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1681 publications found
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Working Paper No. 536
July 03, 2008
Deficient Public Infrastructure and Private Costs
AbstractThis paper presents new evidence on the links between public-infrastructure provisioning and time allocation related to the water sector in India. An analysis of time-use data reveals that worsening public infrastructure affects market work, with evident gender differentials. The results also suggest that access to public infrastructure can lead to substitution effects in time allocation […]
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Policy Notes No. 2
June 05, 2008
Securitization
Abstract“At the annual banking structure and competition conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in May 1987, the buzzword heard in the corridors and used by many of the speakers was ‘that which can be securitized, will be securitized.’” So notes Hyman Minsky in a prescient memo on the nature, and the implications, of […]
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Policy Notes No. 1
May 27, 2008
The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus
AbstractWhat in monetarism, and what in the "new monetary consensus," led to a correct or even remotely relevant anticipation of the extraordinary financial crisis that broke over the housing sector, the banking system, and the world economy in August 2007 and that has continued to preoccupy central bankers ever since? Absolutely nothing, says Senior Scholar […]
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Policy Notes
May 27, 2008
The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus
Abstract“What in monetarism, and what in the ‘new monetary consensus,’ led to a correct or even remotely relevant anticipation of the extraordinary financial crisis that broke over the housing sector, the banking system, and the world economy in August 2007 and that has continued to preoccupy central bankers ever since? The answer is, of course, […]
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Policy Notes
May 27, 2008
The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus
AbstractWhat in monetarism, and what in the “new monetary consensus,” led to a correct or even remotely relevant anticipation of the extraordinary financial crisis that broke over the housing sector, the banking system, and the world economy in August 2007 and that has continued to preoccupy central bankers ever since? Absolutely nothing, says Senior Scholar […]
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Book Series
May 20, 2008
Stabilizing an Unstable Economy
AbstractThe late American economist and Distinguished Scholar Hyman P. Minsky first wrote about the inherent instability of financial markets in the late 1950s, and accurately predicted a transformation of the economy that would not become apparent for nearly a generation. In 2007, interest in his work suddenly exploded as the financial press recognized the relevance […]
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Book Series
May 19, 2008
John Maynard Keynes
AbstractThis reissue of Hyman P. Minsky’s classic book offers a timely reconsideration of the work of economics icon John Maynard Keynes. In it, Minsky argues that what most economists consider Keynesian economics is at odds with the major points of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Both Keynes and Minsky refuse to […]
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Working Paper No. 535
May 13, 2008
Statistical Matching Using Propensity Scores
AbstractThis paper summarizes the background, type, logic, and working procedure of the statistical matching used in the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) project to combine the various data sets used to produce the synthetic data set with which the LIMEW is constructed. The authors use the match between the 2001 Survey of Consumer […]
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Working Paper No. 534
May 08, 2008
Argentina: A Case Study on the Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados, or the Employment Road to Economic Recovery
AbstractAfter the 2001 crisis, Argentina—once the poster-child for pro-market structural-adjustment policies—had to define a new strategy in order to manage the societal demands that had led to the fall of the previous administration. The demand by the majority of the population for employment recovery spurred the government to introduce a massive employment program, the Plan […]
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Working Paper No. 533
April 29, 2008
The Discrete Charm of the Washington Consensus
AbstractOver the last two centuries in Latin America a Washington Consensus development strategy based on integration in the global trading system has dominated both domestic demand management and industrialization "from within." This paper assesses the performance of each from the point of view of the impact of external conditions, and the validity of its underlying […]
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Working Paper No. 532
April 28, 2008
Old Wine in a New Bottle: Subprime Mortgage Crisis—Causes and Consequences
AbstractThis paper seeks to explain the causes and consequences of the United States subprime mortgage crisis, and how this crisis has led to a generalized credit crunch in other financial sectors that ultimately affects the real economy. It postulates that, despite the recent financial innovations, the financial strategies—leveraging and financial risk mismatching—that led to the […]
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Working Paper No. 531
April 23, 2008
The International Monetary (Non-)Order and the “Global Capital Flows Paradox”
AbstractThis paper sets out to investigate the forces behind the so-called “global capital flows paradox” and related “dollar glut” observed in the era of advancing financial globalization. The supposed paradox is that the developing world has increasingly come to pursue policies that result in current account surpluses and thus net capital exports—destined primarily for the […]
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Working Paper No. 530
April 14, 2008
Changes in the US Financial System and the Subprime Crisis
AbstractThis paper traces the evolution of housing finance in the United States from the deregulation of the financial system in the 1970s to the breakdown of the savings and loan industry and the development of GSE (government-sponsored enterprise) securitization and the private financial system. The paper provides a background to the forces that have produced […]
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Strategic Analysis
April 09, 2008
Fiscal Stimulus—Is More Needed?
AbstractAs the government prepares to dispense the tax rebates that largely make up its recently approved $168 billion stimulus package, President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Research Scholars Greg Hannsgen and Gennaro Zezza explore the possibility of an additional fiscal stimulus of about $450 billion spread over three quarters—challenging the notion that a larger and more […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 94
April 01, 2008
Financial Markets Meltdown
AbstractIn this new Public Policy Brief, Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray explains today’s complex and fragile financial system, and how the seeds of crisis were sown by lax oversight, deregulation, and risky innovations such as securitization. He estimates that the combined losses throughout the entire financial sector could amount to several trillion dollars, and that […]
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Working Paper No. 529
March 06, 2008
Can Robbery and Other Theft Help Explain the Textbook Currency-demand Puzzle?
AbstractThis paper attempts to explain one version of an empirical puzzle noted by Mankiw (2003): a Baumol-Tobin inventory-theoretic money demand equation predicts that the average adult American should have held approximately $551.05 in currency and coin in 1995, while data show an average of $100. The models in this paper help explain this discrepancy using […]
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Working Paper No. 528
February 18, 2008
Financial Flows and International Imbalances
AbstractWhile the traditional approach to the adjustment of international imbalances assumes industrialized countries at a similar level of development and with similar production structures, such imbalances have historically been the result of a process of catching up by late-industrializing developing countries. This may call for an alternative approach that assesses how these imbalances can be […]
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Working Paper No. 527
January 25, 2008
Financing Job Guarantee Schemes by Oil Revenue
AbstractIran’s constitution emphasizes social justice and obliges government to provide a job for every citizen. But in fact, the government’s duty to provide jobs has shifted to government support for a measure designed to create new employment opportunities through subsidized loans to the private sector. This policy has not been successful to date, and the […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 93
January 08, 2008
Minsky’s Cushions of Safety
AbstractIn this brief, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel reviews Hyman P. Minsky’s concept of financial fragility—in short, that the structure of a capitalist economy becomes more fragile over a period of prosperity—and concludes that the current crisis is in fact the result of insufficient margins of safety based on how creditworthiness is assessed in the new […]
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Research Project Report No. 34
January 02, 2008
Joint Project of UNDP and Levy Institute on Public Employment
AbstractJoint UNDP—Levy Institute Study Focuses on Employment Guarantee Strategies The recent financial turmoil has brought with it worldwide acceptance of the fact that, when markets fail, government intervention is indispensable. One manifestation of market failure, within the sphere of production, is the inability of private sector investment to absorb surplus labor. In such instances, government […]
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Working Paper No. 526
December 21, 2007
American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank
AbstractAmerican Jewish opinion about the Arab-Israel conflict matters for both American and Israeli politics as well as for American Jewish life. This paper undertakes an analysis of that opinion based on American Jewish Committee (AJC) annual polls. Recently, the AJC made the individual-level datasets for the 2000–05 period available to researchers. The paper focuses on […]
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Working Paper No. 525
December 20, 2007
Financialization
AbstractFinancialization is a process whereby financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites gain greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialization transforms the functioning of economic systems at both the macro and micro levels. Its principal impacts are to (1) elevate the significance of the financial sector relative to the real sector, (2) transfer […]
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Working Paper No. 524
December 19, 2007
Promotion Nationale
AbstractCreated in 1961, Promotion Nationale (PN) is an autonomous public entity in charge of mobilizing an underemployed or unemployed workforce for the implementation of labor-intensive projects, calling upon a simple technology likely to provide employment to unskilled workers. It is one of the major programs of social protection in Morocco—the oldest, most important, and best-targeted […]
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Working Paper No. 523
December 13, 2007
The Natural Instability of Financial Markets
AbstractThis paper contrasts the economic incentives implicit in the Keynes-Minsky approach to inherent financial market instability with the incentives behind the traditional equilibrium approach leading to market stability to provide a framework for analyzing the stability induced by the recent changes in bank regulation to modernize financial services and the evolution of financial engineering innovations […]
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