More 'flexible' labour relations significantly reduce labour productivity growth in sectors that tend towards a 'routinised' (other than a 'garage business') innovation regime. We argue that structural reforms that make firing easier will diminish the loyalty and commitment of workers, making...

Are Institutional and post-Keynesian economists converging on a shared approach to understanding Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)? The literature suggests growing recognition that post-Keynesians and Institutionalists share a common intellectual history, conceptual frameworks, and overlapping...

Once every several decades, the private sector loses its mind in a bubble, leverages itself up to the hilt, and is forced into debt minimization in order to remove its debt overhang following the crash. When the private sector as a whole is deleveraging, even at record low interest rates,...

The euro area is currently going through its worst period of recession and economic stagnation since the Great Depression and World War II. The article tries to give an impression of the extraordinary degree of fiscal austerity and the devastating economic effects it has already had and must be...

Real wages in the United States have continued to stagnate in the years since the end of the Great Recession. This paper attributes this stagnation directly to the prolonged period of high unemployment. It notes research showing that the only period of sustained wage growth for most of the...

This paper offers a constructive critique of 'The Chicago Plan revisited' published by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof (2012) as an IMF working paper. On the one hand, there are reasons to query the exact details of the proposed reform, including claims of large steady-state output gains. On...

Reinhart/Rogoff (2010) and Reinhart et al. (2012) document a negative relationship between public debt and economic growth. However, by classifying the observations of their data set into public debt categories and identifying public debt overhang episodes, they focus only on 'one half' of the...

The relationship between income inequality and economic growth is complex. Some inequality is integral to the effective functioning of a market economy and the incentives needed for investment and growth. But inequality can also be destructive to growth, for example by amplifying the risk of...

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath offer an opportunity to institute significant reform in economics teaching, starting at the introductory level. Mainstream macroeconomics texts still rely heavily on a classical assumption of a long-run full employment equilibrium, which underrates...

Notwithstanding the modified ECB practice that saved the day, the euro area is failing to restore economic prosperity. The problem is visibly political, yet an effective solution must be economically viable. This essay articulates the reason behind the prolonged deflationary bias of euro area...