This paper analyzes the effects of the minimum wage on wage inequality, relative employment and over-education. Using an effciency wage model we show that over-education can be generated endogenously and that an increase in the minimum wage can raise both total and low-skill employment, and...

The interaction between income distribution, accumulation, employment and the utilization of capital is central to macroeconomic models in the `heterodox' tradition. This paper examines the stylized pattern of these variables using US data for the period after 1948. We look at the trends and...

Growth is endogenous in small open economies with substantial hidden or open unemployment, even under constant returns to scale. Growth promoting policies, however, have implications for the balance of trade, and two instruments are needed in order to achieve targets for both the growth rate and...

Mainstream macroeconomics has pursued .micro founded.models based on the explicit optimization by representative agents. The result has been a long and wasteful detour. But elements of the Lucas critique are relevant, also for heterodox economists. Challenging common heterodox views on...

Rising inequality affects the composition of asset demands as well as aggregate demand. The poor have few financial assets and their portfolio is skewed towards fixed-income assets. The rich, by contrast, hold a large proportion of their wealth in stocks. Thus, an increase in inequality tends to...

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. This approach can generate biases in the presence of positional goods and status effects. We show that by ignoring these direct consumption externalities, integrated assessment models overestimate the...

This note outlines and discusses some of the strands in the post-Keynesian literature on business cycles. Most post-Keynesians have focused on endogenously generated cycles, but the mechanism varies: some focus on the goods market, others on financial markets, the labor market, or political...

This paper examines the fiscal requirements for continuous full employment. We find that (i) changes in the financial behavior of households and firms require adjustments in tax rates and public debt, (ii) the stability of the steady-state solution for public debt depends on the .fiscal...

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. These representative-agent models have an intrinsic distributional bias in favor of the rich. The bias is compounded by the se of revenue-neutrality in the allocation of emission permits. The result is...

Macroeconomics is in crisis and this creates openings for alternative perspectives. The dominant heterodox traditions, however, have shortcomings that need to be addressed, both to improve our understanding of the real world and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the irrelevance...