Publications
Search by
1657 publications found
-
Public Policy Brief No.48
09 December 1998
Japanese Corporate Governance and Strategy
AbstractDespite the crisis in the Japanese financial sector, prolonged recession, and competitive challenges, Japan’s formidable productive system remains strong. Nevertheless, the system of corporate governance, which has pursued a strategy of retaining corporate revenues and reallocating labor resources and returns to labor in order to invest in productive capabilities, faces short-term pressures from a transformation of the financial sector and long-term pressures from the growth of intergenerational dependence. Current reforms seek to generate funding for the pension system and profits for financial enterprises from international securities and money markets. These reforms seem to work within the corporate governance framework that emphasizes the retain-and-reallocate strategy, but the question is whether they will create powerful pressures to extract returns from the domestic economy, thereby affecting how corporations are managed and resources allocated.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 48, 1998 PDF (9.83 MB) -
Working Paper No.258
01 December 1998
(Full) Employment Policy
AbstractIn 1998, the United States’ unemployment rate was at its lowest level since the late 1960s. Yet the nation’s employment problem is still far from solved. Although many economists assume that unemployment tends toward a natural rate below which it cannot go without creating inflation, this paper asks whether the current employment levels are the best that can be achieved in times of prosperity and whether current employment policies will be able to deal with the challenges of the next downturn. To evaluate these questions, the author examines the relative merits of three proposed strategies to improve the employment situation-a reduced workweek, employment subsidies, and a public service job opportunity program-to see if they will meet the challenges of upholding an individual’s basic right to job while not stimulating inflation. He finds that a shorter workweek and wage subsidies both have failed to meet one or both of these challenges, but that a public service job opportunity program, such as the “employer of last resort policy,” would satisfy both the full employment and noninflationary criteria.
Download Working Paper No. 258 PDF (94.26 KB) -
Working Paper No.260
01 December 1998
Government Spending and Growth Cycles
AbstractIn this paper the impact of fiscal policy is analyzed within the context of an endogenous growth and cycles model. The investigation shows the different situations in which government expenditure can lead to both crowding-in and crowding-out of output and employment. With regard to the cycle, an increase in the share of government spending leads to an expansion of output, which is given a greater stimulus with a higher degree of monetization. Expansionary monetary policies accompanying the fiscal expansion tend to make the upswing longer and the downswing more shallow, i.e., the cycle becomes more asymmetric. The medium-run dynamics of the model along its warranted growth path essentially rest on the relative movements of business retained earnings (i.e., the private savings rate since household savings are ignored) and the government spending share. With the private savings rate fixed, a rise in the government spending share leads to medium-run crowding-out. On the other hand, if policies such as investment tax credits, lower rates of corporate taxation, and accelerated deductions for capital depreciation stimulate the growth of the business retained earnings, then an increase in the government spending share may either not have any effect on the warranted path or may even raise it, i.e., there might be crowding-in. Moreover, abstracting from any changes in retained earnings, an increase in the level of government spending produces an expansionary cyclical effect with no medium-run crowding-out. Finally, the model exploits the empirical finding that infrastructure investment by the government lowers business costs. This relationship is used to demonstrate that the warranted growth path can be increased via a shift from government consumption expenditures to infrastructure investment. In contrast to mainstream analyses these complex results imply that, within limits, the state has a number of policy levers at its disposal to regulate output and employment.
Download Working Paper No. 260 PDF (2.19 MB) -
Working Paper No.259
01 December 1998
Constructing Long and Dense Time-Series of Inequality Using the Theil Index
AbstractYear-to-year economy-wide measures of income distribution, such as the Gini coefficient, are rarely available for long periods except in a few developed countries, and as a result few analyses of year-to-year changes in inequality exist. But wage and earnings data by industrial sectors are readily available for many countries over long time frames. This paper proposes the application of the between-group component of the Theil index to data on wages, earnings, and employment by industrial classification in order to measure the evolution of wage or earnings inequality through time. We provide formal criteria under which such a between-group Theil statistic can reasonably be assumed to give results that also track the (unobserved) evolution of inequality within industries. While the evolution of inequality in manufacturing earnings cannot be taken as per se indicating the larger movements of inequality in household incomes, including those outside the manufacturing sector, we argue on theoretical grounds that the two will rarely move in opposite directions. We conclude with an empirical application to the case of Brazil, an important developing country for which economy-wide Gini coefficients are scarce, but for which a between-industries Theil statistic may be computed on a monthly basis as far back as 1976.
Download Working Paper No. 259 PDF (456.20 KB) -
Public Policy Brief No.46
08 November 1998
Self-Reliance and Poverty
AbstractThe United States’ official poverty measure defines the poor in terms of a family’s actual, yearly cash income relative to an estimate of the income needed to sustain a minimally acceptable standard of living. An alternative definition, designed to reflect a family’s ability to achieve economic independence, would instead rest on its capacity for generating income. Net earnings capacity (NEC) is an indicator of the income a family could earn if all working-age family members work full-time, full-year, at earnings consistent with their age, education, and other characteristics, with an adjustment made for child care costs. NEC is not intended as a replacement for the official measure, but as a supplement. The official measure identifies the population in need of short-term monetary assistance, whereas NEC identifies the population in need of longer-term skill-enhancing assistance in order to become self-reliant. Two general policy approaches to reduce the prevalence of NEC poverty are to increase the level of education and other income-generating characteristics of those with low earnings capacity and to increase the returns they receive for work.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 46, 1998 PDF (176.66 KB) -
Working Paper No.257
01 November 1998
Is Keynesianism Institutionalist?
AbstractThis paper poses that the one commonality between institutionalist thought and Keynesianism (as presented in his General Theory) was money. Tracing the origins and uses of money, the myth of the development of money as a medium of exchange is dispelled and replaced with money used as evidence of debt, specifically, government debt. This paper was presented as the Presidential Address to the 1998 Association for Institutionalist Thought conference. As such, the paper should be taken in the same spirit as the [in]famous neoclassical Robinson Crusoe story, or Paul Samuelson’s story of the evolution of money. The only significant change that has been made is to add several endnotes that will make some of the references more clear; this might make the piece more accessible for students.
Download Working Paper No. 257 PDF (60.09 KB) -
Working Paper No.256
01 November 1998
The Minimum Wage in Historical Perspective
AbstractDuring the Progressive period of American history the debate over the minimum wage was often between those who clung to traditional economic theory as a reason for not having a minimum wage and those who saw the efficiency-wage benefits of adopting one. Although the latter argument proved quite effective in swaying many state legislatures, it may have also been a strategic argument for circumventing the Supreme Court’s particular understanding of "liberty of contract." Under this doctrine, states could not pass any legislation mandating a minimum wage unless a compelling case could be made that such a wage would definitely serve the larger public interest. This paper argues that although efficiency-wage arguments might have been appealing to liberal reformers of that time, the arguments were ultimately used as a disingenuous means by which "liberty of contract" arguments could be circumvented.
Download Working Paper No. 256 PDF (74.11 KB) -
Public Policy Brief No.45
07 October 1998
Did the Clinton Rising Tide Raise All Boats?
AbstractDuring the recent robust expansion only 700,000 of the almost 12 million jobs created went to the half of the population that does not have at least some college education. Even though the number of officially unemployed fell to less than 4 million in the 25-and-over age group, there remain in that group over 26 million potentially employable workers—the combined number of those who are actively seeking work (and are counted as officially unemployed) and those who are currently out of the labor force but would be willing to participate. Since expansion has not proven sufficient to remedy this intolerably high level of wasted human resources, well-targeted, active labor market policies are required. One such policy is a job opportunity program that “hires off the bottom,” providing minimum-wage jobs for all those who are ready, willing, and able to work. The program would create a buffer stock of labor from which employers could hire during upturns instead of bidding up the wages of the already employed, and thus would offer both full employment and price stability.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 45, 1998 PDF (244.77 KB) -
Working Paper No.255
01 October 1998
Economic Time
AbstractThis paper argues that economists require a particular concept of time to develop theory with greater explanatory power in describing and analyzing the sort of economy in which we are primarily interested–the monetary economy usually termed capitalism. Economists of various persuasions have recognized the importance of a concept of time, but we argue that a very specific concept is required. We propose a concept of time that is consistent with the perception and experience of time in a monetary or capitalist economy. This concept of time is determined by the debt cycle, and the length of this cycle is determined by the interest rate. Thus, while our proposed time measure is certainly historical and sequential in nature (months, years), it is not simply clock time: the length of economic time is fluid and is regulated by the interest rate, a variable of significance in dictating a host of socially important effects.
Download Working Paper No. 255 PDF (55.71 KB) -
Working Paper No.254
01 October 1998
Toward a New Instrumental Macroeconomics
AbstractThis paper argues that the ideas of Abba Lerner and Adolph Lowe contain overlapping and complementary insights and themes that may contribute to the development of a new approach to macroeconomics. They also have rather specific practical policy implications. Lerner’s notions of functional finance and money as a creature of the state are combined with Lowe’s structural analysis to forge an approach to macroeconomic theory and policy that considers both aggregate proportionality and balance and sectoral relations and that addresses issues regarding monetary production and effective demand as well as ongoing structural and technological change. Such a “new instrumental macroeconomics,” focusing on full employment, price stability, and a decent standard of living for all, has important points of contact with recent proposals promoting job opportunities through direct job creation with a public service corps that benefits communities while serving as a buffer stock of labor providing price stability.
Download Working Paper No. 254 PDF (52.07 KB) -
Working Paper No.253
01 October 1998
Finance and the Macroeconomic Process in a Classical Growth and Cycle Model
AbstractThe aim of this paper is to derive an endogenous growth and cycles model that integrates sectoral incomes, expenditures, and finance requirements into an ex ante social accounting matrix (SAM) in the spirit of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group. The SAM includes households, businesses, a banking sector with non-zero net worth, and the government. Investment in circulating capital, endogenous bank credit to finance accumulation, and the negative feedback effect of debt on investment are at the core of the short-run cyclical dynamics. The business cycle dynamics are described by the dual disequilibria relationship that relates monetary and goods market disequilibria to each other. Market disequilibria result from the discrepancy between ex ante plans and expectations and ex post outcomes. The short-run cycle in the model is the three-to-five-year inventory cycle in which aggregate demand and supply chase each other ceaselessly in order to reach equilibrium. Firms respond to excess demand by lowering inventory stocks and increasing investment in circulating capital, which expands output via the Léontief input-output relationship. Over the medium run, they respond to imbalances between actual and normal capacity by increasing fixed capital investment. Over the medium to long run, the path of accumulation is internally financed and regulated by the rate of profit. One can conclude that the macrodynamic model is a synthesis of the Physiocrats’ “circular flow” approach to modeling the economy and the endogenous growth perspective of some classical economists, von Neumann, and Harrod. Finally, the endogenous cyclical dynamics are very much in the spirit of Kalecki and Minsky.
Download Working Paper No. 253 PDF (303.26 KB) -
Public Policy Brief No.44
06 September 1998
The Asian Disease: Plausible Diagnoses, Possible Remedies
AbstractAsia presents a cumulation of apparently rational decisions that produced disastrous results—a textbook illustration of “financial instability” developing from the economics of euphoria. A combination of factors produced the crisis as enormous capital inflows were drawn to the “Asian miracle“-pegged exchange rates with fluctuating interest rates, integrated economies, moral hazard created by central banks, and short-term lending and derivatives trade without sufficient evaluation of risk and credit analysis of borrowers. The Asian tragedy demonstrates the need for improved regulation of cross-border interbank lending, improved accounting for both borrowers and lenders, and separation of the close links between governments and their banking sector.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 44, 1998 PDF (156.72 KB) -
Public Policy Brief No.43
05 September 1998
How Big Should the Public Capital Stock Be?
AbstractInvestment in infrastructure is necessary for a strong, flexible, and growing economy. However, the relationship between public capital and economic growth is not linear. At a certain level, the tax burden associated with financing and maintaining public capital reduces the returns to private industry, which in turn reduces growth; also, different types of spending have different effects on growth. The short- and long-term growth-maximizing effects of public investment increase as the ratio of public to private capital stock rises to an optimal level (found to be about 61 percent); above that level, the growth effects decrease. The public-to-private ratio is below the optimal level throughout much of the country and government spending is not always directed toward the types of investment that have the most positive effects on growth. Good economic policy requires both increasing the public capital stock and reorienting government spending from consumption to investment in physical capital stock.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 43, 1998 PDF (216.39 KB) -
Working Paper No.252
01 September 1998
Modern Money
AbstractAll modern economies have a “chartalist” or “state” money, as acknowledged by Friedrich Knapp and John Maynard Keynes. In this paper, I examine the “history” of money to shed light on its origins. I also examine in detail the views of those who accepted the chartalist, or state, approach to money, from Adam Smith to Knapp and Keynes, with some discussion of the views of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner. This is then linked to Lerner’s “functional finance” approach to money and government spending. I next explore the implications of “modern money” for government policy and show that much economic analysis reaches erroneous conclusions because it fails to recognize the nature of modern money. The state “defines” money when it chooses that in which taxes must be paid. Government spending is the most important determinant of the supply of base money; government deficits are the most important source of net money holdings. This stands in stark contrast to traditional analysis, for fiscal policy is the primary determinant of the money supply and monetary policy determines the short-term interest rate. Because government deficits increase bank reserves, monetary policy is required to offer an interest-earning alternative to excess reserves; essentially, monetary policy consists of sales of government bonds (by the Treasury and central bank) to “drain” excess reserves in order to hit the interest rate target established for monetary policy. Thus, bond sales are not a part of fiscal policy nor are they needed to “finance” government deficits. This analysis leads to several interesting policy conclusions regarding the importance of government deficits and debts and regarding proposals to promote full employment.
Download Working Paper No. 252 PDF (65.30 KB) -
Working Paper No.251
01 September 1998
Paul Davidson’s Economics
AbstractPaul Davidson is one of the best known and most influential post-Keynesian economists. He has insisted throughout his career that economists should focus on real-world problems and that the purpose of economic policy is to help society become more humane and civilized. He is also known for his insistence on adhering to the words and ideas of John Maynard Keynes. This article reviews his contributions to monetary theory, international economics, aggregate supply theory, and environmental economics.
Download Working Paper No. 251 PDF (54.57 KB) -
Working Paper No.250
01 September 1998
Explaining Long-Term Exchange Rate Behavior in the United States and Japan
AbstractConventional exchange rate models are based on the fundamental hypothesis that, in the long run, real exchange rates will move in such a way as to make countries equally competitive. Thus they assume that, in the long run, trade between countries will be roughly balanced. The difficulty in assessing expectations about the consequences of trade arrangements (such as NAFTA or the EEC) is that these models perform quite poorly at an empirical level, making them an unreliable guide to economic policy. To have a sound foundation for economic policy requires operating from a theoretically grounded explanation of exchange rates that works well across a spectrum of developed and developing countries. This paper applies the theoretical and empirical foundation developed in Shaikh (1980, 1991, 1995), and previously applied to Spain, Mexico, and Greece (Roman 1997; Ruiz-Napoles 1996; Antonopoulos 1997), to the explanation of the exchange rates of the United States and Japan. Such a framework implies that it is a country’s competitive position, as measured by the real unit costs of its tradables, that determines its real exchange rate. This determination of real exchange rates through real unit costs provides a possible explanation for why trade imbalances remain persistent and a policy rule-of-thumb for sustainable exchange rates. The aim is to show that a theoretically grounded, empirically robust, explanation of real exchange rate movements can be constructed that also can be of practical use to researchers and policymakers.
Download Working Paper No. 250 PDF (246.96 KB) -
Public Policy Brief No.42
04 August 1998
Automatic Adjustment of the Minimum Wage
AbstractThe fact that every change in the minimum wage requires an act of Congress means that debate over the wisdom of having a minimum is repeatedly returned to the political arena. As inflation continues to erode the value of the minimum wage, each legislative delay means that a larger increase is required. The larger the increase, the more resistance to its passage, so that by the time Congress acts, the political compromise is an increase that is too little and too late to be of much help in lifting workers out of poverty. Automatic adjustment of the wage, with increases keyed to measures of private sector productivity, would eliminate this problem. With the institution of a mechanism that provides regular and incremental increases, Congress will no longer be forced to revisit the issue, employers will not be confronted by sudden and large increases, and the value of the wage will be maintained.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 42, 1998 PDF (149.97 KB) -
Working Paper No.248
01 August 1998
Can Expenditure Cuts Eliminate a Budget Deficit?
AbstractAustralian governments since the late 1970s have attempted to eliminate the fiscal deficit through reductions in expenditure. These efforts have failed. With each successive business cycle the federal government’s budget outcome has been an ever-growing deficit. This paper explains the failure of the government to achieve its balanced budget objective through expenditure reductions. It argues that the impact of these expenditure reductions on the course of the business cycle and the long-term development of the economy has actually fed back onto the budget outcome in a negative way. These feedbacks have rendered the instruments for achieving the government’s objective self-defeating. The paper explores the compositional changes in government outlays, away from capital to current outlays, that have resulted from this policy and which may have a detrimental effect on long-run growth.
Download Working Paper No. 248 PDF (256.36 KB) -
Working Paper No.247
01 August 1998
“Inability to Be Self-Reliant” As an Indicator of US Poverty
AbstractThe official poverty measure is based on the premise that all families should have sufficient income from either their own efforts or government support to boost them above a family-size-specific threshold. Given the current policy emphasis on self-reliance and a smaller role for government, this measure appears to have less policy relevance now than in prior years. We present here a new concept of poverty based on self-reliance—that is, the ability of a family, using its own resources, to support a level of consumption in excess of needs. Using a measure of net earnings capacity (NEC) to examine the size and composition of the self-reliant-poor population from 1975 to 1995, we find that self-reliance poverty has increased more rapidly than has official poverty. We find that families commonly thought to be the most impoverished—those headed by minorities, single women with children, and individuals with low levels of education—have the highest levels of self-reliance poverty, but have experienced the smallest increases in this poverty measure. Families commonly thought to be economically secure—those headed by whites, men, married couples, and highly educated individuals—have the lowest levels of self-reliance poverty, but have experienced the largest increases. We speculate that the trends in self-reliance poverty stem largely from underlying trends in the United States economy, in particular the relative decline of wage rates for whites and men and the rapidly expanding college-educated demographic group.
Download Working Paper No. 247 PDF (2.91 MB) -
Working Paper No.246
01 August 1998
Derivatives and Global Capital Flows
AbstractFour factors in the current financial crisis in Asia have surprised observers. First, although capital flows in Asia appeared stable, the crisis was precipitated by the reversal of the very large proportion of short-term lending. Second, although Asia appeared to be an example of the maxim that capital flows to the region with the highest rates of return, now it appears that risk-adjusted returns were lower in Asia than in other regions. Third, although the foreign lending banks are the most sophisticated operators in global finance, they seem to have had difficulty assessing risk. Fourth, contrary to the belief that foreign equity investors will not liquidate their positions in response to currency devaluation, the equity and foreign exchange markets collapsed together. According to Visiting Scholar Jan Kregel, these four factors may be explained by the role of derivatives contracts in the flow of funds to Asia.
Download Working Paper No. 246 PDF (55.45 KB) -
Working Paper No.249
01 August 1998
The American Wage Structure, 1920–1947
AbstractThis paper uses industrial wage data and a systematic if unconventional selection of methods to examine changes in the inter-industry structure of wages between 1920 and 1947. We first sort among the available data on wage change by industry and occupation for blocs that exhibit common patterns of wage changes over time, reducing the 83 time series available to us into eight distinct groups. Following this, we present a systematic decomposition of the sources of wage variation across groups and through time. The fact that our cluster analysis relies on wage-change observations in percentage form implies that our discriminant analysis produces eigenvectors in time-series format; thus each eigenvector is itself an artificially constructed economic time series. We identify four such forces that together explain 97 percent of the variance in wage change across groups, and identify variables in the historical record that appear to correspond closely to these forces.
This raises a beguiling possibility. It may be that simple explanations account for most of the relative-wage changes during the years under study. In a reversal of the usual notions of micro-to-macro causality, it may be that a small number of macroeconomic variates account for a large proportion of distributional changes.
In a final section, we compute an estimate of the evolution of inequality in the wage structure over time. This estimate is independent of our clustering procedures and of our discriminant analysis, and is measure is well suited to regression analysis. Using it, we test a simple macroeconomic explanation of inequality in the wage structure. The results appear to support the argument that well-known macroeconomic and social developments, including changes in the unemployment rate, in strikes, and in the exchange rate, played the determining roles in the evolution of wage inequality during this time.
Download Working Paper No. 249 PDF (5.10 MB) -
Public Policy Brief No.41
03 July 1998
Side Effects of Progress
AbstractWhy does a dynamic growing economy have a persistent long-term unemployment problem? Research Associates Baumol and Wolff have isolated one cause. Although technological change, the engine of growth and economic progress, may not affect or may even increase the total number of jobs available, the fact that it creates a demand for new skills and makes other skills obsolete can cause an increase in the overall rate of unemployment and the length of time during which an unemployed worker is between jobs. It goes without saying that society will not choose to slow technical innovation, but the task for policy is to find ways to offset the problems caused by this rising level and duration of unemployment.
Download Public Policy Brief No. 41, 1998 PDF (162.02 KB) -
Working Paper No.245
01 July 1998
Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income
AbstractThis paper argues that a guaranteed income is not only consistent with the principle of reciprocity but is required for reciprocity. This conclusion follows from a three-part argument. First, if a guaranteed income is in place, all individuals have the same opportunity to live without working. Therefore, those who choose not to work do not take advantage of a privilege that is unavailable to everyone else. Second, in the absence of an unconditional income, society is, in effect, applying the principle “He who does not work, will not eat.” If the application of this principle is to be consistent with reciprocity, it must be applied to everyone. Most modern industrial societies exempt many citizens from that choice. For example, the owners of external assets do not face the work-or-starve choice and do take advantage of a privilege that is not available to others. An unconditional guaranteed income is one way to eliminate that violation of reciprocity. Third, this paper addresses the criticism that the guaranteed income exploits middle-class workers by demonstrating that a basic income will have a positive effect on wages, which will at least partially counteract the effect of the taxes needed to pay for it.
Download Working Paper No. 245 PDF (54.86 KB) -
Working Paper No.244
01 July 1998
Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?
AbstractThis paper investigates the commonly held belief that government spending is normally financed through a combination of taxes and bond sales. The argument is a technical one and requires a detailed analysis of reserve accounting at the central bank. After carefully considering the complexities of reserve accounting, it is argued that the proceeds from taxation and bond sales are technically incapable of financing government spending and that modern governments actually finance all of their spending through the direct creation of high-powered money. The analysis carries significant implications for fiscal as well as monetary policy.
Download Working Paper No. 244 PDF (1.65 MB)