This book, written by an international team of economists, develops concrete, country specific alternatives to inflation targeting, the dominant policy framework of central bank policy that focuses on keeping inflation in the low single digits to the virtual exclusion of other key goals such as...

After the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, commercial banks in the United States began accumulating huge cash reserves in their accounts at the Federal Reserve. By the middle of 2011, reserves had reached $1.6 trillion, more than 10 percent of US GDP, an order of magnitude for commercial...

Herndon, Ash and Pollin replicate Reinhart and Rogoff and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010 is the most ambitious measure aimed at regulating U.S. financial markets since the Glass-Steagall Act was implemented in the midst of the 1930s Depression.  However, it remains an open question as to whether Dodd-Frank...

As fast-food workers join picket lines around the country, media outlets are questioning how much a minimum wage increase would cost businesses, fast-food restaurants in particular. Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin examine the potential impact of a proposal to raise the federal minimum...

This paper presents new nonlinear regression estimates of the relationship between inflation and economic growth for 80 countries over the 1961- 2000 period, using middle-income and low-income countries. We also consider the four separate decades between 1961 and 2000. The paper consistently...

This article first examines the question, “What is a living wage?†and provides a range of specific dollar amounts derived through a conceptual assessment of the term. It then provides a series of cost estimates of living wage laws in various cities. Based on these cost estimates, the...