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1681 publications found
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Working Paper No. 522
December 10, 2007
Lessons from the Subprime Meltdown
AbstractThis paper uses Hyman P. Minsky’s approach to analyze the current international financial crisis, which was initiated by problems in the American real estate market. In a 1987 manuscript, Minsky had already recognized the importance of the trend toward securitization of home mortgages. This paper identifies the causes and consequences of the financial innovations that […]
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Strategic Analysis
November 30, 2007
The US Economy: Is There a Way Out of the Woods?
AbstractIn their latest Strategic Analysis, Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley, President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and Research Scholars Greg Hannsgen and Gennaro Zezza review recent events in the housing and financial markets to obtain a likely scenario for the evolution of household spending in the United States. They forecast a significant drop in borrowing and private expenditure […]
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Working Paper No. 521
November 29, 2007
Earnings Functions and the Measurement of the Determinants of Wage Dispersion
AbstractThis paper extends the famous Blinder and Oaxaca (1973) discrimination in several directions. First, the wage difference breakdown is not limited to two groups. Second, a decomposition technique is proposed that allows analysis of the determinants of the overall wage dispersion. The authors’ approach combines two techniques. The first of these is popular in the […]
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Working Paper No. 520
November 14, 2007
Nurkse and the Role of Finance in Development Economics
AbstractRagnar Nurkse was one the pioneers in development economics. This paper celebrates the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a critical retrospective of his overall contribution to the field, in particular his views on the importance of employment policy in mobilizing domestic resources and the difficulties surrounding the use of external resources to finance development. […]
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Working Paper No. 519
November 09, 2007
Public Employment and Women
AbstractIn 2002, Argentina implemented a large-scale public employment program to deal with the latest economic crisis and the ensuing massive unemployment and poverty. The program, known as Plan Jefes, offered part-time work for unemployed heads of households, and yet more than 70 percent of the people who turned up for work were women. The present […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 92
October 26, 2007
The US Credit Crunch of 2007
AbstractIt is now clear that most economists underestimated the widening economic impact of the credit crunch that has shaken American financial markets since at least mid-July. A credit crunch is an economic condition in which loans and investment capital are difficult to obtain; in such a period, banks and other lenders become wary of issuing […]
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Working Paper No. 518
October 25, 2007
Fiscal Deficit, Capital Formation, and Crowding Out in India
AbstractThis paper analyzes the real (direct) and financial crowding out in India between 1970–71 and 2002–03. Using an asymmetric vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the paper finds no real crowding out between public and private investment; rather, complementarity is observed between the two. The dynamics of financial crowding out is captured through the dual transmission mechanism […]
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Working Paper No. 517
October 23, 2007
What Are the Relative Macroeconomic Merits and Environmental Impacts of Direct Job Creation and Basic Income Guarantees?
AbstractThere is a body of literature that favors universal and unconditional public assurance policies over those that are targeted and means-tested. Two such proposals—the basic income proposal and job guarantees—are discussed here. The paper evaluates the impact of each program on macroeconomic stability, arguing that direct job creation has inherent stabilization features that are lacking […]
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Book Series
October 15, 2007
Government Spending on the Elderly
AbstractThe results are in: we are aging—individually and collectively, nationally and globally. In the United States, as in most countries with an advanced economy, the aging of the population will be a primary domestic public policy issue in the coming decades. According to Census Bureau estimates, the proportion of the elderly in the total population […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 91
October 09, 2007
Globalization and the Changing Trade Debate
AbstractThe failure of the Doha Development Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations in July 2006 was the first major collapse of a multilateral trade round since World War II. Research Associate Thomas Palley sees the failure as an event that could mark the close of a 60-year era of trade policy largely centered on […]
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Working Paper No. 516
September 21, 2007
The Right to a Job, the Right Types of Projects
AbstractThere is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide jobs while creating public assets. In addition to physical infrastructure, […]
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Working Paper No. 515
September 13, 2007
Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty
AbstractWhile Hyman P. Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what would become the War on Poverty. Indeed, at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a vehement critic of the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and […]
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Working Paper No. 514
September 10, 2007
The Continuing Legacy of John Maynard Keynes
AbstractThis working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of its publication and the 60th anniversary of Keynes’s death. The paper incorporates some of the latest research by prominent followers of Keynes, presented at the 9th International Post Keynesian Conference in […]
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Working Paper No. 513
September 04, 2007
Inequality of Life Chances and the Measurement of Social Immobility
AbstractThis paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents and the columns to the income distribution of their children, it then highlights the importance of the marginal distributions when comparing social immobility within two […]
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Working Paper No. 512
September 03, 2007
Endogenous Money
AbstractWhile the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest rate—which has only an indirect impact on the quantity of reserves and the quantity of privately created money. […]
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Working Paper No. 511
August 15, 2007
The Fed’s Real Reaction Function
AbstractUsing a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to “inflation signals.” Rather, the Fed reacts to the very “real” signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless fear of full employment […]
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Working Paper No. 510
August 13, 2007
A Post-Keynesian View of Central Bank Independence, Policy Targets, and the Rules-versus-Discretion Debate
AbstractThis paper addresses three issues surrounding monetary policy formation: policy independence, choice of operating targets, and rules versus discretion. According to the New Monetary Consensus, the central bank needs policy independence to build credibility; the operating target is the overnight interbank lending rate, and the ultimate goal is price stability. This paper provides an alternative […]
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Working Paper No. 509
August 07, 2007
On Various Ways of Measuring Unemployment, with Applications to Switzerland
AbstractThis paper begins with an examination of various ways of measuring unemployment and, borrowing ideas from the poverty measurement literature, proposes four new general unemployment indices. The first of these is parallel to the Sen poverty index; the second, to the Sen index’s generalization by Shorrocks; the third, to the FGT poverty index; and the […]
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Working Paper No. 508
July 18, 2007
The American Jewish Committee’s Annual Opinion Surveys
AbstractThe American Jewish Committee (AJC) surveys of Jewish opinion are unique both in being conducted annually and in the subject matter covered. This paper assesses the quality of these samples. I first summarize my earlier findings on the implications of limiting a sample to respondents who answered “Jewish” when asked a screening question about their […]
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Working Paper No. 507
July 17, 2007
Who’s a Jew in an Era of High Intermarriage?
AbstractThe old ways in which surveys of Jews handled marginal cases no longer make sense, and the number of cases involved is no longer small. I examine in detail the public-use samples of the two recent national surveys of Americans of recent Jewish origin—the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) and the American Jewish Identity Survey […]
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Working Paper No. 506
July 16, 2007
The Effects of a Declining Housing Market on the US Economy
AbstractLongstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing price decreases on real private […]
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Working Paper No. 505
July 10, 2007
Implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India
AbstractSince its enactment in 2005, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been implemented in 200 districts in India. Based on state-by-state employment demand-supply data and the use of funds released under NREGA, it is found that, although it is a demand-driven scheme, there are significant interstate differences in the supply of employment. The […]
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Working Paper No. 504
July 05, 2007
Female Land Rights, Crop Specialization, and Productivity in Paraguayan Agriculture
AbstractPrevious work has shown a pattern of lower household incomes for those Paraguayan farms with female landowners in the household. The study of agricultural production reveals that Paraguayan women specialize in livestock and dairy production, while men specialize in crop production. An analysis of crop specialization and crop yields finds no significant differences in yields […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 90
July 03, 2007
Cracks in the Foundations of Growth
AbstractWith economic growth having cooled to less than 1 percent in the first quarter of 2007, the economy can ill afford a slump in consumption by the American household. But it now appears that the household sector could finally give in to the pressures of rising gasoline prices, a weakening home market, and a large […]
Download Public Policy Brief No. 90, 2007 PDF (367.52 KB)