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Blog
The Reserve Bank’s Pandemic Predicament
by Lekha Chakraborty and Harikrishnan S As the Reserve Bank of India Governor Shri Shaktikanta Das puts it upfront, these are extraordinary times, and we need to respond with “whatever it takes” to deal with the pandemic. Over the past few days, our hope for systematically “flattening the curve” by containing the COVID-19 pandemic and [...]
Public Policy Brief No. 151
Crisis, Austerity, and Fiscal Expenditure in Greece
This policy brief provides a discussion of the relationships between austerity, Greece’s macroeconomic performance, debt sustainability, and the provision of healthcare and other social services over the last decade. It explains that austerity was imposed in the name of debt sustainability. However, there was a vicious cycle of recession and austerity: each round of austerity […]
Working Paper No. 958
A Stock-Flow Consistent Quarterly Model of the Italian Economy
Macroeconomists and political officers need rigorous, albeit realistic, quantitative models to forecast the future paths and dynamics of some variables of interest while being able to evaluate the effects of alternative scenarios. At the heart of all these models lies a standard macroeconomic module that, depending on the degree of sophistication and the research questions […]
Summary No. 2
Summary Spring 2020
This issue of the Summary features two Strategic Analyses. The first assesses the trends impacting the US economy’s sectoral balances in the context of overvalued asset markets and overleveraged corporate balance sheets; the second, for Greece, identifies the necessary conditions for achieving the government’s campaign promise of 4 percent GDP growth in 2020 and 2021, […]
Blog
Eulogy for Carlos Lessa
I have translated this eulogy on behalf of the Economics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I have spent many of my years of economic formation. Carlos Lessa is part of a generation of brilliant Brazilian economists that have shaped the public debate and the discipline in Brazil. This is an [...]
Working Paper No. 957
Notes on Intersectional Political Economy
This paper presents a critique of Karl Marx’s labor theory of value and his theory of falling profit rates from an intersectional political economy perspective. Specifically, I rely on social reproduction theory to propose that Marx-biased technical change disrupts the social order and leads to competition between workers. The bargaining power of workers cannot be […]
Blog
Higher Education in Brazil: Interrupted Inclusion?
by Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira Brazil is a highly unequal country — so is the access to its higher education system. However, in the beginning of the 21st century (2001-2015), there was a convergence between the profile of Brazilian higher education students and the Brazilian population in terms of income, race, and region, although [...]
Public Policy Brief No. 150
The Impact of Technological Innovations on Money and Financial Markets
According to Senior Scholar Jan Kregel and Paolo Savona, attempting to maintain the status quo in the face of the introduction of some recent technological innovations—chiefly cryptocurrencies and associated instruments based on distributed ledger technology, the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the use of data science in financial markets—will create risks that increase instability and […]
Blog
The Political Economy of Lockdown in India
by Harikrishnan S and Lekha Chakraborty As predictable as it can be, the Indian Prime Minister announced lockdown at 8 PM on March 24th 2020, giving the country and its 1.3 billion people all of four hours to get ready, evoking memories of the demonetisation announcement and the midnight launch of the GST! This was [...]
Strategic Analysis
Greece’s Economy after COVID-19
Greece’s fragile economic recovery was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic: GDP, employment, exports, and investment are expected to record significantly negative trends. While some projections for GDP growth show a quick V-shaped recovery beginning in 2021, this is rather improbable given the Greek economy’s structural inefficiencies. This strategic analysis explores the consequences of various assumptions about […]
Working Paper No. 956
An Empirical Analysis of Long-Term Brazilian Interest Rates
This paper empirically models the dynamics of Brazilian government bond (BGB) yields based on monthly macroeconomic data in the context of the evolution of Brazil’s key macroeconomic variables. The results show that the current short-term interest rate has a decisive influence on BGBs’ long-term interest rates after controlling for various key macroeconomic variables, such as […]
Working Paper No. 955
Class Size, Cognitive Abilities, Bullying, and Violent Behavior
This study uses rich administrative and survey data to investigate the effects of class size on students’ cognitive tests as well as bullying and violent behavior. I use the maximum class size rule to create a regression discontinuity (RD) relation between cohort enrollment size and class size in the public and the United Nations Relief […]