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Working Paper No. 469
August 11, 2006
The Changing Role of Employer Pensions
AbstractBy any measure, pension coverage should be at an all-time high: the nation is richer and workers are older. However, the pension world is a paradox, as pension security falls for middle-class workers and pension spending increases. The United States government directly and indirectly spends more than half a trillion dollars on the elderly each […]
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Working Paper No. 468
August 10, 2006
Global Demographic Trends and Provisioning for the Future
AbstractThe world’s population is aging. Virtually no nation is immune to this demographic trend and the challenges it brings for future generations. Relative growth of the elderly population is fueling debate about reform of social security programs in the United States and other developed nations. In the United States, the total discounted shortfall of Social […]
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Working Paper No. 467
August 09, 2006
The Financial Requirements of Achieving Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment
AbstractAlthough the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been ratified in global and national forums, they have not yet been incorporated into operational planning within governments or international organizations. The weak link between the policies and the investments needed for their implementation is one barrier to progress. An assessment of the resources required is a critical […]
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Working Paper No. 466
August 08, 2006
Net Government Expenditures and the Economic Well-Being of the Elderly in the United States, 1989–2001
AbstractWe examine the economic well-being of the elderly, using the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW). Compared to the conventional measures of income, the LIMEW is a comprehensive measure that incorporates broader definitions of income from wealth, government expenditures, and taxes. It also includes the value of household production. We find that the elderly […]
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Working Paper No. 465
August 04, 2006
The Local Geographic Origins of Russian-Jewish Immigrants, circa 1900
AbstractThis working paper concerns the local origins of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, circa 1900. New evidence is drawn from a large random sample of Russian-Jewish immigrant arrivals in the United States. It provides information on origins not merely by large regions, or even by the provinces of the Pale of Settlement (where nearly […]
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Working Paper No. 464
July 26, 2006
Differing Prospects for Women and Men
AbstractAlthough elderly men and women share many of the same problems as they age, their lives are likely to follow different courses. Women are more likely than men to live into old old-age and are more likely to spend part of their young old-age caring for husbands or parents. By providing this unpaid care women […]
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Working Paper No. 463
July 25, 2006
Working for a Good Retirement
AbstractThe choice of retirement age is the most important portfolio choice most workers will make. Drawing on the Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income model (DYNASIM3), this report examines how delaying retirement for nondisabled workers would affect individual retiree benefits, the solvency of the Social Security trust fund, and general revenues. The results suggest that […]
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Working Paper No. 462
July 24, 2006
Quick Impact Initiatives for Gender Equality
AbstractThe UN Millennium Project identified a set of Quick Impact Initiatives (QIIs) for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the Millennium Project, QIIs are interventions to be implemented in the early years of an MDG scale-up strategy that generate rapid results. With adequate resources, they can be implemented quickly (e.g., within three years) […]
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Working Paper No. 461
July 23, 2006
Wage Growth and the Measurement of Social Security’s Financial Condition
AbstractGovernment spending on the elderly is projected to increase rapidly as the American population becomes older. As a result, many policymakers and budget analysts are concerned about the continued viability of entitlement programs such as Social Security. The Social Security trustees’ economic growth projections receive considerable attention because many people believe that higher growth would […]
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Working Paper No. 460
July 22, 2006
How the Maastricht Regime Fosters Divergence As Well As Fragility
AbstractThis paper investigates the phenomenon of persistent macroeconomic divergence that has occurred across the eurozone in recent years. Optimal currency area theory would point toward asymmetric shocks and structural factors as the foremost candidate causes. The alternative hypothesis pursued here focuses on the working of the Maastricht regime itself, making it clear that the regime […]
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Working Paper No. 459
July 21, 2006
Banking, Finance, and Money
AbstractThis paper briefly summarizes the orthodox approach to banking, finance, and money, and then points the way toward an alternative based on socioeconomics. It argues that the alternative approach is better fitted to not only the historical record, but also sheds more light on the nature of money in modern economies. In orthodoxy, money is […]
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Working Paper No. 458
July 20, 2006
Dissent and Discipline in Ben Gurion’s Labor Party, 1930–32
AbstractThis paper describes a small opposition group that functioned during 1930–33 on the left fringes of Ben Gurion’s Mapai party in Palestine. Mapai dominated Jewish Palestine’s politics, and later the politics of the young State of Israel; it lives on today in Israel’s Labor Party. The opposition group, probably no more than a dozen active […]
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Book Series
July 16, 2006
The Distributional Effects of Government Spending and Taxation
AbstractThis book focuses on the distributional consequences of the public sector. It examines and documents, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of government spending and taxation on personal distribution, that is, on families and individuals. In addition, it investigates the relationship between the public sector and the functional distribution of national income. In this respect, […]
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Policy Notes No. 5
July 06, 2006
The Burden of Aging
AbstractDemographers and economists agree that we are aging—individually and collectively, nationally and globally. An aging population results from the twin demographic forces of fewer children per family and longer lives. Most experts recognize the burden that aging causes as the number of retirees supported by each worker rises. This trend is reinforced by the graying […]
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Working Paper No. 457
June 19, 2006
Why Central Banks (and Money) “Rule the Roost”
AbstractSome have argued that a significant decrease in the demand for money, due to financial innovations, could imply that central banks are unable to implement effective monetary policies. This paper argues that central banks are always able to influence the economy’s interest rates, because their liability is the economy’s unit of account. In this sense, […]
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Working Paper No. 456
June 18, 2006
Asset Prices, Financial Fragility, and Central Banking
AbstractThe paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and Post Keynesian frameworks. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, and so on) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper claims that central banks should focus their attention on […]
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Working Paper No. 455
June 17, 2006
The Minskyan System, Part III
AbstractThis is the last part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan Framework. The paper presents a model that studies some of the features presented in Parts I and II. The model is Post-Keynesian in nature and puts a large emphasis on the role of conventions and the importance of the financial side. In doing […]
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Working Paper No. 454
June 12, 2006
How Does Household Production Affect Earnings Inequality?
AbstractAlthough income inequality has been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of household production. Economic theory predicts that households with less money income will produce more goods at home. Thus extended income, which includes the value of household production, should be more equally distributed than money income. We find this […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 85
June 11, 2006
The Fallacy of the Revised Bretton Woods Hypothesis
AbstractThe stability of the international financial system is in doubt. Analysis of the system has focused mainly on the sustainability of financing the American trade deficit and has failed to understand the microeconomics of transactions within the system. According to this brief by Thomas I. Palley, the international financial system is unsustainable for reasons of […]
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Working Paper No. 453
June 09, 2006
The Minskyan System, Part II
AbstractThis is the second part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan framework. It studies in detail the dynamics at the root of the endogenous financial weakening of capitalist economic systems. This part combines the properties presented in part I with other important concepts, such as the paradox of leverage and conventional expectations, to explain […]
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Working Paper No. 452
June 08, 2006
The Minskyan System, Part I
AbstractThis is the first part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan framework. Via an extensive review of the literature, this paper looks at 12 essential elements necessary to get a good understanding of Minsky’s theory, and argues that those elements are central to comprehend how a monetary production economy works. This paper also shows […]
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Working Paper No. 451
May 25, 2006
Time and Money
AbstractTime and money are basic commodities in the utility function and are substitutes in real terms. To a certain extent, having time and money is a matter of either/or, depending on individual preferences and budget constraints. However, satisfaction with time and satisfaction with money are typically complements, i.e., individuals tend to be equally satisfied with […]
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Working Paper No. 450
May 24, 2006
Extending Minsky’s Classifications of Fragility to Government and the Open Economy
AbstractMinsky’s classification of fragility according to hedge, speculative, and Ponzi positions is well-known. He wrote about fragile positions of individual firms and of the economy as a whole, with the economy transitioning naturally from a robust financial structure (dominated by hedge units) to a fragile structure (dominated by speculative units). In most of Minsky’s writing, […]
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Working Paper No. 449
May 23, 2006
The Temporal Welfare State: A Cross-national Comparison
AbstractWelfare states contribute to people’s well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of “temporal autonomy”: the freedom to spend one’s time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, Australia, […]
Download Working Paper No. 449 PDF (143.85 KB)