There is a strategic need, if a "growth recession" is to be avoided, for a new motor to drive the economy, particularly if there is a further decline in private expenditure relative to income that could generate a further hole in aggregate demand.

Modest sales expectations and limited access to bank credit may be curtailing small businesses' plans for hiring and capital investment.

Growing government surpluses, a ballooning trade deficit, and the resulting growth in private sector debt have placed the U.S. economy in a precarious position. Papadimitriou and Wray agree with President George W. Bush that fiscal stimulus is necessary to reinvigorate the economy; in the...

The world's population is aging. Virtually no nation is immune to this demographic trend and the challenges it brings for future generations. Relative growth of the elderly population is fueling debate about reform of social security programs in the United States and other developed nations. In...

American Jewish opinion about the Arab-Israel conflict matters for both American and Israeli politics as well as for American Jewish life. This paper undertakes an analysis of that opinion based on American Jewish Committee (AJC) annual polls. Recently, the AJC made the individual-level datasets...

This paper calls attention to the American Jewish periphery--Americans of recent Jewish origin who have only the most tenuous connections, if any, with those origins. This periphery has been growing to the point that there are now, for example, nearly a million Americans with recent Jewish...

One of the greatest achievements of the modern "New Consensus" view in macroeconomics is the assertion of a nonquantity theoretic approach to monetary policy. Leading theorists and practitioners of this view have indeed rejected the quantity theory of money, and defended a return to the old...

While the traditional approach to the adjustment of international imbalances assumes industrialized countries at a similar level of development and with similar production structures, such imbalances have historically been the result of a process of catching up by late-industrializing developing...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former's flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter's extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking at...

Approaching the issue of mounting global imbalances from the perspective of the "Bretton Woods II hypothesis," this paper argues that the popular preoccupation with China's supposed export-led development strategy is misplaced. It also suggests, similar to Japan's depression, subdued growth in...