Determining the social cost of carbon emissions (SCC) is a crucial step in the economic analysis of climate change policy as the US government’s recent decision to use a range of estimates of the SCC centered at $77/tC (or, equivalently, $21/tCO2) in cost-benefit analyses of proposed...

Trend and cyclical patterns of household, business, government, and foreign net borrowing shares of GDP are reviewed using diagrams and covariance decompositions of the identity stating that the sum of the shares equals zero. Household and business net borrowing shares and thereby those...

We introduce the results of a non-parametric estimate of the US wage Phillips Curve into a simplified version of the model of the wage-price spiral by Flaschel and Krolzig (2008). Making use of Okun’s law, the non-linearity in the wage inflation-employment relation translates into a...

The US national income and product accounts are restated in the form of a social accounting matrix or SAM. Using data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Consumer Expenditure Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the SAM is extended to include seven household groups in the size...

Thomas Piketty attributes increasing wealth inequality to the characteristics of a neoclassical aggregate production function, which is known not to exist. A more plausible narrative is that wage repression can lead to secular stagnation by enriching the rentier. Lower economic activity...

This paper begins with an informal history of developing country CGE models, going on to specification and closure, and finally describes a few models with financial extensions. Sectoral detail is central to CGE analysis, but after an initial sketch of an n-sector system most of the discussion...

Arguments regarding trade and other forms of liberalization in developing countries are reviewed. Microeconomically, the standard case for liberalization is dubious under increasing returns to scale and when firms can invest directly in productivity enhancement. Distributional effects of...

With full stock/flow accounting respected, the two-country open economy portfolio balance model has just two independent equations for asset market clearing. It can determine home and foreign interest rates but not the exchange rate. If asset market equilibria vary smoothly over time, the...