crisis or opportunity economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability introduction to this special issue abstract this article reviews the burgeoning emerging literature on sustainable degrowth this is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level in the short and long term the paradigmatic propositions of degrowth are that economic growth is not sustainable and that human progress without economic growth is possible degrowth proponents come from diverse origins some are critics of market globalization new technologies or the imposition of western models of development in the rest of the world all criticize gdp accounting though they propose often different social and ecological indicators degrowth theorists and practitioners support an extension of human relations instead of market relations demand a deepening of democracy defend ecosystems and propose a more equal distribution of wealth we distinguish between depression i e unplanned degrowth within a growth regime and sustainable degrowth a voluntary smooth and equitable transition to a regime of lower production and consumption the question we ask is how positive would degrowth be if instead of being imposed by an economic crisis it would actually be a democratic collective decision a project with the ambition of getting closer to ecological sustainability and socio environmental justice worldwide most articles in this issue were originally presented at the april 2008 conference in paris on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity this conference brought the word degrowth and the concepts around it into an international academic setting articles of this special issue are summarized in this introductory article hueting d alessandro and colleagues van den bergh kerschner spangenberg and alcott discuss whether current growth patterns are un sustainable and offer different perspectives on what degrowth might mean and whether and under what conditions it might be desirable matthey and hamilton focus on social dynamics and the obstacles and opportunities for voluntary social action towards degrowth lietaert and cattaneo with gavalda offer a down to earth empirical discussion of two practical living experiments cohousing and squats highlighting the obstacles for scaling up such alternatives finally van griethuysen explains why growth is an imperative in modern market economies raising also the question whether degrowth is possible without radical institutional changes

financialisation income distribution and aggregate demand in the usa this paper investigates the effects of financialisation and functional income distribution on aggregate demand in the usa by estimating the effects of the increase in rentier income dividends and interest payments and housing and financial wealth on consumption and investment the redistribution of income in favour of profits suppresses consumption whereas the increase in the rentier income and wealth has positive effects a higher rentier income decreases investment without the wealth effects the overall effect of the changes in distribution on aggregate demand would have been negative thus a pro capital income distribution leads to a slightly negative effect on growth i e the usa economy is moderately wage led

money creation under full reserve banking a stock flow consistent model this paper presents a stock flow consistent model of full reserve banking it is found that in a steady state full reserve banking can accommodate a zero growth economy and provide both full employment and zero inflation furthermore a money creation experiment is conducted with the model an increase in central bank reserves translates into a two thirds increase in demand deposits money creation through government spending leads to a temporary increase in real gdp and inflation surprisingly it also leads to a permanent reduction in consolidated government debt the claims that full reserve banking would precipitate a credit crunch or excessively volatile interest rates are found to be baseless

stability of zero growth economics analysed with a minskyan model abstract as humanity is becoming increasingly confronted by earth s finite biophysical limits there is increasing interest in questions about the stability and equitability of a zero growth capitalist economy most notably if one maintains a positive interest rate for loans can a zero growth economy be stable this question has been explored on a few different macroeconomic models and both yes and no answers have been obtained however economies can become unstable whether or not there is ongoing underlying growth in productivity with which to sustain growth in output here we attempt for the first time to assess via a model the relative stability of growth versus no growth scenarios the model employed draws from keen s model of the minsky financial instability hypothesis the analysis focuses on dynamics as opposed to equilibrium and scenarios of growth and no growth of output gdp are obtained by tweaking a productivity growth input parameter we confirm that with or without growth there can be both stable and unstable scenarios to maintain stability firms must not change their debt levels or target debt levels too quickly further according to the model the wages share is higher for zero growth scenarios although there are more frequent substantial drops in employment

an integrated approach to climate change income distribution employment and economic growth a demand driven growth model involving capital accumulation and the dynamics of greenhouse gas ghg concentration is set up to examine macroeconomic issues raised by global warming e g effects on output and employment of rising levels of ghg offsets by mitigation relationships among energy use and labor productivity income distribution and growth the economic significance of the jevons and other paradoxes sustainable consumption and possible reductions in employment and sources of instability and cyclicality implicit in the two dimensional dynamical system the emphasis is on the combination of biophysical limits and post keynesian growth theory and the qualitative patterns of system adjustment and the dynamics that emerge

capitalism s growth imperative a capitalist firm operating in a competitive market is subject to a growth imperative because uncertainty about the profit rate under a no growth policy makes the firm s prospects highly unattractive in finite time and bankruptcy practically certain in the long run a no growth policy determines consumption and investment so that they and capital would remain constant over time if the latter s expected return were realized with certainty simulation is used to arrive at the probability of bankruptcy by the end of t periods and the expected values of capital and money for relevant combinations of time and uncertainty under successively more realistic models of a no growth firm in a competitive market the sensitivity of the results to variation in the parameters in each of the models is evaluated finally we consider what firms might actually do to achieve the benefits of growth and more attractive prospects of survival

consistency and stability analysis of models of a monetary growth imperative ist das streben nach wirtschaftswachstum eine frage des politischen willens oder eine notwendige bedingung fur okonomische stabilitat es ist umstritten ob solche wachstumszwange im heutigen geldsystem bestehen und einen konflikt mit nachhaltigkeit hervorrufen zur untersuchung der ersten behauptung dass zinseszinsen einen wachstumszwang hervorrufen stellen wir funf post keynesianische modelle vor und fuhren eine stabilitatsanalyse im parameterraum durch eine stationare okonomie mit spar und investitionsquote von null kann bei positivem zinssatz erreicht werden wenn der parameter konsum aus dem bestand oberhalb eines schwellenwerts liegt der mit dem zinssatz ansteigt die andere behauptung dass die bildung von gewinnrucklagen aus den zinseinnahmen der banken zu einem wachstumszwang fuhrt basiert auf modellen des monetaren kreislaufs die wir fur widerlegbar halten ihre bilanzierung ist inkonsistent und eine zentrale modellannahme ist nicht theoretisch begrundet aber die hauptursache des wachstumszwangs das eigenkapital der bank muss gesteigert werden selbst wenn ihre verbindlichkeiten nicht wachsen was eine diskrepanz zwischen der intention der autoren und dem eigentlichen modell ist wir kommen zum schluss dass das heutige geldsystem auf der basis von zinstragendem kreditgeld mit privaten banken nicht zu einem inharenten wachstumszwang fuhrt falls der stationare zustand instabil ist liegt es an entscheidungen wirtschaftlicher agenten und nicht an struktureller unvermeidbarkeit

facilitating the transition to a steady state economy some macroeconomic fundamentals abstract central government policy is based on a misguided understanding of the macroeconomics of a modern fiat currency economy as the owner issuer of a nation s currency a central government has unlimited spending power moreover taxation exists as nothing more than a means by which a central government can destroy the spending power of the private sector in the process of outlining some of the policies required to facilitate the transition to a steady state economy this paper does not recommend that central governments should spend wildly and irresponsibly to the contrary this paper explains how a central government can use its unique spending and taxation powers in a disciplined and policy effective manner yet in a manner that is being largely overlooked

income distribution and current account imbalances we develop a three country stock flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances each country has a household sector and a non household corporate sector the household sector is divided into income deciles and consumer demand is characterized by upward looking status comparisons following the relative income hypothesis of consumption the strength of consumption emulation depends on country specific institutions the model is calibrated for the united states germany and china simulations suggest that a substantial part of the increase in household debt and the decrease in the current account in the united states since the early 1980s can be explained by the interplay of rising top end household income inequality and institutions on the other hand the weak domestic demand and increasing current account balances of germany and china since the mid 1990s are strongly related to shifts in the functional income distribution at the expense of the household sector

a contribution to the theory of financial fragility and crisis the paper outlines formally three interrelated facets of a financial crisis of domestic origin i a debt financed consumption boom supported by rising asset prices that ends in debt deflation ii a related process of financial evolution of economic agents towards ponzi finance iii resulting systemic illiquidity afflicting the financial sector as a prelude to crisis being placed in relation to theories of exogenous and endogenous money the models indicate how the co evolution of the real and the financial sector results in financial fragility of different types the paper explores formally the specific features of the fragility of various episode of crisis which share a common pattern of gradual build up followed by a sudden collapse of financial confidence through the interaction between the real and the financial sector and concludes with implications for policy copyright the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

a minsky crisis a model is developed to illustrate hyman minsky s financial crisis theories a key assumption is that the level of wealth in the economy is determined mac roeconomically with the value of firms assets responding to the state of confidence as reflected by discounted quasi rents on capital the second assumption is that there is high substitutability between liabilities of firms and money in the public s portfolio a downward shift in anticipated profits leads wealth to contract and the public to shift portfolio preferences toward money interest rates rise leading to further dampening of expected profits and a debt deflation crisis can occur

ecological macroeconomic models assessing current developments our society faces a dilemma while continued economic growth is ecologically unsustainable low or negative rates of economic growth are accompanied by adverse social impacts hence there is a need for macroeconomic tools that can help identify socially sustainable post growth pathways the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics aims to address this need and features a number of new macroeconomic modelling approaches this article provides 1 a review of modelling developments in ecological macroeconomics based on the literature and interviews with researchers and 2 an analysis of how the different models incorporate policy themes from the post growth literature twenty two ecological macroeconomic models were analysed and compared to eight policy themes it was found that environmental interactions and the monetary system were treated most comprehensively themes of income inequality work patterns indicators of well being and disaggregated production were addressed with less detail while alternative business models and cross scale interactions were hardly addressed overall the combination of input output analysis with stock flow consistent modelling was identified as a promising avenue for developing macroeconomic models for a post growth economy however due to the wide interpretation of what the economy entails future research will benefit from employing a range of approaches

an agent based stock flow consistent model of the sustainable transition in the energy sector major structural changes to the current fossil fuel based economic system are needed in order to address the climate change challenge to this purpose effective renewable energy sources res support policies along with concrete efforts towards the improvement of energy efficiency have been adopted in many countries one of these policies is the feed in tariff fit mechanism according to which electricity produced by res is sold at guaranteed prices feed in tariffs which are higher than market ones for fixed periods of time in this paper we investigate how to foster a sustainability transition of the energy system towards an economically and ecologically sustainable growth path by using an enriched version of the eurace model eurace has been enriched by including an energy sector where electricity is demanded by domestic producers and is supplied by a fossil fuel based power producer as well as a renewable energy based one both power producers undertake pricing and capacity investment decisions based on the price of imported fossil fuel and feed in tariff government policy in particular we investigate how the economy is affected by the fiscal costs of financing the feed in tariff mechanism and by the benefits of lower fossil fuels imports in order to devise the policy with the best cost benefit trade off for the macroeconomy as a whole results show that the feed in tariff policy is effective in fostering the sustainability transition of the energy sector and that it increases the level of investments in the economy with a slightly positive impact on the unemployment rates moreover we observe that its financing costs do not impact government finances in a relevant way on the other hand the higher level of investments occurs at the expense of the production of consumption goods therefore with a negative impact for the living standards at least according to the perspective of a consumerist society however if factors like better employment rates and the reduced ghg emissions are also taken into account along with consumption by an appropriate preference function the final outcome on well being should be probably deemed as favourable

100 percent reserve banking a critical review of green perspectives abstract 100 percent reserve banking c perb is an enduring proposal for monetary reform that has been taken up by some ecological economists this paper identifies three groups of green arguments in favor of c perb and offers some criticism first the proposal could serve to constrain new investments by the availability of savings thereby checking economic growth however this would strongly increase interest rate volatility second it could potentially elevate environmental considerations in decisions about resource allocation by increasing the role of the democratic state as an economic actor this line of argument faces problems that require further detailed exploration and historical perspective third a transition to c perb would allow debt levels to be drastically cut this is technically possible but politically a tall order whether the existing system of debt based bank money generates a significant growth imperative is unclear and the importance of other driving forces behind perennial economic growth in modern societies which c perb does not address remains an issue of contention in general the adoption of c perb presupposes a tremendous reconfiguration of power relations between states and finance capital

keynesian macroeconomics without the lm curve the is lm model has been a central tool of macroeconomic teaching and practice for over half a century legions of earlier writers have offered criticisms of the model that have become familiar with the passage of time the model lacks microeconomic foundations assumes price stickiness has no role for expectations and simplifies the economy s complexities to a handful of crude aggregate relationships but countless teachers students and policymakers have found the model to be a powerful framework for understanding macroeconomic fluctuations recent developments have created new difficulties for the is lm model although the new difficulties are less profound than the traditional ones they are more likely to be fatal like all models the is lm model is not universal its assumptions and simplifications make it better suited to analyzing some issues than others and to describing some economic environments than others but neither the issues nor the environment of macroeconomic fluctuations are fixed in terms of issues one major change is that the debates between keynesians and monetarists about the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy that were central to macroeconomics in the 1960s and 1970s now play only a modest role in the analysis of short run fluctuations in terms of the environment one important change is that most central banks including the u s federal reserve now pay little attention to monetary aggregates in conducting policy but the is lm model is particularly well suited to presenting the debates between keynesians and monetarists and one of its basic assumptions is that the central bank targets the money supply in short recent developments work to the disadvantage of is lm this observation suggests that it is time to revisit the question of whether is lm is the best

finance saving and accumulation this paper analyzes the interaction between financial and real variables in different time frames and monetary regimes firms finance investment through retained earnings new issues or bank loans and households desired portfolio of financial assets is related to current income flows the average saving propensity becomes an endogenous variable determined jointly by household and firm decisions and it is shown that changes in the basic parameters give rise to both saving and valuation effects contrary to standard keynesian results an increase in a saving parameter may be expansionary if the valuation effect dominates the saving effect copyright 1988 by oxford university press

post keynesian stock flow consistent modelling a survey the aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the current stock ow consistent sfc literature indeed we feel the sfc approach has recently led to a blossoming literature requiring a new summary after the work of dos santos and above all after the publication of the main reference work on the methodology godley and lavoie s monetary economics an integrated approach to credit money income production and wealth the paper is developed along the following lines first a brief historical analysis investigates the roots of this class of models that can be traced as far back as 1949 and the work of copeland second the competing points of view regarding some of its main controversial aspects are underlined and used to classify the different methodological approaches followed in using these models namely we discuss i how the models are solved ii the treatment of time and its implication and ii the need or not for microfoundations these results are then used in the third section of the paper to develop a bifocal perspective which allows us to divide the literature reviewed according to both its subject and the methodology we explore various topics such as financialisation exchange rate modelling policy implication the need for a common framework within the post keynesian literature and the empirical use of sfc models finally the conclusions present some hypotheses and wishes for the possible lines of development of sfc models

money and credit in a keynesian model of income determination this paper integrates the theory of money and credit derived ultimately from wicksell into the keynesian theory of income determination with assets allocated according to tobinesque principles the model deployed has much in common with the modern endogenous money school initiated by kaldor which emphasises the essential role played by credit in any real life economy since production takes time and the future is always uncertain new ground is broken methodologically because all the propositions are justified by simulations of a rigorous 60 equation model making it possible to pin down exactly why the results come out as they do one conclusion of the paper is that there is no such thing as a supply of money distinct from the money which agents wish to hold or find themselves holding this finding is inimical possibly in the end lethal to the way macroeconomics is currently taught as well as to the neoclassical paradigm itself

economic growth inequality and well being in advanced industrial societies rising levels of inequality have contributed strongly to the observed gap that has emerged between per capita income and the index of sustainable economic welfare isew which in its current versions is known as the genuine progress indicator gpi yet the isew gpi approach to measuring the social costs of inequality has been criticized as ad hoc the present paper reviews the literature on this topic and efforts to resolve it based on the construction of indicators grounded in a a classical utilitarian ethical framework and b empirical evidence on the relationship between income and well being in the united states after tax income per capita grew at an annual rate of 1 7 between 1979 and 2011 a growth rate of 1 2 per year arises when income is adjusted to account for the social costs of inequality the most common adjustment used in isew gpi studies yields a similar growth rate despite much smaller subtractions from baseline income

ces technology and business cycle fluctuations we contribute to an emerging literature that brings the constant elasticity of substitution ces specification of the production function into the analysis of business cycle fluctuations using us data we estimate by bayesian maximum likelihood methods a standard medium sized dsge model with a ces rather than cobb douglas cd technology we estimate a elasticity of substitution between capital and labour well below unity at 0 15 0 18 in a marginal likelihood race ces decisively beats the cd production and this is matched by its ability to fit the data better in terms of second moments we show that this result is mainly driven by the implied fluctuations of factor shares under the ces specification the ces model performance is further improved when the estimation is carried out under an imperfect information assumption hence the main message for dsge models is that we should dismiss once and for all the use of cd for business cycle analysis

non linear prices and energy demand abstract this paper examines the use of non linear price structures in the context of the demand for energy such structures are attractive because they permit policy makers to meet the objective of equity without sacrificing that of resource mobilization and economic efficiency the paper concentrates on two aspects of this issue the first is the accurate forecasting of demand in the presence of such price structures and the second is the design of the optimal non linear tariff given some suitable welfare loss minimizing criterion in addition to looking at the theoretical aspects of the problem the paper also has some illustrative results on forecasting demand with non linear electricity tariffs in pakistan

distributional impacts of climate change mitigation in indian electricity the influence of governance abstract studies that examine the distributional impacts of climate change mitigation policies often neglect the influence of institutions that implement these policies this study examines the short term consumption side distributional impacts of expanding low carbon electric supply in the state of maharashtra india with a focus on the influence of regulatory discretion in pricing households welfare impacts from economy wide electricity price shocks are simulated against a baseline that is calibrated to actual household economic and electricity service conditions including actual electricity budgets block tier prices and supply rationing industrial price impacts are propagated to households using a leontief input output analysis regulatory pricing decisions are evaluated based on social welfare metrics for economic efficiency and income inequality the analysis reveals new linkages between climate change mitigation electricity policy and income distribution low income households can be shielded from mitigation impacts without losses in aggregate welfare to the extent that regulators can recover mitigation costs through industrial price increases regulators flexibility to distribute costs across households is constrained by industrial customers migration off the grid reduced supply interruptions to the rural poor from the resulting demand contraction are a potential co benefit of mitigation distributional impacts therefore depend on other electricity policies that are driven by the political economy of the sector

heterodox theories of economic growth and income distribution a partial survey heterodox theories of economic growth and income distribution are surveyed focusing on major theories and recent contributions first a general framework for examining growth and distribution is discussed in terms of which classical marxian and post keynesian kaleckian and other theories are presented since this framework examines how variables are determined in equilibrium second dynamics behind equilibria are examined focusing on goods market and labor market changes third the framework is extended in a variety of ways to examine additional models addressing productivity growth and technical change money and inflation finance and debt additional distributional considerations multisector issues open economy questions and the environment it is concluded that the literature on heterodox theories of growth and distribution is vibrant large and growing and addresses many issues that are ignored or neglected in orthodox theories including power unemployment and aggregate demand

overcoming accumulation is a capitalist steady state economy possible abstract this article critically reviews the case for a steady state zero growth economy posing the question whether such an economy can be stable and socially just given that in the current global economy lack of growth is synonymous with crisis the sse thesis is analysed within a framework of marxian political economy concluding that a stable and just sse is possible but not feasible within the social relations of capitalism using the marxian analysis of capital accumulation the article then considers whether the reforms proposed by ecological economists can form an effective countervailing force to the drive for accumulation the conclusion is that such reforms can be successful but only in so far as they are complemented and brought to their logical conclusion by a wider attempt to transcend the capitalist relations of production

full reserve banking more cranks than brave heretics this paper analyses the main features and policy implications of full reserve banking frb proposals it argues that whilst frb advocates recognize the essential endogeneity of the money creation process they have failed to understand the post keynesian and monetary circuitist analyses of endogenous money which leads them to analytical errors including lending activity creates seigniorage privilege for commercial banks inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon the inability of distinguishing the actual from the planned supply of bank loans and money to be spent from money hoarded and the debt free money proposition the paper also argues that an frb system is likely to exacerbate financial instability for several reasons including the obsessive focus on commercial banks while ignoring non bank financial intermediaries and shadow banking a blind fascination for the safety and security of the payment system with little consideration for the financing needs of capitalist economies and an inherent deflationary bias furthermore frb arrangements would soon be undermined by the development of alternative near moneys finally frb will nullify the automatic stabilisers of fiscal policy and lead to a de facto dominance of monetary policy and unelected central bankers over fiscal policy and democratic decision making

emergence of new economics energy transition models a review abstract well known academic and non academic institutions call for a new approach in economics able to capture features of modern economies including but not limited to complexity non equilibrium and uncertainty in this paper we provide a systematic review of ecological macroeconomic models that are suitable for the investigation of low carbon energy transitions and assess them based on the features considered desirable for a new approach in economics we draw two main conclusions firstly the knowledge base and structure of these existing ecological macroeconomic models are relevant alongside other types of models for the creation of a new approach in economics secondly the reviewed models are policy relevant especially in the context of the complexity and urgency of rapid energy transitions where increasingly policymakers require economic models able to capture real world characteristics however further improvements are needed to these models and future research should focus on i assuring comparability of models results and their policy insights ii incorporation of the relationships between macroeconomics finance and sustainability and iii the institutionalization of a new approach in economics

towards post keynesian ecological macroeconomics the paper starts with a brief criticism of macroeconomic analyses of different schools of thought for their focus on economic growth and maximisation of output this applies to the traditional keynesian approach which has focused on the achievement of sufficient aggregate demand to underpin full employment and full capacity utilisation down playing aggregate supply constraints this also applies to the neoclassical approach including the current new consensus macroeconomics approach which asserts the dominant role of aggregate supply in the long run and where growth is set by the so called natural rate of growth with no concerns over environmental and ecological issues the paper then proposes a different approach to macroeconomic analysis it explicitly acknowledges that economic growth is a double edged sword growth can help to alleviate persistent levels of high unemployment but it can also lead to potentially catastrophic environmental problems building on the monetary circuit theory and the demand led growth theory the paper offers an analysis of the interconnections and interdependence of the economic biophysical and social worlds and by doing it hopes to provide the building blocks for the establishment of post keynesian ecological macroeconomics

a synthetic stock flow consistent macroeconomic model of financialisation this article is centred around the notions of shareholder value orientation and financialisation shareholder value orientation is reflected by a high dividend payout ratio applied by firms and the reluctance of firms to finance physical investment via new equity issues financialisation is the more general development towards an increased importance of the financial sector of the economy relative to the non financial sector in this article a synthetic stock flow consistent model is developed that attempts to encompass some important recent works on the effects of financialisation this includes contributions from the fields of mainstream information economics and post keynesian economics we conduct simulations reflecting increased shareholder value orientation and show that the results are consistent with important stylised facts copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

exchange rate indeterminacy in portfolio balance mundell fleming and uncovered interest rate parity models with full stock flow accounting respected the two country open economy portfolio balance model has just two independent equations for asset market clearing it can determine home and foreign interest rates but not the exchange rate if asset market equilibria vary smoothly over time the balance of payments equation in the mundell fleming model is not independent and cannot set the exchange rate either the familiar fixed reserves floating rate vs endogenous reserves fixed rate dichotomy does not exist and fundamentals based econometric models of the exchange rate are bound to fail an alternative is a two country is lm model with exchange rate dynamics added its dynamic properties under uncovered interest rate parity are briefly explored copyright 2004 oxford university press

oil futures prices in a production economy with investment constraints we document a new stylized fact that the relationship between the volatility of oil futures prices and the slope of the forward curve is nonmonotone and has a v shape this pattern cannot be generated by standard models that emphasize storage we develop an equilibrium model of oil production in which investment is irreversible and capacity constrained investment constraints affect firms investment decisions and imply that the supply elasticity changes over time since demand shocks must be absorbed by changes in prices or changes in supply time varying supply elasticity results in time varying volatility of futures prices estimating this model we show it is quantitatively consistent with the v shape relationship between the volatility of futures prices and the slope of the forward curve in recent years commodity markets have experienced dramatic growth in trad

degrowth and the supply of money in an energy scarce world abstract degrowth is going to happen whether governments want it or not because as fossil fuels run out incomes will shrink along with the energy supply this degrowth can either be unplanned and catastrophic or managed and relatively benign this paper argues that three tools are essential to avoid degrowth becoming a catastrophic collapse these are i a system to share the benefits from using increasingly scarce fossil fuels ii new ways of financing businesses and iii the introduction of debt free regional and local currencies

firms leverage ratio and the financial instability hypothesis an empirical investigation for the us economy 1970 2014 there are many minskian interpretations of how financial fragility builds up reflecting the unsolved tensions regarding the transition from micro to macro results in minsky s financial instability hypothesis fih using firm level and macroeconomic data to comply with the variety of fih s interpretations we empirically assess the relations between leverage and financial fragility in the us economy 1970 2014 to evaluate firms financial fragility we deploy minsky s scale from the financially sounder to the more fragile firms hedge speculative and ponzi the main findings are the following i the evolution of the aggregate leverage ratio does not account for the systemic financial fragility measured by the frequency of speculative and ponzi firms and ii within the biggest firms the leverage has increased along with the incidence of hedge financing and for the smallest firms group the opposite has happened we conclude that a positive relation between leverage and financial fragility cannot be deemed to be a general outcome

budgetary rigour with stimulus in lean times policy advices from an agent based model abstract the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession triggered a wide spread economic and political debate on the proper policy combination to deal with the crisis and to prevent similar ones in the future probably the main dispute has been around the use of fiscal instruments in order to foster growth while keeping public debt under control the european union for instance endorsed austerity measures for fiscal consolidation but has been sharply criticized by several scholars this paper aims at contributing to the current debate by presenting the outcomes of a computational study performed with the eurace agent based model we set up an experiment with two base policy scenarios i e stability and growth pact and fiscal compact incrementally enriching them with complementary policies which relax fiscal rigidity and introduce quantitative easing results show that budgetary rigour performs well if and only if some mechanisms of fiscal relaxation and monetary accommodation are considered during bad times thus confirming in a richer and more realistic model setting the fundamental tenet of keynesian economics about the importance of sustaining aggregate demand during recessions

from ecological macroeconomics to a theory of endogenous money for a finite planet abstract this paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics most notably post keynesian to ecological economics with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal monetary and prudential reforms to boost green investments and developed new modeling frameworks to explore the interactions between the financial macroeconomic and biophysical spheres while these proposals open a broader range of possibilities to engage in a socio ecological transition than those offered by the current paradigm of a financialized global economy they paradoxically suffer from similar limitations by placing much faith in green investments they impose a vision of the transition that presents strong technical and institutional limitations the field also fails to revisit its own understanding of macroeconomics and of specific phenomena e g financial instability through a biophysical lens in spite of increasing transdisciplinary evidence supporting this approach we suggest overcoming these limitations through institutionalist perspectives that understand money as a language through which value is created and legitimized those perspectives seem essential to re embed the governance of money within a worldview that acknowledges the finiteness and incommensurable values of earth s life support systems

the economics of degrowth economic degrowth is ecologically desirable and possibly inevitable but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable how can we have full employment and economic stability without growth what will happen to public spending and to public debt how would production be organised in a degrowing economy and under what plausible socio political conditions could such grand changes happen standard economic theories and models ignore these questions for them economic growth is an axiomatic necessity this article reviews recent contributions in the economics of degrowth and identifies research avenues for ecological economists

macroeconomic implications of financialisation a growing literature suggests that financialisation may weaken the performance of non financial corporations and constrain the growth of aggregate demand this paper uses two alternative approaches one derived from skott and one from lavoie and godley and two different settings a labour constrained setting and a dual economy setting to evaluate some of the claims that have been made our analysis which pays explicit attention to financial stock flow relations suggests that the qualitative effects of financialisation are insensitive to the precise specification of household saving behaviour but depend critically on the labour market assumptions labour constrained versus dual and the specification of the investment function harrodian versus kaleckian

the eirin flow of funds behavioural model of green fiscal policies and green sovereign bonds abstract fiscal and monetary policies as well as new financial instruments could play a key role to meet the paris agreement however deep uncertainty characterizes their design and their potential effects on growth financial and credit market stability and inequality we develop the eirin flow of funds behavioural model to simulate the introduction of green fiscal policies and green sovereign bonds and we display their effects on firms investments in the brown and green sector on unemployment on the credit and bonds market eirin is stock flow consistent and is rooted on a balance sheet approach it adopts a leontief production function with no substitution of the production factors i e labour capital and raw materials its sectors are endowed with adaptive behaviours and expectations and interact with the others and the foreign sector through a set of markets simulations show that green public policies can promote green growth by influencing firms expectations and the credit market green sovereign bonds represent a short term win win solution while green fiscal measures have higher immediate distributive effects that induce negative feedbacks on the economy these results are influenced by the conditions fiscal budgetary and public debt gdp in which both measures are implemented

the equity premium stock and bond returns since 1802 1992 the equity premium stock and bond returns since 1802 financial analysts journal vol 48 no 1 pp 28 38 46

intra generational equity and sustainable welfare a time series analysis for the uk and sweden this paper discusses the importance of intra generational equity to sustainable development it outlines a number of methodologies for measuring income inequality in the economy and presents several possible ways of incorporating the impact of distributional effects into measures of welfare in the economy the authors highlight in particular an index developed by atkinson atkinson a b 1970 distributive politics and economic growth q j econ may 465 490 based on the social welfare model this method possesses two main advantages over other methods firstly it is expressed directly in terms of social well being secondly value judgements incorporated into the measure are made explicit through the parameter o which expresses society s degree of aversion to income inequality the paper calculates the value of the atkinson index for two case study countries sweden and the uk between 1950 and 1996 for a central estimate of o0 8 the results show that the welfare loss due to inequalities in the distribution of income varied between 5 and 10 for sweden and between 6 and 14 for the uk with the higher values coming towards the end of the period the paper explores the sensitivity of these results to changes in the value of o for the case of the uk and discusses the relevance of the work to the measurement of sustainable welfare 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

equilibrium exhaustible resource price dynamics we develop equilibrium models of exhaustible resource markets with endogenous extraction choices and prices our analysis demonstrates how adjustment costs can generate oil and gas forward price dynamics with two factors consistent with the behavior these commodities exhibit in the schwartz and smith 2000 calibration our two factor model predicts that stochastic volatility will arise in these markets as a natural consequence of production adjustments however and we provide supporting empirical evidence differences between endogenous price processes from our general equilibrium model and exogenous processes in earlier papers can generate significant differences in both financial and real option values

allocation distribution and scale towards an economics that is efficient just and sustainable abstract the practical policy of issuing tradeable permits for depletion and pollution requires for its implementation the clear separation of the three basic economic goals of efficient allocation equitable distribution and sustainable scale economic theory needs to catch up with policy in recognizing that scale issues cannot be reduced to either allocation or distribution

a simple competitive model with production and storage we study a rational expectations partial equilibrium model of a market for a single storable commodity whose output each period is a function of previous period effort on production and a realization of a shock that affects equally all producers i he final demand is non random and depends only on each period s price risk neutral producers make production and storage decisions based on forecasts of future price distributions existence of equilibrium is proved and for the case of i i d shocks several comparative statics results are established as well as the existence and stability of a unique stationary distribution and whose output at each period is a multiplicative function of previous period s planting and of the realization of a shock that affects equally all producers the final demand for this good is non random and depends only on this period s price this describes approximately markets for agricultural products which are not traded internationally and where most of the price uncertainty stems from supply shocks risk neutral producers make their decisions based on forecasts of future price distributions and of known cost functions of storage and production to maximize their discounted profits in order to close the model an assumption on how such price forecasts are made is needed we assume that agents make equilibrium forecasts i e that their forecast is common and that when producers act taking the forecasted prices as given they make decisions that yield the forecasted prices as equilibrium prices this is of course what has been sometimes called rational expectations the assumption of equilibrium expectations and the presence of risk neutral pro ducers will imply that the equilibrium variables may be obtained by considering a related market surplus maximization problem 1 this places strong restriction on the stochastic process of equilibrium prices for the case where the basic shocks are assumed to be independently and identically distributed over time one may thus show that equilibrium prices are a function of a certain state variable the total stocks kept from last period plus this period s output and this allows us to derive properties of equilibrium solutions our main results concerning this case are a storage is a non increasing function of price and expected production a non decreasing one b the elasticity of expected future prices with respect to today s prices is positive and less than one c this elasticity is non constant being zero for high enough prices d the price process follows a renewal process if prices are low

an ecological monetary theory abstract while money is critical to the modern world ecological economics does not have a theory of money that is applicable to its theoretical framework and policy prescriptions accordingly the field often defers to an orthodox conception of money that is historically inaccurate and ontologically inconsistent the dualized nature of western philosophy informs orthodoxy by defining money according its function as a medium of exchange this conceptualization creates logical and historical problems that can be addressed by exploring an interdisciplinary literature that defines money according to its nature as a social relation expressed in a unit of account this paper develops an ecological monetary theory that is simultaneously rooted in a socio historical understanding of money s nature and in an ontology of social and ecological embeddedness such a theory provides ecological economists and others concerned with social and ecological equity with a framework from which to address monetary systems and policy

the relationship among energy prices and energy consumption in china the pricing mechanism for energy is not in line with the international standards because the energy prices are controlled by the government partly or completely in china chinese government made a lot of efforts to improve the pricing mechanism for energy the relations between chinese energy prices and energy consumption are the foundations to reform the mechanism in this paper the relations between chinese energy consumption and energy prices are researched by cointegration equations impulse response functions granger causality and variance decomposition the cointegration relations among energy prices energy consumption and economic outputs show that higher energy price will decrease energy consumption in chinese industrial sectors but will not reduce the economic output in the long run the cointegration relation between energy price and household energy consumption shows that higher energy price will decrease household energy consumption in the long run and increase it in the short run so chinese government should deepen the reform of pricing mechanism for energy and increase the energy prices reasonably to save energy

degrowth taking stock and reviewing an emerging academic paradigm degrowth has evolved within a decade from an activist movement into a multi disciplinary academic paradigm however an overview taking stock of the peer refereed degrowth literature is yet missing here we review 91 articles that were published between 2006 and 2015 we find that the academic degrowth discourse occupies a small but expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental sciences the discourse is shaped by authors from high income mainly mediterranean countries until 2012 articles largely constitute conceptual essays endorsed by normative claims more recently degrowth has branched out into modelling empirical assessments and the study of concrete implementations authors tend to agree in that economic growth cannot be sustained ad infinitum on a resource constraint planet and that degrowth requires far reaching societal change whether degrowth should be considered as a collectively consented choice or an environmentally imposed inevitability constitutes a major debate among degrowth thinkers we argue that the academic discourse could benefit from rigid hypotheses testing through input output modelling material flow analysis life cycle assessments or social surveys by analyzing the potentials for non market value creation and identifying concrete well being benefits the degrowth discourse could receive wider public support and contribute to a paradigmatic change in the social sciences

a simple model of three economies with two currencies the eurozone and the usa this paper presents a keynesian model which describes three countries trading merchandise and financial assets with one another it is initially assumed that all three countries have independent fiscal policies but that two of the countries share a currency hence the model can be used to make a preliminary analysis of the conduct of economic policy in the eurozone vis a vis the rest of the world the usa the main conclusion will be that if all three countries do indeed operate independent fiscal policies the system will work under a floating currency regime but only so long as the european central bank is prepared to modify the structure of its assets by accumulating an ever rising proportion of bills issued by any weak euro country

can degrowth overcome the leakage problem of unilateral climate policy abstract unilateral climate policy suffers from carbon leakage i e the partial offset of the initial emission reduction by increases in other countries different than most typically discussed climate policies degrowth not only aims at reducing the fossil fuel use in an economy but rather besides other social and political goals at a reduction of all factor inputs which may lead to different leakage implications we conduct the first investigation of degrowth in a multi country setting in order to i compare the leakage effects of national pure emission reduction policies to degrowth scenarios ii identify underlying channels by decomposing the implied emission changes into scale composition and technique effects and iii investigate which country characteristics determine degrowth s relative effectiveness to overcome the leakage problem using a structural gravity model we find that degrowth indeed significantly reduces leakage by keeping the sectoral composition of the country more stable and reducing uncommitted countries incentives to shift towards more energy intensive production techniques the higher effectiveness of degrowth in reducing carbon emissions is most pronounced for small and trade open economies with comparatively clean production technologies

a stock flow fund ecological macroeconomic model this paper develops a stock flow fund ecological macroeconomic model that combines the stock flow consistent approach of godley and lavoie with the flow fund model of georgescu roegen the model has the following key features first monetary and physical stocks and flows are explicitly formalised taking into account the accounting principles and the laws of thermodynamics second georgescu roegen s distinction between stock flow and fund service resources is adopted third output is demand determined but supply constraints might arise either due to environmental damages or due to the exhaustion of natural resources fourth climate change influences directly the components of aggregate demand fifth finance affects macroeconomic activity and the materialisation of investment plans that determine ecological efficiency the model is calibrated using global data simulations are conducted to investigate the trajectories of key environmental macroeconomic and financial variables under i different assumptions about the sensitivity of economic activity to the leverage ratio of firms and ii different types of green finance policies

a foxy hedgehog wynne godley and macroeconomic modelling wynne godley has made enormous contributions to macroeconomic modelling they are reviewed here in connection with his recent book with marc lavoie monetary economics an integrated approach to credit money income production and wealth copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

complementary system perspectives in ecological macroeconomics the example of transition investments during the crisis globally societies are facing a number of interrelated environmental economic and social crises this paper is intended to contribute to the development of an ecological macroeconomics that addresses these multiple crises in combination insights from different research communities will be included in this effort taking an ecological economic understanding of sustainability as the point of departure and inspired by systems thinking it is discussed which economic sub systems should be in focus for sustainability transitions and whether relevant guides for sustainability can be formulated for these systems in particular the focus is on systems that are decisive for resource consumption and pollution although their influence on these is indirect a simple typology of sub systems is suggested and applied in relation to an example that highlights the importance of the interplay between macroeconomic provision and distribution systems the example concerns investments in sustainability transitions of provision systems and demonstrates the complexities of implementing such transformations during the economic crisis it also addresses the need for ecological macroeconomics to develop a third position beyond austerity policies and keynesian approaches

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

reconsidering monetary policy an empirical examination of the relationship between interest rates and nominal gdp growth in the u s u k germany and japan abstract the rate of interest the price of money is said to be a key policy tool economics has in general emphasised prices this theoretical bias results from the axiomatic deductive methodology centring on equilibrium without equilibrium quantity constraints are more important than prices in determining market outcomes in disequilibrium interest rates should be far less useful as policy variable and economics should be more concerned with quantities including resource constraints to investigate we test the received belief that lower interest rates result in higher growth and higher rates result in lower growth examining the relationship between 3 month and 10 year benchmark rates and nominal gdp growth over half a century in four of the five largest economies we find that interest rates follow gdp growth and are consistently positively correlated with growth if policy makers really aimed at setting rates consistent with a recovery they would need to raise them we conclude that conventional monetary policy as operated by central banks for the past half century is fundamentally flawed policy makers had better focus on the quantity variables that cause growth

a stock flow consistent macro econometric model of the uk economy part i this paper is the second of a series of two which describe the estimation and simulation of a stock flow consistent macro economic model of the uk economy the first part davis 1987 surveyed the theoretical literature on stock adjustment dynamics criticized existing uk forecasting models for omitting many potential stock flow interactions and gave an outline of the model which is constructed here the estimation and simulation results suggest that variables encapsulating such stock flow effects are frequently significant in the estimation of key equations and that their inclusion may make a sizeable difference to the simulation properties of a model

peering over the edge of the short period the keynesian roots of stock flow consistent macroeconomic models this work argues that institutionally rich stock flow consistent models i e models in which economic agents are identified with the main social categories institutional sectors of actual capitalist economies the short period behaviour of these agents is thoroughly described and the period by period balance sheet dynamics implied by the latter is consistently modelled are i perfectly compatible with keynes theoretical views ii the ideal tool for rigorous post keynesian analyses of the medium run and therefore iii crucial to the consolidation of the broad post keynesian research programme copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

the ecology of money a critical assessment abstract this paper assesses the proposal to transform the monetary system into an ecology of money that is into a system made of a large diversity of complementary currencies its central aim is to examine whether this proposal could provide a systemic solution to both the ecological and financial crises as several authors most notably lietaer and douthwaite have argued to this end it analyses the two main arguments in favour of this proposal first it focuses on the claim that an ecology of money would be more resilient and less prone to crisis than the present monetary system it shows that this argument suffers from several conceptual flaws and argues that it fails to provide sufficient normative reasons to favour an ecology of money second this paper analyses the claim that an ecology of money could help defeat the monetary growth imperative that supposedly plagues our economies the paper raises serious doubts about the existence of such an imperative and questions the claim that an ecology of money could contribute to weaken it in a significant way

the transition to a sustainable prosperity a stock flow consistent ecological macroeconomic model for canada abstract this paper presents a stock flow consistent sfc macroeconomic simulation model for canada we use the model to generate three very different stories about the future of the canadian economy covering the half century from 2017 to 2067 a base case scenario in which current trends and relationships are projected into the future a carbon reduction scenario in which measures are introduced specifically designed to reduce canada s carbon emissions and a sustainable prosperity scenario which incorporates additional measures to improve environmental social and financial conditions across society the performance of the economy is tracked using two composite indicators constructed especially for this study an environmental burden index ebi which describes the environmental performance of the model and a composite sustainable prosperity index spi which is based on a weighted average of seven economic social and environmental performance indicators contrary to the widely accepted view the results suggest that green growth in the carbon reduction scenario may be slower than brown growth more importantly we show in the sustainable prosperity scenario that improved environmental and social outcomes are possible even as the growth rate declines to zero

the impact of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies on the low carbon transition abstract there is growing consensus on the fact that fossil fuel subsidies provided by governments in high income countries represent a misalignment on emissions reduction with the global climate agenda in addition a discussion emerged on the negative socio economic and environmental externalities associated with fossil fuel subsidies nevertheless pathways for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies in high income countries and their implications on the low carbon transition have not yet been assessed with the aim to narrow this knowledge gap we extend the eirin stock flow consistent behavioral model to study the implications on sustainable development of the gradual phasing out of fossil fuels subsidies whose revenues could be used by the government to subsidize energy investments in green capital e g solar panels either via fiscal policies or green bonds we assess the effects on green growth employment credit and bonds market as well as the distributive effects across heterogeneous households and sectors a smooth phasing out of fossil fuels subsidies contributes to improve macroeconomic performance to decrease inequality and helps the government to find fiscal space to support stable renewable energy policies renewable energy subsidies contribute to foster the low carbon transition but could imply distributive effects depending on the way in which they are implemented

investment and operating choice oil and natural gas futures prices and drilling activity abstract we present evidence that changes in oil and natural gas field investment measured by drilling rig use respond positively to changes in the futures prices of oil and natural gas consistent with predictions based upon value maximizing behavior these results hold for world regions dominated by private independent oil companies but not national oil companies in those cases where futures price changes are identified as drivers the role of spot prices is either absent or weak the results are robust to several alternative specifications including controls for changes in rig productivity

what drives markups evolutionary pricing in an agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomic model this paper studies coordination between firms in a multi sectoral macroeconomic model with endogenous business cycles firms are both in competition and interdependent and set their prices with a markup over unit costs markups are heterogeneous and evolve under market pressure we observe a systematic coordination within firms in each sector and between each sector the resulting pattern of relative prices are consistent with the labor theory of value those emerging features are robust to technology shocks

ecological macroeconomics an application to climate change ecological economics has not paid sufficient attention to the macroeconomic level both in terms of theory and modeling yet key topics debated in the field of ecological economics such as sustainable consumption reduction in working time the degrowth debate the energy exergy link and the rebound effect require a holistic and macro perspective while this deficiency has been identified before and keynesian economics has been generally suggested as a potent vehicle to establish economic system s thinking very little concrete theorizing and practical suggestions have been put forward we give further credence to this suggestion and demonstrate the value of tackling key concerns of ecological economics within a keynesian growth framework contextualized by an application to climate change we suggest that policy relevant recommendations need to be based on a consistent view of the macroeconomy we end with laying out key building blocks for a keynesian model framework for an ecological macroeconomics authors abstract

towards an accounting view on money banking and the macroeconomy history empirics theory in this paper three views are considered which are traditionally associated with money cranks and brave heretics the first is that the credit nature of money has macroeconomic significance the second is that financial development can be bad for economic growth the third is that macroeconomic models need to be explicitly monetary macroeconomic models it is argued that in each of these three areas there has been a recent shift in mainstream economic opinion this suggests new opportunities for meaningful debate between heterodox and orthodox schools on money and finance it is further argued following skaggs 2003 that a common meeting ground could be an accounting view of economics this is a mode of macroeconomic analysis which explicitly uses accounting definitions identities that credit is also debt or that flows of a variable affect the stock of that variable or accounting methods e g decomposing different kinds of liabilities or linking flows of liquidity to flows of transactions to structure and direct the analysis the accounting view is highly pluralist yet clearly defined i discuss its applications to each of the three views

ecological monetary economics a post keynesian critique the monetary analysis of some ecological economists currently appears to be mostly articulated around the following core a stationary economy and a fortiori a degrowth economy is incompatible with a system in which money is created as interest bearing debt to question the relevance of the debt money positive interest rate output growth nexus this paper adopts a critical stance towards the currently emerging ecological monetary economics from the standpoint of another strand of heterodox economics the post keynesian approach in its current state ecological monetary economics is at odds with post keynesian economics in its analysis of the money growth relationship this will be shown using the theory of endogenous money and a simple cambridgian kaleckian model where debt money and a positive interest rate are compatible with a full stationary economy

the euthanasia of the rentier a way toward a steady state economy abstract a positive interest rate has many impacts on ecology one of them is the pushing of economic growth in the present economy accumulation of capital is an end in itself according to the golden rule of accumulation the extension rate of the capital stock is equal to the interest rate however in the present economic conditions the interest rate is always significantly higher than zero due to the liquidity premium of money keynes in this context old proposals such as the free money approach of silvio gesell could provide interesting solutions gesell wanted to neutralize the liquidity premium by putting artificial carrying costs on money by increasing the stock of capital assets without being interrupted by economic crises the interest and profitability level should be reduced down to zero because in this situation every marginal saving and marginal investment would cause a negative interest or profitability rate they would be stopped though keynes was very excited by the proposals of gesell he criticized the fact that gesell did not see many of the further obstacles however these obstacles could be overcome by means of further institutional reforms

small scale cooperative banking and the production of capital reflecting on the role of institutional agreements in supporting rural livelihood in kampot cambodia this paper explores the ecological economics of small scale cooperative banking sscb through reference to the empirical case of a rice farming village in kampot cambodia it combines georgescu roegen s discussion of an economy s capacity to produce economic processes with ostrom s concept of institutional performance in order to address the implications and functioning of sscb within a small farmer economy the local collective action situation of maintaining and making use of a sscb system a specific finance model provides the studied community with access to a pooled capital fund that may play an important role in ensuring its capacity to produce and reproduce economic processes according to its own specifications the coordinated action among the villagers which matches up well with ostrom s criteria for effective institutional performance of common pool resource use governance is found to include social and environmental dimensions which we understand to be necessary for achieving transformations toward more sustainable economic activity while we do not wish to suggest that the adoption of sscb guarantees either improved ecological or social impacts our results suggest that this finance model could play a supporting role in enhancing the potential of small farming communities to improve both should they wish to do so

hawtrey harvard and the origins of the chicago tradition milton friedman has claimed that his monetary economics derives from a chicago tradition that in the 1930s offered a monetary explanation of cyclical fluctuations in general and the great depression in particular an optimistic view of the power of monetary policy and a case for governing it by rules rather than discretion it is argued that all the elements of this tradition except the last are to be found in earlier writings of ralph hawtrey allyn young and lauchlin currie and that there is much evidence to point to a direct influence running from hawtrey through harvard to chicago

agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomics towards a benchmark model abstract the paper moves from a discussion of the challenges posed by the crisis to standard macroeconomics and the solutions adopted within the dsge community although several recent improvements have enhanced the realism of standard models we argue that major drawbacks still undermine their reliability in particular dsge models still fail to recognize the complex adaptive nature of economic systems and the implications of money endogeneity the paper argues that a coherent and exhaustive representation of the inter linkages between the real and financial sides of the economy should be a pivotal feature of every macroeconomic model and proposes a macroeconomic framework based on the combination of the agent based and stock flow consistent approaches the papers aims at contributing to the nascent ab sfc literature under two fundamental respects first we develop a fully decentralized ab sfc model with several innovative features and we thoroughly validate it in order to check whether the model is a good candidate for policy analysis applications results suggest that the properties of the model match many empirical regularities ranking among the best performers in the related literature and that these properties are robust across different parameterizations second the paper has also a methodological purpose in that we try to provide a set or rules and tools to build calibrate validate and display ab sfc models

stabilizing an unstable complex economy on the limitations of simple rules abstract this paper offers a systematic comparison of a wide range of leaning against the wind interest rate policy rules within a macroeconomic stock flow consistent agent based model the model generates endogenous booms and busts along credit cycles as feedback loops on aggregate demand affect the goods and the labor markets the real and the financial sides of the economy are closely interconnected the baseline scenario is able to qualitatively reproduce a wide range of stylized facts we show that a monetary policy rule that targets the movements in the net worth of firms significantly dampens the credit cycles and reduces the employment costs of financial crises because this indicator incorporates early signals of financial imbalances performances of this three mandate taylor rule are also more robust to the specific parameter values and regulatory framework than the standard dual mandate taylor rules nonetheless none of the policy rules under study completely eliminates the high employment costs of financial crises

does slow growth lead to rising inequality some theoretical reflections and numerical simulations this paper explores the hypothesis most notably made by french economist thomas piketty that slow growth rates lead to rising inequality if true this hypothesis would pose serious challenges to achieving prosperity without growth or meeting the ambitions of those who call for an intentional slowing down of growth on ecological grounds it would also create problems of social justice in the context of a secular stagnation the paper describes a closed demand driven stock flow consistent model of savings inequality and growth in a macroeconomic framework sigma with exogenous growth and savings rates sigma is used to examine the evolution of inequality in the context of declining economic growth contrary to the general hypothesis we find that inequality does not necessarily increase as growth slows down in fact there are certain conditions under which inequality can be reduced significantly or even eliminated entirely as growth declines the paper discusses the implications of this finding for questions of employment government fiscal policy and the politics of de growth

hotelling under pressure we show that oil production from existing wells in texas does not respond to oil prices while drilling activity and costs respond strongly to explain these facts we reformulate hotelling s class

a simplified stock flow consistent dynamic model of the systemic financial fragility in the new capitalism in the last few years many financial analysts and heterodox economists but even some dissenters among orthodox economists have referred to the contribution of hyman p minsky as fundamental to understanding the current crisis however it is well known that the traditional formulation of minsky s financial instability hypothesis shows serious internal logical problems furthermore minsky s analysis of capitalism must be updated on the basis of the deep changes which during the last three decades have concerned the world economy in order to overcome these theoretical and empirical troubles this paper first introduces the reader to the mechanics of the financial instability theory according to the formulation of the traditional minskian literature section 2 second it shows why minsky s theory cannot be regarded as a general theory of the business cycle section 3 third the paper attempts to supply a simplified but consistent re formulation of minsky s theory by inter breeding it with inputs coming from the new cambridge theories and the current formal minskian literature the aim of this is to analyze the impact of both capital asset inflation and consumer credit on the financial soundness of the non financial business sector sections 4 7 some concluding remarks are provided in the last part of the paper section 8

the cambridge school of keynesian economics there have been strong ties between the cambridge journal of economics cje and the cambridge school of keynesian economics from the very beginning in this paper the author investigates the environment that saw the birth of the cje at cambridge uk in 1977 and the relationship that linked it to the direct pupils of keynes a critical question is explicitly examined why didn t the keynesian revolution succeed in becoming a permanent winning paradigm some behavioural mistakes of the members of the keynesian school may explain this lack of success but only to a certain extent in any case there were and there still are remedies too but what we are inheriting is a unique set of analytical building blocks the paper lists eight of them that makes this school of economics a viable and in some directions definitely superior alternative to mainstream economics admittedly there is some important work still to be done the paper highlights the need for a two stage approach addressing pure theory and extensive institutional analysis it is argued that a combination of the two would strengthen the coherence of the theoretical foundations and at the same time would provide a fruitful extension of economic analysis to empirical institutional and economic dynamics investigations copyright 2005 oxford university press

toward a new microfounded macroeconomics in the wake of the crisis the great recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007 is not only the largest economic crisis after the great depression of the 1930s it also signals a crisis of economics as a discipline this is not only the consequence of the inadequacy of mainstream macroeconomics and specifically the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge workhorse model to forecast such a huge event or at least to detect the worrying tendencies towards it even more relevant is the choice to explicitly avoid the modeling of large crises that for someone is a motivation for not attacking pre crisis dsge models focused on the analysis of small deviations from the steady state so denying the intrinsic nature of capitalism a system that necessarily proceeds through cycles and extended crises the replies of the dsge approach to critics have led to extensions regarding for instance the role of financial frictions heterogeneous agents and bounded rationality though typically in the form of quasi rational expectations the alternative paradigm of agent based ab macroeconomics can take into account all these elements at once within an evolutionary modeling framework based on heterogeneity and interaction so capable to endogenously reproduce complex dynamics from small fluctuations to large crises due to innovation and industrial dynamics rising inequality and financial instability and so on the integration between ab macroeconomics and the post keynesian stock flow consistent approach represents a promising way for the future development of this research field

stock flow consistent macroeconomic models a survey the stock flow consistent sfc modelling approach grounded in the pioneering work of wynne godley and james tobin in the 1970s has been adopted by a growing number of researchers in macroeconomics especially after the publication of monetary economics by godley and lavoie which provided a general framework for the analysis of whole economic systems and the recognition that macroeconomic models integrating real markets with flow of funds analysis had been particularly successful in predicting the great recession of 2007 2009 we introduce the general features of the sfc approach for a closed economy showing how the core model has been extended to address issues such as financialization and income distribution we next discuss the implications of the approach for models of open economies and compare the methodologies adopted in developing sfc empirical models for whole countries we review the contributions where the sfc approach is being adopted as the macroeconomic closure of microeconomic agent based models and how the sfc approach is at the core of new research in ecological macroeconomics finally we discuss the appropriateness of the name sfc for the class of models we survey

does credit create a growth imperative a quasi stationary economy with interest bearing debt abstract this paper addresses the question of whether a capitalist economy can ever sustain a stationary or non growing state or whether as often claimed capitalism has an inherent growth imperative arising from the charging of interest on debt we outline the development of a dedicated system dynamics macro economic model for describing financial assets and liabilities in a stock flow consistent framework falstaff and use this model to explore the potential for stationary state outcomes in an economy with balanced trade credit creation by banks and private equity contrary to claims in the literature we find that neither credit creation nor the charging of interest on debt creates a growth imperative in and of themselves this finding remains true even when capital adequacy and liquidity requirements are imposed on banks we test the robustness of our results in the face of random variations and one off shocks we show further that it is possible to move from a growth path towards a stationary state without either crashing the economy or dismantling the system nonetheless there remain several good reasons to support the reform of the monetary system our model also supports critiques of austerity and underlines the value of countercyclical spending by government

exploration activity long run decisions and the risk premium in energy futures investment by oil firms positively affects the futures basis and negatively predicts excess returns on crude oil futures i build an equilibrium model of drilling exploration and storage to understand these facts firms capital stock lowers extraction costs as firms drill in increasingly expensive fields drilled wells produce the resource at a geometrically declining rate however by specifying consumers habit level equaling production from old wells the futures basis and risk premium are only related to drilling investment and inventory investment leads to a more elastic drilling response by firms and dampens oil price increases from demand shocks thus lowering the risk premium received october 10 2015 editorial decision march 30 2018 by editor philip strahan author has furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

long waves and short cycles in a model of endogenous financial fragility this paper presents a stock flow consistent macroeconomic model in which financial fragility in firm and household sectors evolves endogenously through the interaction between real and financial sectors changes in firms and households financial practices produce long waves the hopf bifurcation theorem is applied to clarify the conditions for the existence of limit cycles and simulations illustrate stable limit cycles the long waves are characterized by periodic economic crises following long expansions short cycles generated by the interaction between effective demand and labor market dynamics fluctuate around the long waves