June Flanders (2015) provides a useful introduction to Hyman Minsky’s views on banking and macroeconomics. Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” (FIH) basically says that debt-based intermediation does not enable intertemporal equilibrium but rather self-generates boom and bust...

The paper aims to expose economists at large to the work of Hyman Minsky. The popular term ‘Minsky Moment’ is somewhat misleading, for he perceived not a moment but an era of instability and governmental management at the brink of crisis. His model incorporates explicitly money and the...

This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed.

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival...

Monetarists maintain that changes in the price level are attributable to the level of the money supply. Hence, price stability has been the rationale for the money supply rule derived from the Quantity Theory of Money. Consequently, to curb inflation, the general price level index is the lever...

Movement in China’s money supply is shown to drive the movement in world money supply over the last twenty years. Structural shocks to G3 (U.S., Eurozone and Japan) real M2 and to China’s real M2 are both large over 1996:1-2011:12. The cumulative impact of real G3 M2 shocks on real oil...

Obtaining reliable data on capital is a recurring challenge when estimating economy-wide productivity growth, especially for developing countries. In this paper I construct energy-based productivity series which use energy consumption instead of capital when making such estimates. I first show...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. In this paper a condition on the primitives determines whether an economy supports institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not...

Die Dynamik der Weltwirtschaft wird in den kommenden Monaten verhalten bleiben. Zwar sind die Ölpreise wieder gefallen, doch bestimmt die Abschwächung in den USA vorerst das weltwirtschaftliche Klima. Einer stärkeren Abkühlung wirkt im Euroraum die expansive Finanzpolitik entgegen. In...

Am 23. Oktober stellten die sechs Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitute in Berlin ihr Herbstgutachten der Presse vor. Sie kommen zu der Ansicht, dass der Konjunkturabschwung durch die Terroranschläge verstärkt wurde. Mit einer Besserung ist erst im nächsten Jahr zu rechnen.