This paper examines the issue of the Greek public debt from different perspectives. We provide a historical discussion of the accumulation of Greece's public debt since the 1960s and the role of public debt in the recent crisis. We show that the austerity imposed since 2010 has been unsuccessful...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

The paper discusses the trajectories of the Greek public deficit and sovereign debt over the last three decades and its connection to the political and economic environment of the same period. We pay special attention to the causality between the public and the foreign deficit. We argue that...

The present paper presents a discussion of the forces at play behind the economic fluctuations in the medium run and their relation with the short-run macroeconomic equilibrium. The business cycle is the result of two separate phenomena. On the one hand there is the instability, which is caused...

The Gibson paradox, long observed by economists and named by John Maynard Keynes (1936), is a positive relationship between the interest rate and the price level. This paper explains the relationship by means of interest-rate, cost-push inflation. In the model: spending is driven in part by...

Since Christopher Sims's quot;Macroeconomics and Realityquot; (1980), macroeconomists have used structural VARs, or vector autoregressions, for policy analysis. Constructing the impulse response functions and variance decompositions that are central to this literature requires factoring the...

The process of constructing impulse-response functions (IRFs) and forecast-error variance decompositions (FEVDs) for a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) usually involves a factorization of an estimate of the error-term variance-covariance matrix V. Examining residuals from a monetary VAR,...

In his presidential address to the American Economic Association, Robert Lucas claimed that the welfare costs of the business cycle in the United States equaled .05 percent of consumption. His calculation compared the utility of a representative consumer receiving actual per-capita consumption...

Despite being arguably one of the most active areas of research in heterodox macroeconomics, the study of the dynamic properties of stock-flow consistent (SFC) growth models of financially sophisticated economies is still in its early stages. This paper attempts to offer a contribution to this...

To put an economy on an equitable growth path, economic development must be based on social efficiency, equity, and job creation. It has been shown that unemployment has far-reaching effects, all leading to an inequitable distribution of well-being. But many economists assume that unemployment...