The global financial crisis of 2007/2008 was the painful peak of a decade of “financial euphoria” and inadequate financial re-regulation in the advanced economies. However, during that period of “financial euphoria”, the structure of the developed financial systems in the EU varied...

Some of the findings from new trade and economic geography theory are quite critical concerning the South-South agreements. This study contributes to the discussion by means of different empirical analyses of a representative set of South-South integrations. The income developments of its member...

Our previous work argued that the official U.S. poverty definition is flawed because it ignores interest paid on household debt. When it was developed in the early 1960s, this was not a problem because U.S. households had little consumer debt. Today, most households have considerable consumer...

This paper provides an introduction to the Minsky-Veblen Cycles as a specific example of pluralist economic thinking in the context of the recent global economic crisis. It illustrates how pluralism can be applied to economic research. Specifically, the Minsky-Veblen Cycles combine three...

In this paper, we test two hypotheses as regarding potential effects of domestic and international migration on wage inequality. One related to the possibility of wage competition, and another alternative hypothesis related to fixed set-up costs and indivisibilities for different types of...

Many developing countries are afflicted by persistent inequality in the distribution of income. While a growing body of literature emphasize differential fertility as a channel through which income inequality persists, this paper investigates differential child mortality - differences in the...

Recent studies warn that the U.S. economy may return to a phase of secular stagnation. In the next 20 to 50 years, U.S. economic growth will be negatively affected by lower contributions of hours worked and education. But some studies also add that productivity could decelerate sharply and that...

This paper addresses the problem of the normative evaluation of income tax systems and income tax reforms. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the utilitarian tradition, are uniquely based on information about individual incomes, this paper, building upon the opportunity egalitarian...

Most papers explaining the macro causes of the U.S. Great Recession focus on the behavior of the middle class: how its saving rate declined in the pre-crisis years, then surged following the crisis. This paper argues that the saving rate of the rich followed a similar pattern, the result of...