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  • Working Paper No. 902 April 02, 2018

    The Job Guarantee

    Pavlina R. Tcherneva
    Abstract

    The job guarantee (JG) is a public option for jobs. It is a permanent, federally funded, and locally administered program that supplies voluntary employment opportunities on demand for all who are ready and willing to work at a living wage. While it is first and foremost a jobs program, it has the potential to be […]

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  • Book Series April 01, 2018

    America Classifies the Immigrants

    Joel Perlmann
    Abstract

    In America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Harvard University Press, 2018), Senior Scholar Joel Perlmann traces the evolution of thinking about “race” and “ethnic groups” in America. Beginning with the 1897 “List of Races and Peoples” through the proposed 2020 changes for the US Census, Perlmann examines the shifting ideas […]

  • Policy Notes No. 2 March 19, 2018

    Guaranteed Jobs through a Public Service Employment Program

    Stephanie A. Kelton, L. Randall Wray, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Scott Fullwiler, and Flavia Dantas
    Abstract

    Amid a recent upsurge in support for a national job guarantee program, L. Randall Wray, Stephanie A. Kelton, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Scott Fullwiler, and Flavia Dantas outline a new proposal for a federally funded program with decentralized administration. Their Public Service Employment (PSE) program would offer a job—paying a uniform living wage with a basic […]

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  • Working Paper No. 901 March 06, 2018

    Income Distribution, Household Debt, and Aggregate Demand

    J. W. Mason
    Abstract

    During the period leading up to the recession of 2007–08, there was a large increase in household debt relative to income, a large increase in measured consumption as a fraction of GDP, and a shift toward more unequal income distribution. It is sometimes claimed that these three developments were closely linked. In these stories, the […]

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  • Book Series March 01, 2018

    Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia

    Jan Kregel
    Abstract

    Edited by Marcella Corsi, Sapienza University of Rome, Levy Institute Director of Research Jan Kregel, and Carlo D’Ippoliti, Sapienza University of Rome, this new collection of 16 essays is dedicated to Alessandro Roncaglia and deals with the themes that “have characterized his work or represent expressions of his personality, his interests and method," particularly his […]

  • One-Pager No. 54 February 06, 2018

    Why the United States Will Beat China to the Next Minsky Moment

    L. Randall Wray
    Abstract

    The outgoing governor of the People’s Bank of China recently warned of a possible Chinese “Minsky moment”—Paul McCulley’s term, most recently applied to the 2007 US real estate crash that reverberated around the world as a global financial crisis. Although Western commentators have weighed in on both sides of the debate about the likelihood of […]

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  • Policy Notes No. 1 February 06, 2018

    Does the United States Face Another Minsky Moment?

    L. Randall Wray
    Abstract

    It is beginning to look a lot like déjà vu in the United States. According to Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, the combination of overvalued stocks, overleveraged banks, an undersupervised financial system, high indebtedness across sectors, and growing inequality together should remind one of the conditions of 1929 and 2007. Comparing the situations of the […]

    Download Policy Note 2018/1 PDF (334.91 KB)
  • Research Project Report February 06, 2018

    The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation

    Stephanie A. Kelton, Scott Fullwiler, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum
    Abstract

    Among the more ambitious policies that have been proposed to address the problem of escalating student loan debt are various forms of debt cancellation. In this report, Scott Fullwiler, Research Associate Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum examine the likely macroeconomic impacts of a one-time, federally funded cancellation of all outstanding student debt. The […]

    Download Research Project Report, February 2018 PDF (1.59 MB)
  • Working Paper No. 900 January 29, 2018

    Functional Finance

    L. Randall Wray
    Abstract

    This paper examines the views of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner on the functional finance approach to fiscal policy. It argues that the main principles of functional finance were relatively widely held in the immediate postwar period. However, with the rise of the Phillips curve, the return of the Quantity Theory, the development of the […]

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  • Working Paper No. 899 January 12, 2018

    Gender Pay Gaps in the Former Soviet Union: A Review of the Evidence

    Tamar Khitarishvili
    Abstract

    The goal of this paper is to examine the patterns and movements of the gender pay gaps in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and to place them in the context of advanced economies. We survey over 30 publications and conduct a meta-analysis of this literature. Gender pay gaps in the region are […]

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  • Policy Notes No. 4 November 09, 2017

    How Time Deficits and Hidden Poverty Undermine the Sustainable Development Goals

    Ajit Zacharias
    Abstract

    The predominant framework for measuring poverty rests on an implicit assumption that everyone has enough time available to devote to household production or enough resources to compensate for deficits in household production by purchasing market substitutes. Senior Scholar Ajit Zacharias argues that this implicit bias in our official poverty statistics threatens to undermine the Sustainable […]

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  • Working Paper No. 898 October 12, 2017

    Corporate Tax Incidence in India

    Lekha S. Chakraborty, and Samiksha Agarwal
    Abstract

    The paper attempts to measure the incidence of corporate income tax in India under a general equilibrium setting. Using seemingly uncorrelated regression coefficients and dynamic panel estimates, we tried to analyze both the relative burden of corporate tax borne by capital and labor and the efficiency effects of corporate income tax. The data for the […]

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  • Working Paper No. 897 September 20, 2017

    Quantitative Easing and Asset Bubbles in a Stock-flow Consistent Framework

    Tai Young-Taft, and Cameron Haas
    Abstract

    Ever since the Great Recession, central banks have supplemented their traditional policy tool of setting the short-term interest rate with massive buyouts of assets to extend lines of credit and jolt flagging demand. As with many new policies, there have been a range of reactions from economists, with some extolling quantitative easing’s expansionary virtues and […]

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  • Public Policy Brief No. 144 September 08, 2017

    A Two-Tier Eurozone or a Euro of Regions?

    Jan Kregel
    Abstract

    In light of the problems besetting the eurozone, this policy brief examines the contributions of John Maynard Keynes and Richard Kahn to early debates over the design of the postwar international financial system. Their critical engagement with the early policy challenges associated with managing international settlements offers a perspective from which to analyze the flaws […]

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  • Working Paper No. 896 September 04, 2017

    Minsky’s Financial Fragility

    Ernani Teixeira Torres Filho, Norberto Montani Martins, and Caroline Yukari Miaguti
    Abstract

    The present paper applies Hyman P. Minsky’s insights on financial fragility in order to analyze the behavior of electricity distribution companies in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. More specifically, it builds an analytical framework to classify the firms operating in this sector into Minskyan risk categories and assess how financial fragility evolved over time, in […]

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  • Working Paper No. 895 August 23, 2017

    Unemployment: The Silent Epidemic

    Pavlina R. Tcherneva
    Abstract

    This paper examines two key aspects of unemployment—its propagation mechanism and socioeconomic costs. It identifies a key feature of this macroeconomic phenomenon: it behaves like a disease. A detailed assessment of the transmission mechanism and the existing pecuniary and nonpecuniary costs of unemployment suggests a fundamental shift in the policy responses to tackling joblessness. To […]

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  • Working Paper No. 894 August 04, 2017

    An Inquiry Concerning Long-term US Interest Rates Using Monthly Data

    Tanweer Akram, and Huiqing Li
    Abstract

    This paper undertakes an empirical inquiry concerning the determinants of long-term interest rates on US Treasury securities. It applies the bounds testing procedure to cointegration and error correction models within the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) framework, using monthly data and estimating a wide range of Keynesian models of long-term interest rates. While previous studies have […]

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  • Working Paper No. 893 July 26, 2017

    The Neoclassicals’ Conundrum

    Oscar Valdes Viera
    Abstract

    Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith’s theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith’s notion of value, his understanding of the economic individual and their interactions in society, his methodology, and the field of study he afforded to […]

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  • Policy Notes No. 3 July 21, 2017

    Why the Compulsive Shift to Single Payer?

    L. Randall Wray
    Abstract

    The growing political momentum for a universal single-payer healthcare program in the United States is due in part to Republican attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). However, according to Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, it is Obamacare’s successes and its failures that have boosted support for a single-payer system. Even after […]

    Download Policy Note 2017/3 PDF (252.09 KB)
  • Policy Notes No. 2 July 07, 2017

    The Concert of Interests in the Age of Trump

    Jan Kregel
    Abstract

    If the Trump administration is to fulfill its campaign promises to this age’s “forgotten” men and women, Director of Research Jan Kregel argues, it should embrace the broader lesson of the 1930s: that government regulation and fiscal policy are crucial in addressing changes in the economic and financial structure that have exacerbated the problems faced […]

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  • Working Paper No. 892 June 21, 2017

    Understanding Financialization

    Charles J. Whalen
    Abstract

    Since the death of Hyman Minsky in 1996, much has been written about financialization. This paper explores the issues that Minsky examined in the last decade of his life and considers their relationship to that financialization literature. Part I addresses Minsky’s penetrating observations regarding what he called money manager capitalism. Part II outlines the powerful […]

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  • Working Paper No. 891 May 24, 2017

    Stock-flow Consistent Macroeconomic Models

    Gennaro Zezza, and Michalis Nikiforos
    Abstract

    The stock-flow consistent (SFC) modeling approach, grounded in the pioneering work of Wynne Godley and James Tobin in the 1970s, has been adopted by a growing number of researchers in macroeconomics, especially after the publication of Godley and Lavoie (2007), which provided a general framework for the analysis of whole economic systems, and the recognition […]

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  • Working Paper No. 890 May 15, 2017

    On the Centrality of Redemption

    Abstract

    The paper presents a financial approach to monetary analysis that links the credit and state theories of money. A premise of the functional approach to money is that “money is what money does.” In this approach, monetary and mercantile mechanics are conflated, which leads to the conclusion that unconvertible monetary instruments are worthless. The financial […]

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  • Working Paper No. 889 May 08, 2017

    The Dynamics of Government Bond Yields in the Eurozone

    Tanweer Akram, and Anupam Das
    Abstract

    This paper investigates the determinants of nominal yields of government bonds in the eurozone. The pooled mean group (PMG) technique of cointegration is applied on both monthly and quarterly datasets to examine the major drivers of nominal yields of long-term government bonds in a set of 11 eurozone countries. Furthermore, autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) methods […]

    Download Working Paper No. 889 PDF (416.57 KB)

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Blithewood
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
845-758-7700
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986 through the generous support of Bard College trustee Leon Levy, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. The Levy Institute is independent of any political or other affiliation, and encourages diversity of opinion in the examination of economic policy issues while striving to transform ideological arguments into informed debate.