Max Weber Lecture Series
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Finance Without Financiers*
3 Finance without Financiers* Robert C. Hockett, Cornell Law School * Thanks to Dan Alpert, Fadhel Kaboub, Stephanie Kelton, Paul McCulley, Zoltan Polszar, Nouriel Roubini and particularly my alter ego Saule Omarova. Special thanks to Fred Block and Erik Olin Wright, who have been part of this project since its inception in 2014 – as well as to the “September Group,” where it proved necessary that same year to formulate arguments whose full elaboration has issued in this Chapter. Hockett, Finance without Financiers 4 I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work…Thus [we] might aim in practice… at an increase in the volume of capital until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus; and at a scheme of direct taxation which allows the intelligence and determination and executive skill of the financiers… (who are certainly so fond of their craft that their labour could be obtained much cheaper than at present), to be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward.1 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF SCARCITY AND INTERMEDIATION A familiar belief about banks and other financial institutions is that they function primarily as “intermediaries,” managing flows of scarce funds from private sector “savers” or “surplus units” who have accumulated them to “dissevers” or “deficit units” who have need of them and can pay for their use. This view is routinely stated in treatises,2 textbooks,3 learned journals,4 and the popular media.5 It also lurks in the background each time we hear theoretical references to “loanable funds,” practical warnings about public “crowd-out” of private investment, or the like.6 This, what I shall call “intermediated scarce private capital” view of finance bears two interesting properties. -
What Is Minsky All About, Anyway?
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES What is Minsky All About, Anyway? Korkut Ertürk Gökcer Özgür Working Paper No: 2009-08 University of Utah Department of Economics 1645 East Central Campus Dr., Rm. 308 Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9300 Tel: (801) 581-7481 Fax: (801) 585-5649 http://www.econ.utah.edu 1 What is Minsky All About, Anyway? Korkut Ertürk Gökcer Özgür Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Ken Jameson for his helpful comments without implicating him for any possible mistakes there might be. 2 The financial crisis has been billed a “Minsky moment” in the mainstream media, turning Hyman P. Minksy into a household name. One would think that this was at long last Minsky’s moment of posthumous vindication, and in a way it was. But, oddly, a couple of post-Keynesian luminaries would have none of it. Paul Davidson, the Editor of JPKE , and Jan Kregel, senior scholar at the Levy Institute of Bard College where Minksy had spent the last of his years, were both eager to set the record straight: the current financial debacle did not qualify as a Minskyan crisis because how it unfolded differed from Minsky’s depiction of crises in his writings (Davidson 2008, Kregel 2008a). Of course, whether we think Minsky is relevant for the current crisis or not depends on what we make of him. If Minskyan work means solely his own writings and their restatement, then, Davidson and Kregel are probably right – one cannot help but focus on what is different about the current crisis. But, if instead Minksyan refers to an evolving literature that emanate from but transcend his work, their arguments miss their mark. -
The Great Moderation, the Great Panic and the Great Contraction By
“The Great Moderation, the Great Panic and the Great Contraction” Speech given by Charles Bean, Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy and Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England Given at the Schumpeter Lecture, Annual Congress of the European Economic Association, Barcelona 25 August 2009 I am grateful for the assistance of Adrian Penalver. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of either the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. 1 All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx Summary Charles Bean, the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy, was invited to deliver the Schumpeter lecture at the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association. The Great Moderation, the Great Panic and the Great Contraction, looks back at the causes of the financial crisis and subsequent recession. He argues that much of what went wrong can be analysed using standard economic tools. The Great Moderation was a period of unusually stable macroeconomic activity in advanced economies. This was partly thanks to good luck, including the integration of emerging market countries into the global economy, and partly a dividend from structural economic changes and better policy frameworks. The longer this stability persisted, the more markets became convinced of its permanence and risk premia became extremely low. Real short and long term interest rates were also low due to a combination of loose monetary policy, particularly in the US, and strong savings rates in a number of surplus countries. Low interest rates and low apparent risk created strong incentives for financial institutions to become highly geared. -
Boa Cover Pages
5TH EUROSTAT COLLOQUIUM ON MODERN TOOLS FOR BUSINESS CYCLE ANALYSIS Jointly organised by EUROSTAT and European University Institute (Florence, Italy) Luxembourg, 29th September – 1st October 2008 Monetary Policies and Low-Frequency Manifestations of the Quantity Theory Thomas Sargent Paolo Surico Monetary Policies and Low-Frequency Manifestations of the Quantity Theory∗ Thomas J. Sargent† Paolo Surico‡ September 2008 Abstract To detect the quantity theory of money, we follow Lucas (1980) by looking at scatter plots of filtered time series of inflation and money growth rates and interest rates and money growth rates. Like Whiteman (1984), we relate those scatter plots to sums of two-sided distributed lag coefficients constructed from fixed-coefficient and time-varying VARs for U.S. data from 1900-2005. We interpret outcomes in terms of population values of those sums of coefficients implied by two DSGE models. The DSGE models make the sums of weights depend on the monetary policy rule via cross-equation restrictions of a type that Lucas (1972) and Sargent (1971) emphasized in the context of testing the natural unemployment rate hypothesis. When the U.S. data are extended beyond Lucas’s 1955-1975 period, the patterns revealed by scatter plots mutate in ways that we want to attribute to prevailing monetary policy rules. JEL classification: E4, E5, N1 Key words: quantity theory, policy regimes, time-varying VAR ∗We wish to thank Tim Besley, Efrem Castelnuovo, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Haroon Mumtaz, and Francesco Zanetti for useful discussions. Sargent thanks the Bank of England for providing research support when he was a Houblon-Norman Fellow. -
Tax Policy Reform: the Role of Empirical Evidence
TAX POLICY REFORM: THE ROLE OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE Richard Blundell University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies Abstract To understand the role of evidence in tax policy design, this paper organizes the empirical analysis of reform under five loosely related headings: (i) key margins of adjustment, (ii) measurement of effective tax rates, (iii) the importance of information and complexity, (iv) evidence on the size of responses, and (v) implications from theory for tax design. The context for the discussion is the recently published Mirrlees Review of tax reform. Although the Review focused on all aspects of tax reform, this paper highlights the taxation of earnings. It also comments on earnings taxation in the context of VAT base-broadening reforms and the taxation of capital (JEL: H2, H3). 1. Introduction How should evidence be used in the study of tax design? What is the appropriate balance between theory and empirics? These questions lay at the heart of the Mirrlees Review. Motivated by the aim to develop a broad set of principles for what makes a good tax system, the Review was an attempt to base tax reform on the large body of economic theory and empirical evidence. It was inspired by the Meade Report (1978) with the idea to review tax design from first principles for modern open economies in general and for the UK in particular. The UK over the past thirty years would be the working laboratory. The Mirrlees Review was published in two volumes: Dimensions of Tax Design (Mirrlees et al. 2010) bringing together expert evidence across a wide range of aspects of tax reform, and Tax by Design (Mirrlees et al. -
New Institutional Economics: a State-Of-The-Art Review for Economic Sociologists by Rinat Menyashev, Timur Natkhov, Leonid Polishchuk, and Georgiy Syunyaev 12
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne) (Ed.) Periodical Part economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, Volume 13, Number 1-3 economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Provided in Cooperation with: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne Suggested Citation: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne) (Ed.) (2011) : economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, Volume 13, Number 1-3, economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, ISSN 1871-3351, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne, Vol. 13, Iss. 1-3 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/155978 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. -
Michael BEST CV
MICHAEL CARLOS BEST Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) | [email protected]| personal.lse.ac.uk/bestm John A. & Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA | +1 (415) 316 5006 October 2014 EMPLOYMENT 2014-2017 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University Postdoctoral Fellow EDUCATION 2009-2014 London School of Economics PhD Economics 2011-2012 UC Berkeley Economics, Center for Equitable Growth Visiting PhD Student 2008-2009 London School of Economics MRes Economics (distinction) 2006-2008 University of Oxford MPhil Economics (distinction) 2003-2006 London School of Economics BSc Government & Economics PUBLICATIONS Production vs Revenue Efficiency With Limited Tax Capacity: Theory and Evidence From Pakistan (with Anne Brockmeyer, Henrik Kleven, Johannes Spinnewijn and Mazhar Waseem) September 2014. Forth- coming, Journal of Political Economy WORKING PAPERS Salary Misreporting and the Role of Firms in Workers’ Responses to Taxes: Evidence from Pakistan May 2014 Housing Market Responses to Transaction Taxes: Evidence from Notches and Stimulus in the UK (with Henrik Kleven) May 2014 Optimal Income Taxation with Career Effects of Work Effort (with Henrik Kleven) February 2013. Revise & Resubmit at the American Economic Review WORK IN PROGRESS Motivating Bureaucrats: Autonomy vs Performance Pay for Public Procurement in Pakistan (with Ori- ana Bandiera, Adnan Khan and Andrea Prat) The Challenge of Taxing Small Businesses in Mexico (with Miguel Almunia) Haste Makes Waste: -
The New Political Economy
The New Political Economy Timothy Besley London School of Economics November 8, 2004 1 Introduction It is a great honour to give this year’sKeynes lecture. I have chosen as my subject the New Political Economy, a body of research and thinking that has ‡ourished in the past …fteen years or so at the interface between economics and politics. At the margin the New Political Economy reverses the split that occurred between the disciplines of economics and political science at the end of the nineteenth century. The aim of the New Political Economy is to understand important issues that arise in the policy sphere.1 It is not, as is occasionally hinted, an e¤ort by economists to colonize political science. Rather, the main concern is to extend the competence of economists to analyze issues that require some facility with economic and political decision making. This lecture is not in any sense a survey of the …eld. It is a highly selective and personal view of the motivation behind the …eld and some of the key themes that link the literature. Thus, it represents a manifesto presented in the hope that somebody who encounters these ideas for the …rst time here might be tempted to delve further into the literature and even contribute to it. This paper is based on the Keynes lecture delivered at the British Academy on October 13th 2004. I am indebted to Pete Boetkke, Mary Morgan and Torsten Persson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this lecture and Steve Coate for numerous illuminating discussions. -
The Socialization of Investment, from Keynes to Minsky and Beyond
Working Paper No. 822 The Socialization of Investment, from Keynes to Minsky and Beyond by Riccardo Bellofiore* University of Bergamo December 2014 * [email protected] This paper was prepared for the project “Financing Innovation: An Application of a Keynes-Schumpeter- Minsky Synthesis,” funded in part by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET grant no. IN012-00036, administered through the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Co-principal investigators: Mariana Mazzucato (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex) and L. Randall Wray (Levy Institute). The author thanks INET and the Levy Institute for support of this research. The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad. Levy Economics Institute P.O. Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 http://www.levyinstitute.org Copyright © Levy Economics Institute 2014 All rights reserved ISSN 1547-366X Abstract An understanding of, and an intervention into, the present capitalist reality requires that we put together the insights of Karl Marx on labor, as well as those of Hyman Minsky on finance. The best way to do this is within a longer-term perspective, looking at the different stages through which capitalism evolves. -
The Tale of Two Great Crises
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Fratianni, Michele; Giri, Federico Working Paper The tale of two great crises FinMaP-Working Paper, No. 51 Provided in Cooperation with: Collaborative EU Project FinMaP - Financial Distortions and Macroeconomic Performance, Kiel University et al. Suggested Citation: Fratianni, Michele; Giri, Federico (2015) : The tale of two great crises, FinMaP-Working Paper, No. 51, Kiel University, FinMaP - Financial Distortions and Macroeconomic Performance, Kiel This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/125823 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu The Tale of Two Great Crises Michele Fratianni∗ Federico Giriy December 14, 2015 Abstract The great depression of 1929 and the great financial crisis of 2008 have been the two big events of the last 75 years. -
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Policy Note 2018 / 1 DOES THE UNITED STATES FACE ANOTHER MINSKY MOMENT? l. randall wray Outgoing governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, recently sounded an alarm about the fragility of China’s financial sector, referring to the possibility of a “Minsky moment.” Paul McCulley coined the term and applied it first to the serial bursting of the Asian Tiger and Russian bubbles in the late 1990s, and later to our own real estate crash in 2007 that reverberated around the world as the global financial crisis (GFC). We are still mopping up after the excesses in the markets for mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (squared and cubed), and credit default swaps. Governor Zhou’s public warning was unusual and garnered the attention he presumably intended. With the 19th Communist Party Congress in full swing in Beijing, there is little doubt that recent rapid growth of Chinese debt (which increased from 162 percent to 260 percent of GDP between 2008 and 2016) was a topic of discussion, if not deep concern. Western commentators have weighed in on both sides of the debate about the likelihood of China’s debt bubble heading for a crash. And yet there has been little discussion of the far more probable visitation of another Minsky moment on America. In this policy note, I make the case that it is beginning to look a lot like déjà vu in the United States. Senior Scholar l. randall wray is a professor of economics at Bard College. -
What Is Past Is Prologue: the History of the Breakdown of Economic Models Before and During the 2008 Financial Crisis
McCormac 1 What is Past is Prologue: The History of the Breakdown of Economic Models Before and During the 2008 Financial Crisis By: Ethan McCormac Political Science and History Dual Honors Thesis University of Oregon April 25th, 2016 Reader 1: Gerald Berk Reader 2: Daniel Pope Reader 3: George Sheridan McCormac 2 Introduction: The year 2008, like its predecessor 1929, has established itself in history as synonymous with financial crisis. By December 2008 Lehman Brothers had entered bankruptcy, Bear Sterns had been purchased by JP Morgan Chase, AIG had been taken over by the United States government, trillions of dollars in asset wealth had evaporated and Congress had authorized $700 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to bailout different parts of the U.S. financial system.1 A debt-deflationary- derivatives crisis had swept away what had been labeled Alan Greenspan’s “Great Moderation” and exposed the cascading weaknesses of the global financial system. What had caused the miscalculated risk-taking and undercapitalization at the core of the system? Part of the answer lies in the economic models adopted by policy makers and investment bankers and the actions they took licensed by the assumptions of these economic models. The result was a risk heavy, undercapitalized, financial system primed for crisis. The spark that ignited this unstable core lay in the pattern of lending. The amount of credit available to homeowners increased while lending standards were reduced in a myopic and ultimately counterproductive credit extension scheme. The result was a Housing Bubble that quickly turned into a derivatives boom of epic proportions.