Program: Explorations in Theory and Empirical Analysis

• LIU QIANG, FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, and HAN JIQIN, Is China’s Low Fertility Rate Caused by the Population Control Policy?

Download Volume 29, No. 2 PDF (1.34 MB)

This issue of the Summary features L. Randall Wray’s written testimony submitted for a November 20, 2019 hearing before the US House of Representatives’ Budget Committee, where he urged a reexamination of the economic impact of public debt and deficits; prepared by Wray and Yeva Nersisyan, the testimony explains why federal deficits have become the norm in the context of the US economy, argues that they are not only necessary but useful, and advocates strengthening automatic fiscal stabilizers. A working paper, also by Wray, examines state and local government debt through the lens of Modern Money Theory and proposes a new understanding of how the fiscal space available at the federal level can be used to revitalize local economies.

In a related vein, this issue includes two working papers that are part of a series of empirical investigations uncovering evidence for the Keynesian view that the chief determinants of government bond yields are the decisions of monetary policymakers. Tanweer Akram and Huiqing Li inquire into the impact of Japan’s monetary policy on its government bond yields; Akram and Anupam Das extend their earlier work on the short-term interest rate’s influence over the long-term interest rate, this time employing daily data on changes in US Treasury security yields.

In a Research Project Report under the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) program, Senior Scholar Ajit Zacharias, Research Scholars Thomas Masterson, Fernando Rios-Avila, Michalis Nikiforos, and Kijong Kim, and Research Associate Tamar Khitarishvili present the findings of their study on consumption and time poverty in Ghana and Tanzania, undertaken with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

A working paper under the Gender Equality and the Economy program by Srinivas Raghavendra, Research Scholar Kijong Kim, Sinead Ashe, Mrinal Chadha, Felix Asante, Petri T. Piiroinen, and Nata Duvvury puts forth the results of their study on the macroeconomic impacts of violence against women and girls in Ghana.

Also in this issue, Research Associate Jörg Bibow reviews the evolution of the international monetary and financial architecture against the background of John Maynard Keynes’s original Bretton Woods plan; Lorenzo Esposito and Giuseppe Mastromatteo argue that the faulty assumptions of a particular strand of mainstream theory played a key role in rendering economic systems more fragile; Research Associate Lekha Chakraborty reflects on the future of fiscal federalism in India; and Zengping He and Genliang Jia examine local government debt growth in China—tying it to increased concerns of a Chinese Minsky moment—and argue that the central government should play a more active role in relieving these local burdens.
 
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• TANWEER AKRAM and ANUPAM DAS, An Analysis of the Daily Changes in US Treasury Security Yields

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• L. RANDALL WRAY, Congressional Testimony
• TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, The Impact of the Bank of Japan’s Monetary Policy on Japanese Government Bonds’ Low Nominal Yields
• LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, Indian Fiscal Federalism at the Crossroads: Some Reflections
• L. RANDALL WRAY, Fiscal Reform to Benefit State and Local Governments: The Modern Money Theory Approach
• JÖRG BIBOW, Evolving International Monetary and Financial Architecture and the Development Challenge: A Liquidity Preference Theoretical Perspective
• LORENZO ESPOSITO and GIUSEPPE MASTROMATTEO, Defaultnomics: Making Sense of the Barro-Ricardo Equivalence in a Financialized World
• ZENGPING HE and GENLIANG JIA, Rethinking China’s Local Government Debt in the Frame of Modern Money Theory

 
Program: The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty

• AJIT ZACHARIAS, THOMAS MASTERSON, FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, KIJONG KIM, and TAMAR KHITARISHVILI, Macroeconomic and Microeconomic Impacts of Improving Physical and Social Infrastructure: A Macro-Micro Policy Model for Ghana and Tanzania

 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• SRINIVAS RAGHAVENDRA, KIJONG KIM, SINEAD ASHE, MRINAL CHADHA, FELIX ASANTE, PETRI T. PIIROINEN, and NATA DUVVURY, The Macroeconomic Loss Due to Violence against Women and Girls: The Case of Ghana

 
INSTITUTE NEWS

• 29th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar
• Intensive Course in Gender-Sensitive Macroeconomic Modeling for Policy Analysis
• New Research Fellow

Download Volume 29, No. 1 PDF (1.08 MB)

This issue of the Summary features a Strategic Analysis identifying the four main structural problems for the US economy and how the feedback effects between them explain the 2007–9 crisis and account for the weak recovery that followed, as well as offering an estimate of the macroeconomic benefits of recent proposals designed to reduce inequality through changes in tax policy. Two policy notes explore the reform of the international financial system undertaken to address global imbalances, and present a proposal to increase the supply of safe European assets to remedy imbalances inherent in the eurozone setup.

Working papers included in this issue estimate the costs of the Green New Deal in terms of resource requirements; examine the spread between 10-year Treasury notes and the federal funds rate to gain a better understanding of when to reduce interest rates to prevent recessions; extend the concept of “shifting involvements” to the relationship between capital and labor to ascertain its effects on distribution and growth; consider the basic principles behind our understanding of money and how to apply them to money’s democratization; focus on fiscal policy’s role in stabilization following a shock; trace the evolution of China’s monetary policy framework to assess the effects of recent reforms; outline experiments with economic planning in the United States and France in the early 20th century to determine their applicability in modern capitalist societies; evaluate the effects of the education-occupation mismatch on both employees and employers; assess obesity’s impact on wages; and investigate changes in inequality in the United States using recentered influence functions.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Can Redistribution Help Build a More Stable Economy?
• JAN KREGEL, Global Imbalances and the Trade War
• PAOLO SAVONA, A Proposal to Create a European Safe Asset
• L. RANDALL WRAY and YEVA NERSISYAN, How to Pay for the Green New Deal
• HAROLD HASTINGS, TAI YOUNG-TAFT, and THOMAS WANG, When to Ease Off the Brakes (and Hopefully Prevent Recessions)
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, Induced Shifting Involvements and Cycles of Growth and Distribution

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, Democratizing Money
• PLAMEN NIKOLOV and PAOLO PASIMENI, Fiscal Stabilization in the United States: Lessons for Monetary Unions
• ZENGPING HE and GENLIANG JIA, An Institutional Analysis of China’s Reform of their Monetary Policy Framework
• FERNANDO CARDIM DE CARVALHO, Economic Planning under Capitalism: The New Deal and Postwar France Experiments

Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, It Pays to Study for the Right Job: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of Education-Occupation Job Mismatch

Program: Distribution of Wealth and Income

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, A Semi-Parametric Approach to the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition with Continuous Group Variable and Self-Selection
• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Recentered Influence Functions in Stata: Methods for Analyzing the Determinants of Poverty and Inequality

INSTITUTE NEWS

• Workshop: Gender and Macroeconomics

Download Volume 28, No. 3 PDF (1.10 MB)

This issue of the Summary features a public policy brief that considers the flaws in the eurozone’s settlement and payment system and a policy note that revisits the fall of Lehman Brothers ten years later.
 
Working papers included in this issue discuss the construction of stock-flow-consistent models that consider the specific features of the economy they are built to examine; investigate the role of social institutions in investment decisions under capitalism; compare Hyman Minsky’s and Lauchlin Curry’s positions on monetary economics; explore the evolution of central bank profits as fiscal revenue; assess the scope, successes, and shortcomings of social programs in Mexico and Argentina; and evaluate the impact of gender budgeting on gender equality and fiscal spending in Asia Pacific countries.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• GENNARO ZEZZA and FRANCESCO ZEZZA, On the Design of Empirical Stock-Flow-Consistent Models

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, Globalization, Nationalism, and Clearing Systems
• JAN KREGEL, Preventing the Last Crisis: Minsky’s Forgotten Lessons Ten Years after Lehman
• SUNANDA SEN, Investment Decisions under Uncertainty
• IVÁN D. VELASQUEZ, Two Harvard Economists on Monetary Economics: Lauchlin Currie and Hyman Minsky on Financial Systems and Crises
• JÖRG BIBOW, Unconventional Monetary Policies and Central Bank Profits: Seigniorage as Fiscal Revenue in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis

 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• MARTHA TEPEPA, Social Policy in Mexico and Argentina

 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, MARIAN INGRAMS, and YADAWENDRA SINGH, Macroeconomic Policy Effectiveness and Inequality: Efficacy of Gender Budgeting in Asia Pacific

 
INSTITUTE NEWS

• Levy Berlin
• Minsky Conference
• Minsky Summer Seminar

Download Volume 28, No. 2 PDF (1.37 MB)

This issue of the Summary features a strategic analysis for Greece, analyzing the sources of the current turnaround in growth and the prospects for increasing the pace of the recovery. A public policy brief in the Distribution of Income and Wealth program updates the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) through 2013 to provide a comprehensive assessment of household living standards in the United States, while a research project in the same program applies the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) to Ghana and Tanzania to highlight the role of time constraints in an attempt to meaningfully inform poverty reduction strategies.
 
Working papers included in this issue consider the transition processes in the countries of the former Soviet Union; reflect on Germany’s dominant role in the European Union and its implications for the stability of the eurozone as a whole; explore what the euro’s German roots mean for the future of the European Monetary Union; investigate the drivers of long-term bond yields in Australia; assess the quality of statistical matches and enumerate the data sources for the LIMEW update; and examine employment trends since the Great Recession, with a focus on the narrowing of the employment–population ratio gap between black and white workers.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Can Greece Grow Faster? 
• LIUDMILA MALYSHAVA, External Instability in Transition: Applying Minsky’s Theory of Financial Fragility to International Markets

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• IGNACIO RAMIREZ CISNEROS, German Economic Dominance within the Eurozone and Minsky’s Proposal for a Shared Burden between the Hegemon and Core Economic Powers 
• JÖRG BIBOW, Twenty Years of the German Euro Are More than Enough 
• TANWEER AKRAM and ANUPAM DAS, Australian Government Bonds’ Nominal Yields: An Empirical Analysis

 
Program: The Distribution of Income and Wealth

• AJIT ZACHARIAS, THOMAS MASTERSON, and FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Stagnating Economic Well-Being and Unrelenting Inequality: Post-2000 Trends in the United States 
• AJIT ZACHARIAS, THOMAS MASTERSON, FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, KIJONG KIM, and TAMAR KHITARISHVILI, The Measurement of Time and Consumption Poverty in Ghana and Tanzania: The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty 
• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Quality of Match for Statistical Matches Using the American Time Use Survey 2013, the Survey of Consumer Finances 2013, and the Annual Social and Economic Supplement 2014 
• AJIT ZACHARIAS, THOMAS MASTERSON, and FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, The Sources and Methods Used in the Creation of the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being for the United States, 1959–2013

 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• THOMAS MASTERSON, Black Employment Trends since the Great Recession

 
 INSTITUTE NEWS

• Levy Institute at Bard College Berlin
• Upcoming Events
• Minsky Summer Seminar
• Minsky Conference

Download Volume 28, No. 1 PDF (1.05 MB)

This issue of the Summary features a public policy brief discussing the European Commission’s proposal for regulating sovereign bond-backed securities (SBBS) and presents an alternative approach to addressing the problems that are supposed to be solved by an SBBS scheme. Three policy notes also are included. The first focuses on the nexus between wage employment, consumption poverty, and time deficits, particularly as they affect women’s economic empowerment, while the other two consider the impacts of a federally funded and locally administered Public Service Employment (PSE) program. A research project report provides details on the full scope of the PSE proposal.
 
Working papers included in this issue present a critical discussion of the Sraffian supermultiplier approach to growth and distribution; analyze the macroeconomic implications of corporate debt in Latin America; consider the costs of the failure of state-managed intervention in financial markets and the increase in moral hazard in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall; investigate the dynamics of bond yields in Japan; employ a historic perspective to evaluate how supposedly stable and efficient markets embark on disequilibrium paths; examine the impetus behind the increase in household debt relative to consumption; evaluate popular New Deal–era programs through the lens of the evolving definition of “liberal democracy”; and suggest a blueprint for implementing a job guarantee program, with an appendix addressing a list of frequently asked questions about the costs and benefits of such a program.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies
 

• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, Some Comments on the Sraffian Supermultiplier Approach to Growth and Distribution
• ESTEBAN PÉREZ CALDENTEY, NICOLE FAVREAU-NEGRONT, and LUIS MÉNDEZ LOBOS, Corporate Debt in Latin America and Its Macroeconomic Implications

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure
 

• MARIO TONVERONACHI, European Sovereign Bond-Backed Securities: An Assessment and an Alternative Proposal
• W. LEE HOSKINS and WALKER F. TODD, Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Rethinking the Role of Money and Markets in the Global Economy
• TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, The Dynamics of Japanese Government Bonds’ Nominal Yields
• FRANK VENEROSO, The Economics of Instability: An Abstract of an Excerpt

Program: The Distribution of Income and Wealth
 

• THOMAS MASTERSON and AJIT ZACHARIAS, Wage Employment and the Prospects of Women’s Economic Empowerment: Some Lessons from Ghana and Tanzania
• J. W. MASON, Income Distribution, Household Debt, and Aggregate Demand: A Critical Assessment

 
Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets
 

• L. RANDALL WRAY, FLAVIA DANTAS, SCOTT FULLWILER, PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, and STEPHANIE A. KELTON, Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment
• L. RANDALL WRAY, A Consensus Strategy for a Universal Job Guarantee Program
• L. RANDALL WRAY, FLAVIA DANTAS, SCOTT FULLWILER, PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, and STEPHANIE A. KELTON, Guaranteed Jobs through a Public Service Employment Program
• JOHN F. HENRY, Reflections on the New Deal: The Vested Interests, Limits to Reform, and the Meaning of Liberal Democracy
• PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation

 
INSTITUTE NEWS
 

• Fernando Cardim de Carvalho

Download Volume 27, No. 3 PDF (1.54 MB)

A conference organized by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

The proceedings include the 2017 conference program, transcripts of keynote speakers’ remarks, synopses of the panel sessions, and biographies of the participants.

Download Conference Proceedings, April 18-19, 2017 PDF (3.60 MB)

This issue of the Summary opens with a policy note regarding the predictions of an impending Chinese “Minsky moment” and the far more likely prospect of another crisis in the United States. It also presents the results of a research project investigating the macroeconomic impact of a one-time cancellation of existing US student loan debt.
 
Working papers included in this issue examine Hyman Minsky’s and Abba Lerner’s writings on the functional finance approach to fiscal policy; the forces underlying the gender pay gap in the countries of the former Soviet Union; and the impact of corporate taxes on capital and labor in a modern, open economy. The issue closes with a look at the newest book in the Levy Institute Book Series, a compilation of essays dedicated to classical political economist, Alessandro Roncaglia.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• L. RANDALL WRAY, Does the United States Face Another Minsky Moment?
• L. RANDALL WRAY, Functional Finance: A Comparison of the Evolution of the Positions of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner

 
Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• TAMAR KHITARISHVILI, Gender Pay Gaps in the Former Soviet Union: A Review of the Evidence

 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

• SCOTT FULLWILER, STEPHANIE A. KELTON, CATHERINE RUETSCHLIN, and MARSHALL STEINBAUM, The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation
• SAMIKSHA AGARWAL and LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, Corporate Tax Incidence in India

 
INSTITUTE NEWS
New Books in the Levy Institute Book Series

• Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia, edited by MARCELLA CORSI, JAN KREGEL, and CARLO D’IPPOLITI

 
Upcoming Events

• 27th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

Download Volume 27, No. 2 PDF (2.62 MB)

This issue of the Summary opens with a public policy brief that suggests looking to the postwar clearing union proposals made by John Maynard Keynes and Richard Kahn for insight into possible reforms of the current eurozone financial system. Two policy notes featured in this issue focus on current policy in the United States: the first addresses the feasibility of the Trump administration’s campaign promises to the middle class; and the second calls for the implementation of a universal single-payer health system. A third policy note argues that the relationship between time poverty and income poverty must be recognized in policy creation if the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are to be met.

Working papers included in this issue: examine the determinants of long-term interest rates for US Treasury securities; build a stock-flow consistent model to assess the relationship between quantitative easing and economic instability; use the Minskyan concept of financial fragility to assess the financial soundness of electricity distribution companies in Brazil; discuss the origins of the “science” of economics from its beginnings in the political economy of Adam Smith; survey Minsky’s contributions to the financialization literature for answers to today’s pressing economic issues; and suggest the application of strategies for containing disease epidemics to reduce the socioeconomic costs of unemployment.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• JAN KREGEL, A Two-Tier Eurozone or a Euro of Regions? A Radical Proposal Based on Keynes’s Clearing Union
• TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, An Inquiry Concerning Long-term US Interest Rates Using Monthly Data

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, The Concert of Interests in the Age of Trump
• CAMERON HAAS and TAI YOUNG-TAFT, Quantitative Easing and Asset Bubbles in a Stock-flow Consistent Framework
• ERNANI TEIXEIRA TORRES FILHO, NORBERTO MONTANI MARTINS, and CAROLINE YUKARI MIAGUTI, Minsky’s Financial Fragility: An Empirical Analysis of Electricity Distribution Companies in Brazil (2007–15)
• OSCAR VALDES VIERA, The Neoclassicals’ Conundrum: If Adam Smith is the Father of Economics, It Is a Bastard Child
• CHARLES WHALEN, Understanding Financialization: Standing on the Shoulders of Minsky

 
Program: The Distribution of Wealth and Income

• AJIT ZACHARIAS, How Time Deficits and Hidden Poverty Undermine the Sustainable Development Goals

 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

• L. RANDALL WRAY, Why the Compulsive Shift to Single Payer? Because Healthcare Is Not Insurable
• PAVLINA TCHERNEVA, Unemployment: The Silent Epidemic

 
INSTITUTE NEWS
Upcoming Events

• 27th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

 
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Recent Levy Institute Publications

Download Volume 27, No. 1 PDF (831.89 KB)

This issue of the Summary opens with a Strategic Analysis that uses the Institute’s stock-flow model to assess the effect of the Trump administration’s policy promises on the recovery from the Great Recession. A policy note investigates the trends in income inequality in the United States over the past four decades.

Working papers included in this issue examine the literature on stock-flow consistent macroeconomic models; the determinants of government bond yields for the eurozone; the potential job-creation effects of the Trump administration’s proposed infrastructure investment; the role of trust in an issuer’s promise of redemption in the valuation of monetary instruments; Germany’s rejection of Keynesianism as the root of the eurozone’s economic woes; the quality of a synthetic dataset that seeks to provide complete information on household demographics in Turkey; the gender divisions of time use in Turkey and how they change over the life cycle; macroeconomic conditions in the United States during the Great Recession and their effect on time use in households with children; and the impact of public spending on economic development in G-20 countries.
 
INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS and GENNARO ZEZZA, The Trump Effect: Is This Time Different?
• PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, Inequality Update: Who Gains When Income Grows?
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS and GENNARO ZEZZA, Stock-flow Consistent Macroeconomic Models: A Survey
• TANWEER AKRAM AND ANUPAM DAS, The Dynamics of Government Bond Yields in the Eurozone
• PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, Trump’s Bait and Switch: Job Creation in the Midst of Welfare State Sabotage

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• ÉRIC TYMOIGNE, On the Centrality of Redemption: Linking the State and Credit Theories of Money through a Financial Approach to Money
• JÖRG BIBOW, How Germany’s Anti-Keynesianism Has Brought Europe to Its Knees

 
Program: The Distribution of Income and Wealth

• ÖZLEM ALBAYRAK and THOMAS MASTERSON, Quality of Statistical Match of Household Budget Survey and SILC for Turkey

 
 Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• EBRU KONGAR and MARK PRICE, Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Time Use of Married and Cohabiting Parents during the Great Recession
• EBRU KONGAR and EMEL MEMIŞ, Gendered Patterns of Time Use over the Life Cycle: Evidence from Turkey

 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

• HORST HANUSCH, LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, and SWATI KHURANA, Fiscal Policy, Economic Growth, and Innovation: An Empirical Analysis of G20 Countries

 
INSTITUTE NEWS

• New Research Scholar
• A Note on the Summary

       
        Save the Date

• 27th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Recent Levy Institute Publications

Download Volume 26, No. 3 PDF (483.04 KB)

A conference organized by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College with support from the Ford Foundation

The 2016 Minsky Conference addressed whether what appears to be a global economic slowdown will jeopardize the implementation and efficiency of Dodd-Frank regulatory reforms, the transition of monetary policy away from zero interest rates, and the “new” normal of fiscal policy, as well as the use of fiscal policies aimed at achieving sustainable growth and full employment. The proceedings include the conference program, transcripts of keynote speakers’ remarks, synopses of the panel sessions, and biographies of the participants.

Download Conference Proceedings, April 12–13, 2016 PDF (963.01 KB)

This issue of the Summary opens with a policy brief that examines the move by Brazil’s Temer administration to impose a radical, two-decades-long public spending freeze aimed at boosting business confidence and investment, and explains why this fiscal strategy is flawed.

Working papers included in this issue investigate the long-run determinants of government bond yields in India; expansionary austerity theory; the Federal Reserve’s announced policy of “normalization”; money’s role in the modern economy; the effects of the Great Recession on the well-being of different racial groups in the United States; why abstractions are necessary for understanding complex economic and social realities; and the economic impacts of expanding the social care sector in Turkey. The issue closes with a policy brief that argues that the current unemployment rate provides an inaccurate picture of the health of the labor market, and that the common narrative attributing shrinking labor force engagement to aging demographics is overstated.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• FERNANDO J. CARDIM DE CARVALHO, Brazil Still in Troubled Waters

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• TANWEER AKRAM and ANUPAM DAS, The Long-run Determinants of Indian Government Bond Yields
• ALBERTO BOTTA, The Short- and Long-run Inconsistency of the Expansionary Austerity Theory: A Post-Keynesian/Evolutionist Critique
• JAN KREGEL, Financial Stability and Secure Currency in a Modern Context
• FLAVIA DANTAS, Normalizing the Fed Funds Rate: The Fed’s Unjustified Rationale

Program: Distribution of Income and Wealth

• THOMAS MASTERSON, AJIT ZACHARIAS, FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, and EDWARD N. WOLFF, The Great Recession and Racial Inequality: Evidence from Measures of Economic Well-Being
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, Distribution-led Growth through Methodological Lenses

Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• KIJONG KIM, İPEK İLKKARACAN, and TOLGA KAYA, Investing in Social Care Infrastructure and Employment Generation: A Distributional Analysis of the Care Economy in Turkey

Program: Employment Policy and Labor Markets

• FLAVIA DANTAS and L. RANDALL WRAY, Full Employment: Are We There Yet?

INSTITUTE NEWS

Upcoming Events

• 26th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

Recent Levy Institute Publications

Download Volume 26, No. 2 PDF (368.97 KB)

This issue of the Summary opens with a strategic analysis for Greece. Using alternative policy scenarios, the authors demonstrate that cleaning up the government’s arrears accounts and boosting public investment would improve GDP growth, but that growth and employment would best be promoted through the implementation of a direct job creation program underwritten by an innovative financing mechanism.

Also in this issue: a policy note examines US Current Population Survey data for 2001–13 to identify the impact of state-level immigration rates on the native-born unemployed; a related paper provides a more in-depth look at the data and methodology used in the study. Other papers evaluate the impact of rule-based fiscal controls on public investment at the state level in India; the impact of incorporating gender criteria into the fiscal devolution formula proposed by India’s 14th Finance Commission; alternatives for increasing the effectiveness of banking supervision, including the use of a global cap rule to break up large banks; and the effects of employment gains on household production in Ghana and Tanzania using the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

Strategic Analysis

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Greece: Getting Out of the Recession

• PINAKI CHAKRABORTY, Federalism, Fiscal Space, and Public Investment Spending: Do Fiscal Rules Impose Hard Budget Restraints?

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• GIUSEPPE MASTROMATTEO and LORENZO ESPOSITO, Minsky at Basel: A Global Cap to Build an Effective Postcrisis Banking Supervision Framework

Program: Distribution of Income and Wealth

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Quality of Match for Statistical Matches Used in the Development of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) for Ghana and Tanzania
• THOMAS MASTERSON, KIJONG KIM, and FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Simulations of Employment for Individuals in LIMTCP Consumption-poor Households in Tanzania and Ghana, 2012

Program: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Structure

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA and GUSTAVO CANAVIRE-BACARREZA, The Impact of Immigration on the Native-born Unemployed
• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA and GUSTAVO CANAVIRE-BACARREZA, Unemployed, Now What? The Effect of Immigration on Unemployed Transitions of Native-born Workers in the United States

Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

• ABHISHEK ANAND and LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, Engendering Intergovernmental Transfers: Is There a Case for Gender-sensitive Horizontal Fiscal Equalization?

INSTITUTE NEWS

Upcoming Events

• 26th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

Call for Papers

• Gender and Macroeconomics Workshop

Download Volume 26, No. 1 PDF (497.28 KB)

This issue opens with a policy note that traces the “narrow path” ahead for Brazil as the country struggles through a joint economic and political crisis that has paralyzed its policymaking apparatus and constrained its fiscal and monetary policy space. Two related papers examine the role played by Greece’s public debt in that country’s economic crisis and the failure of austerity to achieve debt stabilization; and the feasibility of introducing fiscal currencies to restore fiscal space in Greece and other countries in the eurozone periphery. The lessons we could have learned from the 1930s New Deal in dealing with the recent global recession are outlined in a public policy brief.

The issue also includes working papers on the origins of financialization; the European Central Bank’s monetary policies from the euro’s inception to the present; an analysis of the ECB’s options for achieving its price stability mandate; the drivers of long-term interest rates in the United States; Japan’s ongoing liquidity trap; the origins and nature of money as a “creature of the state”; and time and income poverty in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• FERNANDO J. CARDIM DE CARVALHO, The Narrow Path for Brazil
• APOSTOLOS FASIANOS, DIEGO GUEVARA, and CHRISTOS PIERROS, Have We Been Here Before? Phases of Financialization within the 20th Century in the United States
• MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, and GENNARO ZEZZA, The Greek Public Debt Problem
• MASSIMO AMATO, LUCA FANTACCI, DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Going Forward from B to A? Proposals for the Eurozone Crisis

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, What We Could Have Learned from the New Deal in Confronting the Recent Global Recession
• JÖRG BIBOW, From Antigrowth Bias to Quantitative Easing: The ECB’s Belated Conversion?
• WARREN MOSLER and DAMIANO B. SILIPO, Maximizing Price Stability in a Monetary Economy
• TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, The Empirics of Long-Term US Interest Rates
• TANWEER AKRAM, Japan’s Liquidity Trap
• PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, Money, Power, and Monetary Regimes

Program: The Distribution of Income and Wealth

• RANIA ANTONOPOULOS, VALERIA ESQUIVEL, THOMAS MASTERSON, AND AJIT ZACHARIAS, Measuring Poverty in the Case of Buenos Aires: Why Time Deficits Matter

INSTITUTE NEWS

• New Research Associate

Save the Date

• 26th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Recent Levy Institute Publications

Download Volume 25, No. 3 PDF (388.47 KB)

This issue includes two strategic analyses: one for the United States and one for Greece. The first reports that the US recovery continues to be hampered by structural weaknesses—rising income inequality, weak demand for US exports, and fiscal conservatism—while external risks include sluggish growth in US trading partners, dollar appreciation, and asset price declines. Turning to Greece, the medium-term outlook under the current policy regime continues to be bleak, and while efforts to spur investment could provide a measure of growth, these will not produce the levels of growth and employment needed to put the country on a sustainable path. The authors argue for a complementary currency (the Geuro) to fund a job creation program while honoring Greece’s commitments. A related policy note investigates Switzerland’s successful use of a complementary currency, emphasizing its countercyclical role in stabilizing the economy and supporting demand.

The Summaryalso includes new research on trends associated with economic stagnation and economic inequality in the United States, the current upheaval in the Brazilian economy, and the impacts of austerity on the redistribution of income in Europe. Other publications address the factors driving low central bank interest rates globally, the emergence of financial Dutch disease in Colombia, and arguments supporting functional finance as a pragmatic alternative to mainstream policy prescriptions. Gender equality issues are explored in an analysis of the conditions in Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and the Western CIS, and in a second paper examining methods to measure gender inequality. Prospective changes to the US Census’s collection of information on race, ancestry, and ethnicity are discussed in a policy note. The issue closes with a new paper on the application of graph theory to stock-flow consistent modeling.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

Strategic Analysis

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, Destabilizing an Unstable Economy
• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, MICHALIS NIKIFOROS, and GENNARO ZEZZA, How Long Before Growth and Employment Are Restored in Greece?

• DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, Complementary Currencies and Economic Stability
• JORDAN BRENNAN, Rising Corporate Concentration, Declining Trade Union Power, and the Growing Income Gap: American Prosperity in Historical Perspective FERNANDO J. CARDIM DE CARVALHO, Looking Into the Abyss? Brazil at the Mid-2010s
• MARKUS P. A. SCHNEIDER, STEPHEN KINSELLA, and ANTOINE GODIN, Redistribution in the Age of Austerity: Evidence from Europe, 2006–13

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• TANWEER AKRAM, The Malady of Low Global Interest Rates
• ALBERTO BOTTA, ANTOINE GODIN, AND MARCO MISSAGLIA, Finance, Foreign Direct Investment, and Dutch Disease: The Case of Colombia
• GIUSEPPE MASTROMATTEO and LORENZO ESPOSITO, The Two Approaches to Money: Debt, Central Banks, and Functional Finance

Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• BHAVYA AGGARWAL and LEKHA S. CHAKRABORTY, The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and Measuring Gender Inequality: A Technical Articulation for Asia-Pacific
• TAMAR KHITARISHVILI, Gender Dimensions of Inequality in the Countries of Central Asia, South Caucasus, and Western CIS

Program: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Structure

• JOEL PERLMANN and PATRICK NEVADA, The US Census Asks About Race and Ethnicity: 1980–2020

Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

Explorations in Theory and Empirical Analysis

• MIGUEL CARRIÓN ÂLVAREZ and DIRK EHNTS, The Roads Not Taken: Graph Theory and Macroeconomic Regimes in Stock-flow Consistent Modeling

INSTITUTE NEWS

Workshop

• Gender and Macroeconomics: Current State of Research and Future Directions

Upcoming Events

• 25th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Publications and Presentations by Levy Institute Scholars
• Recent Levy Institute Publications

Download Volume 25, No. 2 PDF (804.08 KB)

Jordan Brennan, of Unifor and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, examines the rise of income inequality and the deceleration of economic growth in the United States in this two-part analysis. The first section explores the consolidation of corporate power, through mergers and acquisitions, between 1895 and 2013, and finds that reduced competition, declines in fixed asset investment, and the rise of practices such as stock buybacks have shifted investment away from the real economy, leading to weak economic growth and rising income inequality. The second section of Brennan’s analysis examines the interplay of labor unions, inflation, and income inequality. The author observes that the decline of unions as a countervailing force to corporate power and anti-inflationary monetary policy have shifted income away from middle- and lower-income groups. Similarly, he observes that over the past century inflation has tended to redistribute income from capital to labor—from the upper to the lower income strata. In this context, he observes that anti-inflation policy is a use of state power to effect a regressive redistribution of income.  

Download e-pamphlet, March 2016 PDF (2.80 MB)

The Winter 2016 Summary opens with a policy brief discussing the implications for euro-area member-states’ fiscal rules should the European Central Bank (ECB) advance the project of a single financial market through the creation of debt certificates. A policy note follows with proposals to ensure that the most recent round of recapitalizations of Greek banks does not repeat past mistakes and instead promotes a healthier banking sector in Greece. This issue also contains working papers on topics including financial Dutch disease, the performance of the ECB, full reserve banking, bank leverage ratios, and the management of high public debt levels, as well as analyses of monetary financing of public spending in Canada and the secular stagnation debate. A research project report compares the economic impact of public investment in early childhood care and education programs in Turkey, and a policy note investigates demographic factors accompanying labor force participation trends in the United States. Finally, the issue includes synopses of three new books by Institute scholars. The first is a collection of studies on the impact of financial regulation in the European Union, focusing on eight national economies. The second is an update of a primer on Modern Money Theory, and the second volume provides an accessible and rigorous introduction to the contributions of Distinguished Scholar Hyman P. Minsky.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH

Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• MARIO TONVERONACHI, The ECB, the Single Financial Market, and a Revision of the Euro Area Fiscal Rules
• EMILIOS AVGOULEAS and DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU, What Should Be Done with Greek Banks to Help the Country Return to a Path of Growth?
• ALBERTO BOTTA, The Macroeconomics of a Financial Dutch Disease
• ESTEBAN PÉREZ CALDENTEY and MATÍAS VERNENGO, Integration, Spurious Convergence, and Financial Fragility: A Post-Keynesian Interpretation of the Spanish Crisis
• JÖRG BIBOW, The Euro’s Savior? Assessing the ECB’s Crisis Management Performance and Potential for Crisis Resolution

Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• PATRIZIO LAINÀ, Money Creation under Full-reserve Banking: A Stock-flow Consistent Model
• EMILIOS AVGOULEAS, Bank Leverage Ratios and Financial Stability: A Micro- and Macroprudential Perspective
• JOSH RYAN-COLLINS, Is Monetary Financing Inflationary? A Case Study of the Canadian Economy, 1935–75

Program: The Distribution of Income and Wealth

• ECKHARD HEIN, Secular Stagnation or Stagnation Policy? Steindl after Summers

Program: Gender Equality and the Economy

• Ä°PEK Ä°LKKARACAN, KIJONG KIM, and TOLGA KAYA, The Impact of Public Investment in Social Care Services on Employment, Gender Equality, and Poverty: The Turkish Case

Program: Policy and Labor Markets

• FERNANDO RIOS-AVILA, Losing Ground: Demographic Trends in US Labor Force Participation

Program: Economic Policy in the 21st Century

• PEDRO LEAO, Is a Very High Public Debt a Problem?

INSTITUTE NEWS

• New Scholars

New Books by Levy Institute Scholars

• Financial Regulation in the European Union, edited by Rainer Kattel, Jan Kregel, and MARIO TONVERONACHI
• Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, by L. RANDALL WRAY
• Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist, by L. RANDALL WRAY

Upcoming Events

• Gender and Macroeconomics Conference
• 25th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Publications and Presentations by Levy Institute Scholars

 

Download Volume 25, No. 1 PDF (596.43 KB)