Working Papers

As the “Technoking” of Tesla strategizes to maintain his control over the company’s decision-making, anyone concerned with the role that Tesla will play in the evolving EV transition should be asking how CEO Musk might use, or abuse, his powerful position.

By 1812 the U.S. already had more business corporations than any other country, and possibly more than all other countries put together, securing its role as the world’s first “corporation nation.”

Sensitivity of investment and valuation to drug price indices and market conditions

The concentration of innovation in a handful of urban centers engenders large and persistent regional disparities in economic opportunity.

The current paper returns to the key questions of wages and incomes and how wealth effects cripple reliance on interest rates to control inflation.

How convincing is the model analysis by Bernanke and Blanchard? How empirically relevant are their mechanisms causing inflation – and how robust and plausible are their econometric findings?

The empirical analysis of public sector investments and the health value created by the drugs selected for Medicare price negotiations provides a cost basis for the assessment of the maximum fair price.

It is not just all about banking system liquidity

Read in the context of his time, Bagehot’s book Lombard Street appears as an attempt above all to reveal the dynamic of globalization when global money was sterling.

Research on labor market experience does not explain the link between the volatility low-wage workers encounter and their earnings and it leaves open numerous pressing questions, such as what, if anything, can be done to reduce racial and ethnic differences in economic well-being.

Examining the crucial role of poverty and inequality in shaping household indebtedness.

The re-emergence of inflation threw the ‘science of monetary policy’ off the rails. Do the new tweaks to the theory work?

Creating the post-2008 global safety net for mega-banks

By permitting business definitions of “efficiency” to leak over into the antitrust lexicon, antitrust scholars have done a great disservice

Monetary policy should be guided much more by financial sector developments and much less by near-term targets for inflation.

Central banks strongly favored rentier incomes in their reaction functions

Were the sharp increases in prices during 2020-2022 due to fundamental shifts in supply and demand or are they attributable to excessive market speculation?

Changes to deeply entrenched systems of unequal gender power dynamics, roles and relations, underpinned by patriarchal values, are part of an effective response to the prevention of sexual harassment and its economic consequences.

Does cyber risk exposure, as opposed to actual incidents, affect firm outcomes?

Revenues to GB electricity generators in 2022 increased by almost £30bn, compared to pre-COVID levels.

Antitrust econometrics relies on often-implausible assumptions

Despite the shock and the costs, the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy were in the nature of a gift.

A Balance-of-Payments Constrained Growth Perspective

On the dereliction of key US-based business corporations to take the lead in making the investments in organizational learning required to generate cutting-edge communication-infrastructure products.

If primary commodities and mid-to-high-tech manufacturing products are produced by industries with different wage shares, there are distributive implications of deepening trade integration with certain regions with respect to others.

The principal threat to economic stability currently is the overhang of debt, both private and public.

Increased hospital system consolidation in small Metropolitan Statistical Areas is adversely related to nurse wage growth.

Things are going to break and central banks are going to have to respond, but the mental frame that most people will be using is not well suited for understanding how the world now works

A critical reappraisal of the case in favor of monetary tightening pressed by inflation hawks is overdue.

The Consumer Welfare Standard is severely limited or defective, preventing it from being an appropriate standard for modern antitrust.

A Novel Account of Inflation Forecasts

Moving away from fossil fuels, towards a system with a far greater contribution from variable renewables, means that the current system is not fit for purpose.

Fears of ‘stagflation’ have come back to haunt macroeconomic policy makers all over the globe

Price Inflation, Marginal Cost Pricing, and Principles for Electricity Market Redesign in an Era of Low-Carbon Transition

China’s successful technological development path stands in contrast to the corporate financialization model in the United States

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are considered “passive” investors and are exempt from corporate tax. But in reality, they play a very active role in reshaping whole industries, like healthcare.

Central banks can encourage climate-friendly investments by offering financial institutions favorable haircuts on green collateral

A persistent regime of low wages may determine very negative long-term consequences on the economy.

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

Are there alternative, less socially costly, ways to bring inflation down?

Despite his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority

Contrary to the neoclassical loanable funds theory, historical bond yields show Keynes was right that “convictions” anchor long-term interest rates

Business firms are not alone in making investments in the productive capabilities required to generate innovative goods and services. Household units and government agencies also make investments in productive capabilities upon which business firms rely for their own investment activities.

The Consumer Welfare Standard of antitrust is outdated and defective

How could the new SDR allocation help developing countries?

Using aggregate campaign finance data as well as a Transformer based text embedding model we can predict roll call votes for legislation in the US Congress with more than 90% accuracy.

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

US regulators can step in to ensure drug pricing both supports patient access and drug development

A formal argument that Kahneman and Tversky’s compelling empirical findings, and those of other behavioral economists, do not provide a basis for a general approach to specifying participants’ “predictable errors.”

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility become severely diminished

The pandemic and electrification are shaking the foundations of the auto industry

A tractable formalization of the Knightian uncertainty faced by an economist and market participants in an intertemporal asset-price model.

Some cautionary remarks

By helping abate the liquidity crisis, incidences of banks becoming insolvent are reduced, and hence moral hazard in its severest form is minimized.

Covid and BLM protests were key to Biden’s victory

Swift reorganization or liquidation of insolvent businesses is the single best policy to deal with corporate debt booms.

Between a rock and a hard place

Open-ended polling responses reveal considerably more complexity – and more ambivalence and negativity – in Americans’ views of international trade than has been inferred from widely cited closed questions

In the 19th Century, “hypothecations” provided investors with valuable information on sovereign fiscal resources

Stock-Price Volatility During the Pandemic

To strengthen the American semiconductor industry, Congress should condition additional funds on suspending stock buybacks

Evidence from Survey Data of Inflation Forecasts

“School choice” aimed to block the choice of equal, integrated education for Black families

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

Is Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose adage “lending freely against good collateral at a penalty rate” has been gospel for central bankers, still relevant in a post-Great Financial Crisis world?

How once-promising Black upward mobility reversed course, and what can be done about it

Despite fear-mongering about the latest Consumer Price Index, unemployment remains elevated and stimulus is needed to prevent a collapse in demand

Analyzing corporate conference calls reveals the way that countries perceive and spread risk through the global financial system

Contrary to the New Keynesian paradigm, long-term unemployment can be reversed without a significant uptick in inflation

Unlike the Great Recession, the pandemic has hit women workers harder than men, and disproportionately hurt the job prospects of lower education workers

The People’s Bank of China’s network of local currency swap arrangements provide Asian countries with a much-needed safety net, while also strengthening China’s diplomatic position

Formerly incarcerated Black people emerge from prison with far less education and social skills than white ex-cons. And they have great trouble forming families or earning a good living.

Mortality and economic data show how constraints to government spending and a skepticism of redistributive policies have made the pandemic far worse

INET’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation - Interim Report on the Global Response to the Pandemic

The New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) is a straightjacket for macroeconomics

A large and growing percentage of households are missed in the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).

Conservative legal theory is based on a shoddy definition of what constitutes “efficiency”

Labor-saving advances in AI may undo the gains from globalization and pose new challenges for economic development

Recognizing that inflation of the value of output and its costs of production must be equal, we focus on a cost-based macroeconomic structuralist approach in contrast to micro-oriented monetarist analysis.

This paper analyzes the role of local spending, particularly on social welfare, and local inequality as factors in the Italian political crisis following the adoption in 2011 of more radical national austerity measures.

“Build back” means restoring the government and business investments in the productive capabilities of the U.S. labor force that created a growing middle class in the three decades after World War II

Even if psychological factors influence participants’ decision-making, as behavioral economists compellingly argue, incorporating such factors into economic theory would seem to require that market participants adhere to elementary logical rules.

How electric and self-driving cars could change the industry

Carbon pricing still has the potential to be a powerful tool contributing to emissions reductions, but it is clearly no panacea.

In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning.

Unregistered lobbyists, including former members of Congress, are a key resource for lobbying firms

Our findings confirm the existence of a negative relationship between labor market slack and the wage share, and we find no tendency to return to a ‘normal’ unemployment rate associated with a stable wage share.

The study seeks to explain why the instruments of central banking inevitably break down over time.

How NAFTA led to GOP dominance of the American South

Amid debates over costs—and profits—from a coronavirus vaccine, a new study shows that taxpayers have been footing the bill for every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019

Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.

An alternative look at the “global savings glut”

Despite post-2008 regulations, the boom-bust credit cycle continues to run wild

The success of projects for pandemic preparedness and response depends on the strength of government-business collaborations.

A look at Dodd-Frank’s impact

To fulfill MLK’s vision of jobs and freedom for Black Americans, Washington must rein in corporate greed

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

Rising inequality has focused attention on the benefits of new technologies. Do these accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class.

The popular discontent and rise of ‘populist’ political parties is closely related to the failure of New Labor to navigate social democracy’s dilemma.