This paper clarifies why a transaction tax of the type proposed by James Tobin can have a stabilizing influence in financial markets. It argues that such a tax is potentially stabilizing, not because it reduces the excessive volume of transactions, but because it can slow the speed with which...

The essay argues that a crisis of collective agency is at the root of the global economic crisis we face today. The secret of prosperous capitalism, the so-called golden age, was the ability of the state to uniformly impose welfare enhancing market restrictions that made it possible to husband...

Since around 2000 the education premium and the level of employment in high-skill occupations has stagnated, if not actually begun to shrink. This brings into question the generally held view that in advanced countries, while potentially harmful for those who work with their hands, globalization...

In this paper our objective is to sketch out an alternative understanding of Minsky as an evolving research agenda.At the most general level we hold that a Minksyan way of looking at the world boils down to few basic propositions: (i) in a financial capitalist economy, credit is procyclical in...

The paper explores the link between financial sentiment and private debt, using Keynes's 'A Treatise on Money' as a conceptual backdrop. In responding to his critics after the publication of his 'General Theory' Keynes famously talked about unexpected, violent changes in conventional asset...

Drawing broadly on the literature on the political economy of the financial crisis, the paper looks at deregulation as a market driven process that culminated in a collective action failure. In the run up to the 2008 Financial Crisis strong competition and moral hazard went hand in hand and that...

In simple textbook treatment of bilateral exchange traders end up on the contract curve such that the trading surplus is maximized regardless of any asymmetric bargaining power they might have. However, that need not be true when the terms of exchange are determined by uncooperative bargaining,...

The essential insight Minsky drew from Keynes was that optimistic expectations about the future create a margin, reflected in higher asset prices, which makes it possible for borrowers to access finance in the present. In other words, the capitalized expected future earnings work as the...

The sharp exchanges that Keynes had with some of his critics on the loanable funds theory made it harder to appreciate the degree to which his thought was continuous with the tradition of monetary analysis that emanates from Wicksell, of which Keynes's A Treatise on Money was a part. In the...