Economics: Research Guide

This article shows that in highly internationally financially integrated ("globalized") economies, policymakers' ability to implement effective expansionary macroeconomic policies, referred to in the article as "Keynesian policy space, " is influenced by the portfolio decisions of a specific group of investors known as "Global investors." This conclusion arises from a two-country, open-economy model in which Global investors allocate capital internationally based primarily on their perception of the policy credibility of the countries where they invest their managed wealth. In countries that Global investors deem highly credible, expansionary macroeconomic policies prove effective in terms o..

We extend the Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K+S; see Dosi et al., 2010, 2013, 2015) to model the emergence and the dynamics of an interbank network in the money market. The extended model allows banks to directly exchange funds, while evaluating their interbank positions using a network- based clearing mechanism (NEVA, see Barucca et al., 2020). These novel adds on, allow us to better measure financial contagion and systemic risk events in the model and to study the possible interactions between micro-prudential and macro-prudential policies. We find that the model can replicate new stylized facts concerning the topology of the interbank network, as well as the dynamics of individual banksââ..

Latin American Structuralism is an important strain in development theory, one which focuses on the center-periphery dynamics arising from an international economy ridden by technological, financial and power asymmetries. This paper discusses recent Structuralist contributions around the concept of sustainable development, defined as a growth path that is sustainable in three dimensions: economic, social and environmental. The economic dimension of sustainability means that the effective rate of growth is compatible with the Balance-of-Payments constraint; the social dimension means that growth is inclusive and reduces inequality; and the environmental dimension means that it respects the ec..

In order to consider the problem of the relationship between central banks and governments, it is necessary to go back to first principles and consider what society needs from central banks. The role of the central bank is explored as being to provide a stable financial environment as a basis for real economic activity. This involves the provision of a safe money asset; an appropriate level and composition of lending to the corporate sector to finance capital investment; and lending to government as required, subject to maintaining the value of the currency. The evolution of this traditional role in relation to banks and government is analysed in terms of collateral, emphasising their interd..

We study the relationship between inequality and social instability. While the argument that inequality can be damaging for the cohesion of a society is well established, the empirical evidence is mixed. We use a novel approach to isolate the causal relationship running from inequality to social instability. We run a laboratory experiment in which two groups interact repeatedly and have an incentive to coordinate even though coordination comes at the cost of inter-group inequality. Then, we vary the extent of the inequality implied by coordination. Our results show that increasing inequality has a destabilising effect; the disadvantaged initiate the destabilisation; and a worsening of the ab..

This paper examines the challenges of achieving and sustaining full employment in a global economy, as discussed by Michał Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes. Its aim is to analyse the common perspectives and differences between Kalecki and Keynes on this issue. The paper first examines the basic views of Kalecki and Keynes on long-term employment issues. This contains comparing their respective considerations of political economy constraints to full employment. Then Kalecki’s and Keynes’s views on the constraints in open economies and the economic policy strategies they proposed are assessed. The paper points out Kalecki’s advocacy for public deficit spending and income redistribution f..

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the integration of unpaid care-giving in the household into short- and long-term macroeconomic theory and, in particular, the theoretical structure of production on the supply-side of the economy. The ambition of the project is to furnish a general theoretical representation of how unpaid care giving and its (gendered) social structure contributes to the technical conditions of production in the sphere of marketed output. In so doing, it aims to provide macro theorists with an apparatus that allows consistent description of both short-term (levels of activity) and long-term (rates of growth) macro outcomes in a manner that routinely integrates fe..

Drawing on work spanning economics, public health, education, sociology, and law, I formalize theoretically what makes systemic discrimination "systemic." Injustices do not occur in isolation, but within a complex system of interdependent factors; and their effects may amplify as a consequence. I develop a taxonomy of these amplification mechanisms, connecting them to well-understood concepts in economics that are precise, testable and policy-oriented. This framework reveals that these amplification mechanisms can either be directly disrupted, or exploited to amplify the effects of equity-focused interventions instead. In other words, it shows how to use the machinery of systemic discriminat..

This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again – social scientists of different backgrounds recognized that morality and politico-economic outcomes influence each other in rich bi-directional ways. Because psychologists and economists possess distinct and complementary skill sets, part of this movement consists of productive ‘economic imperialism’ – economists leveraging their empirical toolkit to test and substantiate theories from moral psychology at scale or in the wild. To..

We define Trans-development as an overcoming of maldevelopment under capitalism towards building a planetary ecological civilization that is equitable, life-affirming and can ensure flourishing of humans along with nature and other species. How can such a planetary ecological counterhegemony be established in the Global South? I answer this question through exploring a fairly comprehensive strategy for development as freedom beyond the ecological and other crises-filled capitalism in the 21st century. Accordingly, I try to find a way to integrate useful markets with the key characteristics of the Enabling Ecological Trans-developmental State(EETDS) for the 21st Century in order to build a gr..

The first characteristic of the capitalist is his objective of monetary accumulation. For this purpose, the first thing to be done is the acquisition of the means of production (which are then profit-making). The second characteristic of capitalism are the rules, the ways of acquiring its means of production for profit. The first characteristic leads to the exploitation of workers, a subject which has been widely studied. The second characteristic leads to the increasing concentration of wealth, a concentration which has been widely observed without considering the rules of acquisition which are the cause, as if they were self-evident. This characteristic also ensures the monopoly of acquisi..

I derive Sraffa’s fundamental equation r = R(1 − w) by means of differential equations and optimisation, on which I work three remarks: (i) I analytically provide an alternative formulation of Sraffa’s fundamental equation; (ii) it is analogous to the optimisation problem of a particle moving along a straight line; (iii) the optimisation problem’s objective function is that of the minimisation of R. I additionally ask whether such an optimisation problem may also apply to any corresponding ‘Real System’ of the ‘Standard System’, to which it is already found to apply, and I answer positively. I ulteriorly assess the application of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to the sa..

The study of gender was far from mainstream in economics when Claudia Goldin began her research on women and work in the 1980s. Barbara Petrongolo discusses the impact of the 2023 economics Nobel laureate in shaping today's research frontier on gender inequalities - from public policy to the stereotypes and social norms that have such a powerful influence on women's participation in the labour market.

Are wages really a good proxy of the value of labour? Or, alternatively, do they largely reflect socio-institutional embedded practices of current societies according to which a manager deserves to be paid more than a nurse? This paper studies the determinants of wage remuneration and wage distribution focusing on two neglected origins of inequality: hierarchical power and care-work. Our contributions include, first the construction of a new synthetic indicator able to capture and quantitatively assess the distribution of power across occupations; second, the development of an indicator able to fine grained account for care jobs; third, the econometric estimation of the determinants of wage ..

The main purpose of this paper is to explore African Development Strategy as part of a non-neocolonial Global South. For this purpose, I propose a fairly comprehensive strategy for development as freedom for Africa. Accordingly, I try to find a way to integrate useful markets with the key characteristics of the Enabling Developmental State for the 21st Century in order to build a growing ecologically sustainable economy with equity in terms of capabilities. This is both for theoretical clarification and for aiding the strategies of popular democratic movements. A few tentative steps are taken here to serve this dual purpose. Proceeding from a critical capabilities perspective that is fully g..

The literature on Keynes’s activity as an investor has substantially grown in the last decade (e.g. Chambers and Dimson 2013; Accominotti and Chambers 2016; Chambers and Kabiri 2016; Cristiano, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2018; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2018; Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016; [2020]2022). The contribution of the present paper is to investigate a specific feature of Keynes’s investment activity on his own account: his preference for American rather than British Investment Trusts. While this feature has also been observed in his investments on behalf of King’s College (Chambers and Kabiri 2016), we focus here on his personal portfolio, and we also provide a set of possible explanati..

The History of Economics Society was founded at a time when the History of Economic Thought was being eliminated from the Economics post-graduate curriculum in many universities, and was one of the key institutions around which the sub-discipline successfully re-organised itself and continued to develop. Laidler (2003), a paper presented at the Society’s 2002 conference, argued that Economics itself, especially Macroeconomics, was suffering serious damage from this expulsion. It has continued to do so since, and the simple passage of time has now made it appropriate for Historians of Economic Thought to study this question.

In the 1990s, history of economics was comprised of a number of national communities. Among the latter the North American community held a dominant position and was quite different from its continental European counterparts. The HES had no counterpart in continental Europe, where national societies were small and recent. While the History of economics society was open to methodological pluralism, European societies were not. Over the past two decades, the growing domination of the continental European community has created a new context in which the identity of the North American community in general and that of the HES in particular has become uncertain. The consequence had been that method..

The task given to me for this issue was to discuss the history, challenges, and accomplishments of the History of Economics Society (HES) as I see them from my vantage point as a past president. I frame my remarks in terms of changes I believe have occurred in how our field has been pursued in the Society since I became involved.

Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from economics departments and graduate programs has made the Society’s mission increasingly irrelevant to the larger community of economists. In this partially autobiographical essay, the author argues that it is long past time for the Society to reassess its place among learned societies. Some suggestions for HES renewal appear in the paper’s Appendix.

This paper provides a personal reflection on the development, over 50 years, of the History of Economics Society. The (perhaps obvious) punchline is that history writing is not neutral, but entails stances about power and politics. These stances are all the more relevant in today's context, in which money buys history.

This paper outlines my own career within the History of Economics Society, my contributions to the society, and its central importance to my research endeavors. It is impossible for me to imagine having the career I have had without the HES, and my own case highlights how the society functioned to mentor and develop my academic career. This mentoring function is, in my view, the society’s most important, and one that has become only more vital in the face of the declining interest in the area within mainstream economics departments in the US, Canada, and the UK.

The City of Glasgow Bank failure in 1878, which led to large numbers of shareholders becoming insolvent, generated great public concern about their plight, and led directly to the 1879 Companies Act, which paved the way for the adoption of limited liability for all shareholders. In this paper, we focus on the question of why the opportunity was not taken to distinguish between the appropriate liability for ‘insiders, ’ i.e. those with direct access to information and power over decisions, as contrasted with ‘outsiders.’ We record that such issues were raised and discussed at the time, and we report why proposals for any such graded liability were turned down. We argue that the reason..

The long-term estimation of the Marxist average rate of profit does not adhere to a theoretically grounded standard regarding which economic activities should or should not be included for such purposes, which is relevant because methodological non-uniformity can be a significant source of overestimation or underestimation, generating a less accurate reflection of the capital accumulation dynamics. This research aims to provide a standard Marxist decision criterion regarding the inclusion and exclusion of economic activities for the calculation of the Marxist average profit rate for the case of United States economic sectors from 1960 to 2020, based on the Marxist definition of productive la..

The Classics and Marx, but also more recent contributions inspired by them, assume that the interest rate is a part of the profit rate. Over time, however, credit towards consumption and for the purchase of housing by workers has taken on greater and greater economic weight. This paper therefore aims to study this issue from a theoretical point of view, analysing its premises and implications. After investigating the necessary conditions on both the demand side (workers) and the supply side (banks), an attempt is made to analyse the distributional effects of a change in the interest rate. The results appear rather complex and difficult to interpret, suggesting a certain difficulty in identif..

In a world where banked customers are increasingly aware of social and environmental issues, agents of financial inclusion need to adopt sustainable practices to remain relevant. This brings us to the issue of sustainable financial inclusion which is quite different from the mainstream financial inclusion concept. Sustainable financial inclusion is a concept used to describe the integration of sustainability principles into financial inclusion strategies. This paper provides an in-depth discussion of sustainable financial inclusion. Using the discourse analysis method, the paper provides several definitions of sustainable financial inclusion, and show the importance and benefits of sustainab..

This work presents the evolutionary growth theory, which studies the drivers and patterns of technological change and production together with the (imperfect) mechanisms of coordination among a multitude of firms. This requires to studies economies as complex evolving systems, i.e. as ecologies populated by heterogenous agents whose out-of-equilibrium local market interactions lead to the emergence of some collective order at higher level of aggregation, while the system continuously evolves. Accordingly a multi-country multi-industry agent-based model is introduced, where the restless competition of firms in international markets lead to the emergence of growth and persistent income diverge..

The purpose of the paper is to rescue Irving Fisher’s theorizing of the yield curve (1896, 1907, 1930) from relative obscurity and to contrast it with the better known and equally pioneering theory of John Maynard Keynes (1930, 1936). The paper also adduces evidence that Fed economists and the U.S. monetary experience in the 1920s greatly influenced these authors, both of whom were concerned with the management of the long-term interest rate.

The current phase of capitalism has been defined in many alternative ways, ranging from techno-capitalism, turbo-capitalism, unbridled capitalism, unleashed capitalism, managerial capitalism. In this paper we put forward the notion of rentified capitalism defined as a configuration of capitalism based on the progressive rentification of the socio-economic fabric acting via three mechanisms: Appropriation, Exclusion and Commodification. Delving into a classical political economy distinction of rents from a distributive versus a production perspective, we ask the following research questions: are rents simply a form of functional income source or rather a process of redefinition of property ri..

Heidi Hartmann, founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, talks about the concept of “comparable worth” and what attracted her to the field of economics.