In dealing with the problematic relationship of morality to rational choice theory, neoclassical economists since Lionel Robbins have often argued that they can incorporate moral values into consumer theory by putting those values into the utility function. This paper tests the viability of such...

Since Christopher Sims's "Macroeconomics and Reality" (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...

In this new Strategic Analysis, we review what we believe is the most important economic policy issue facing policymakers in the United States and abroad: the prospect of a growth recession in the United States, linked to the imbalances in the U.S. current account, government, and private sector...

This Strategic Analysis provides a retrospective view of U.S. growth in the last 10 years, showing that the authors’ previous work, grounded in the linkages between growth and the financial balances of the private, public, and foreign sectors of the economy, has proven a useful contribution to...

The development of the permanent income/life cycle consumption hypothesis was a key blow to Keynesian and Kaleckian economics, and, according to George Akerlof, it 'set the agenda' for modern neoclassical macroeconomics. This paper focuses on the relationship of housing wealth to neoclassical...

With economic growth having cooled to 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007, the economy can ill afford a slump in consumption by the American household. But it now appears that the household sector could finally give in to the pressures of rising gasoline prices, a weakening home market, and...

In its November 2007 Strategic Analysis, the Levy Institute's Macro-Modeling Team called for an immediate, sustained fiscal stimulus of 2 percent of GDP, as well as a plan for a much larger additional fiscal stimulus should the economic slowdown continue over the next two to three years. Since...

Many empirical studies have found that interest rate increases have a positive effect on the price level. This paper pursues an obvious, but neglected explanation: interest payments are a cost of production that is at least in part passed on to customers. A model shows that the cost- push effect...

Hyman Minsky suggested a possible channel through which monetary policy could affect the economy. He asserted that rising interest rates due to contractionary monetary policy compromised the balance sheets of firms that had financed long-term positions in illiquid assets with short-term...

The US economy has been expanding moderately since the official end of the Great Recession in 2009. The budget deficit has been steadily decreasing, inflation has remained in check, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7 percent. The restrictive fiscal policy stance of the past three years...