Recently, there has been a burst of interest in modern money theory (MMT). The essential claim of MMT is sovereign currency issuing governments do not need taxes or bonds to finance government spending and are financially unconstrained. MMT rests on a triad of arguments concerning: (i) the...

We estimate the dynamic multiplier effect of public investment in Spain. To this aim, we employ annual data of the seventeen Spanish Autonomous Communities for the 1980-2016 period. We disaggregate public investment in productive infrastructure investment, INFINV, and in social investment,...

The Obama stimulus package has been less than a total success if one is to compare what was predicted to what has been delivered to date. The crux of the problem is that the economic planners have ignored or failed to take into account the secondary effects that increased government spending has...

A growing literature suggests that 'financialization' may weaken the performance of non-financial corporations and constrain the growth of aggregate demand. This paper evaluates (some of) the claims that have been made using two alternative approaches (one derived from Skott (1981, 1988, 1989)...

Ever since the Great Recession, central banks have supplemented their traditional policy tool of setting the short-term interest rate with massive buyouts of assets to extend lines of credit and jolt flagging demand. As with many new policies, there have been a range of reactions from...

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...

In this paper, we investigate how the COVID-19 pandemics and more precisely the lockdown of a sector of the economy may have changed our habits and, therefore, altered the demand of some goods even after the re-opening. In a two-sector infinite horizon economy, we show that the demand of the...

In this paper, we investigate how a transitory lockdown of a sector of the economy may have changed our habits and, therefore, altered the goods' demand permanently. In a two-sector infinite horizon economy, we show that the demand of the goods produced by the sector closed during the lockdown...

Prospective economic developments depend on the behavior of consumer spending. A key question is whether private expenditures recover once social distancing restrictions are lifted or whether the COVID-19 crisis has a sustained impact on consumer confidence, preferences, and, hence, spending....

Prospective economic developments depend on the behavior of consumer spending. A key question is whether private expenditures recover once social distancing restrictions are lifted or whether the COVID-19 crisis had a sustained impact on consumer confidence, preferences, and hence, spending. The...