The subprime mortgage crisis caught Wall Street off guard this summer. That is the definition of a crisis, and a credit crunch soon ensued. But according to the financial thinking of the late economist Hyman Minsky, such problems are endemic to what he called "money manager capitalism."...

Post-Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI), a synthesis of post Keynesian and institutional economics, emerged in the USA as a strand of evolutionary economics in the early 1980s and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This article examines milestones in the development of PKI,...

This essay is based on remarks presented by the author at The Fourth Bi-Annual Cross-Border Post Keynesian Conference, Buffalo State College, on October 9, 2009. It addresses the economic challenges facing Buffalo, New York, and countless other American cities, especially in the Northeast and...

Among the models that CBO uses to analyze the economic effects of changes in federal fiscal policy is a life-cycle growth model. That model requires an estimate of the responsiveness of the supply of labor to a one-time temporary change in after-tax compensation, which is described by the...

Changes in federal fiscal policies can have both short-term and long-term effects on output. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the short-term effects focuses on the impact on the demand for goods and services. That impact can be decomposed into direct effects and indirect effects:...

The recession from 2007 to 2009 sparked wide interest in the economic effects of fiscal policy. That interest is reflected in an ongoing debate over the size of the fiscal multiplier. This working paper addresses three questions: What models do economists use to estimate that multiplier? Why do...