Νίκος Κουτσιαράς: Μακροοικονομική θεωρία και πολιτική (επιστήμη)
Η εξηγητική ισχύς και προγνωστική δυνατότητα της μακροοικονομικής θεωρίας είναι αντικειμενικώς περιορισμένη και η διαμόρφωση της μακροοικονομικής πολιτικής μοιραίως εξαρτάται, επίσης, από (αμιγώς) πολιτικούς παράγοντες – που μελετώνται από την πολιτική θεωρία και αναγνωρίζονται στην πολιτική οικονομία. Η πρόσφατη κρίση θέτει υπό πολύ σοβαρή αμφισβήτηση θεωρητικά υποδείγματα, αλλά και ιδεολογικές θέσεις, που υποστηρίζουν ότι η […]
Fiscal policy and income inequality
IMF. Fiscal policy is the primary tool for governments to affect income distribution. Rising income inequality in advanced and developing economies has coincided with growing public support for income redistribution. This comes at a time when fiscal restraint is an important priority in many advanced and developing economies. In the context of the Fund’s mandate […]
Economic theories that influenced the judges of Karlsruhe
De Grauwe, Paul. The German constitutional court declared the OMT program to against EU law. This column argues that the economic logic used by the German judges was flawed – based on economic theories that have been rejected empirically. Πηγή: Voxeu πλήρες κείμενο
Foreign investors and crises: There is no safe haven for all seasons
Habib, Maurizio Michael, Stracca, Livio. At the peak of the Global Crisis, the US dollar appreciated and US Treasury yields fell, suggesting that foreign investors were purchasing US assets in general. Actually, they were fleeing only into short-term Treasury bills. This column discusses recent research showing that there are indeed no securities which are consistently a […]
Changing trade patterns, unchanging European and global governance
O‘Neill, Jim, Terzi, Alessio. The world economy is going through its biggest transformation in a relatively short space time. There have been many explanations for this phenomenon but the unprecedented scale and pace of this change and, most crucially, its implications, still seems little understood. In turn, there has been little preparation for, or adjustment to, this […]
Who Anticipated the Great Depression? Gustav Cassel versus Keynes and Hayek on the Interwar Gold Standard
Douglas, Irwin. The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a depression (bust following a credit-fueled investment boom) […]
OECD forecasts during and after the financial crisis
OECD. This note discusses OECD forecast performance over the period 2007-12. It focuses on the lessons that can be learned from cross-country differences in growth forecast errors and the changes to forecasting models and procedures that have been prompted by the experience of the crisis. A more detailed statistical evaluation of OECD forecast performance, and […]
Sticky Situations
Krugman, Paul. David Glasner has a thoughtful post about wage stickiness, afavorite topic of mine. And he is partially right in suggesting that there has been a bit of a role reversal regarding the role of sticky wages in recessions: Keynes asserted that wage flexibility would not help, but Keynes’s self-proclaimed heirs ended up putting downward nominal wage […]
Tracking the causes of Eurozone external imbalances: New evidence
Jose Luis Diaz Sanchez, Aristomene Varoudakis. External imbalances within the Eurozone grew substantially between the introduction of the euro in 1999 and the global financial crisis of 2008–09. Using new empirical evidence, this column argues that imbalances in the Eurozone periphery were mainly driven by a domestic demand boom, triggered by greater financial integration, with […]
Bullard on the ‘Death of a Theory’
Simon Wren-Lewis. Following this post, James Bullard (President of the St. Louis Fed, and member of the FOMC – the US equivalent of the Monetary Policy Committee) kindly sent me his article (pdf) entitled ‘Death of a Theory’. As the theory he is referring to is the idea of fiscal stimulus at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB), the title tells you that the […]