A new paper by Thomas Piketty finds that major parties on both sides of the political spectrum have been captured by elites and warns of a future political system that pits “globalists” against “nativists.”
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Baldwin on Globalization: “A Lot of the Narrative Is Based on the US as If It Were the Whole World”
Richard Baldwin, professor of international trade at the Graduate Institute of Geneva and editor-in-chief of VoxEU.org, talks to ProMarket about the convergence between the G7 and emerging countries, the United States’ failure to build a social contract to mediate the changes of globalization, and his confidence that—rumors of trade war notwithstanding—the international trade regime is actually quite resilient.
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“Globalization Has Contributed to Tearing Societies Apart”
In an interview with ProMarket, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik explained where globalization went wrong, how trade agreements serve rent-seeking by politically well-connected firms, and why the only solution to the rise of political populism is an economic populism that reimagines the institutions of capitalism.
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How India’s Bridal Dowry Tradition Leads to Missing Women
In a famous essay published in 1990 the economist Amartya Sen explored the drivers of the global sex ratio imbalance, what he called the problem of “missing women.” A new CEPR discussion paper revisits this question and traces variation in sex ratios in India to changes in the price of gold, used for bridal dowries.
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Does the Growth of Bitcoin Have Anything to Do with Distrust of Government?
The results of the latest Financial Trust Index (FTI) survey, released last week by Chicago Booth and the Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, offer some provocative, even if only preliminary, insights into the motivations of Bitcoin holders.
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How Denmark Got to Denmark: The Role of Landed Elites in Development
For most people the idea of landed elites conjures up images of aristocrats sipping tea while enjoying the proceeds of the labors of the peasants on their land. New research on Denmark suggests, however, a quite different story—one in which these elites in fact played a crucial role for development, and ultimately enabled the empowerment of the peasant class through agricultural cooperation.
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Angus Deaton on the Under-Discussed Driver of Inequality in America: “It’s Easier for Rent-Seekers to Affect Policy Here Than In Much of Europe”
In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton talks about the connection of rent-seeking and monopolization to rising inequality.
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The Rate of Return on Everything
A new paper purports to have finally unlocked the mystery of the rate of return on capital. Here the authors report on their research on an enormous data set on asset returns for 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015 and provide surprising insight into the relationship between long-run growth and capital—a connection that has occupied thinkers from Mill to Marx to Piketty and many others to this day.
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Where Will the Crypto Craze Lead? A Venture Capitalist’s View
Can individual cryptocurrencies be programmed with stability in mind and if so, could a plethora of cryptocurrencies exhibit, in the aggregate, stable behaviors?
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Wondering How Your Financial Advisors Rank for Misconduct? There’s a Web App for That
A new site created by ProMarket board member Amit Seru (Stanford) and co-authors Mark Egan (Harvard) and Gregor Matvos (UT Austin) offers free data and analysis on the financial advisory industry, including rankings for each firm, county, and state in terms of financial adviser misconduct.
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How Regulation Subsidizes Big Finance
If you want to understand how the US economy is producing big gains for those at the top and stagnation for everybody else, the financial sector is clearly a big piece of the puzzle. Is finance really overregulated, or simply misregulated?
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Who Are the Top 1 Percent in America? The Answer from New Research Might Surprise You
A new paper challenges Thomas Piketty’s portrayal of an income distribution dominated at the top by passive rentiers who do nothing to earn their money, arguing that income inequality in America today is driven by the working rich.
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