This paper explores the macroeconomics of fiscal austerity. A binding budget deficit cap makes the economy more volatile by turning the government budget into an automatic destabilizer. Public debt helps maintain aggregate demand (AD) in the presence of a lower price level because a lower price...

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath offer an opportunity to institute significant reform in economics teaching, starting at the introductory level. Mainstream macroeconomics texts still rely heavily on a classical assumption of a long-run full employment equilibrium, which underrates...

This paper attempts to analyse the macroeconomic effects of unemployment benefits in a small open economy. We adopt a stock–flow consistent (SFC) approach with an emphasis on the dynamics of the labour market. We numerically solve the model using a combination of estimation and calibration to...

Nicholas Kaldor and Kazimierz Łaski have been two very prominent exponents of Keynesian thinking. They both contributed to the debate on European economic integration, one (Nicholas Kaldor) in the early 1970s, when there were fierce debates about the United Kingdom's entry to the European...

This contribution discusses the book Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence by . It touches upon the underlying theoretical perspectives, von Weizsäcker's neo-Austrian view and Krämer's short-run Keynesian theory, and it proposes an alternative based on...

Although the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the worst economic crisis in over 60 years for many industrial countries, most Asian and Pacific developing countries weathered it quite successfully. The resilience of the region is somewhat puzzling at first sight. In an increasingly...

How fiscal policy impacts equity and bond returns is an open question. Unlike previous studies, we address this issue in a way that decomposes current returns into news about cash flows and news about discount rates. Moreover, we use narrative methods to identify plausibly exogenous shocks to...

The purpose of this paper is to develop Minskyan financial fragility indices for the government sector and to examine the financial structure of the Greek government before and after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2009. We provide empirical evidence that clearly shows the growing...

It is shown from empirical data that the Keynesian policy of continual stimulus of the US economy over decades has led to a mountain of debt and a destruction of economic growth. The causal mechanism of how this occurs has been identified. Excessive Keynesian monetary stimulation of aggregate...

This paper describes active learning strategies using the FRED Excel based application to help bridge the gap between theory and empirics. The recent FRED Excel based application permits students to easily collect, manipulate, and plot macroeconomic data. It also allows students to use this...