Articles

How Dairy Monopolies Keep Milk Off the Shelves

Article By Eileen Appelbaum and Jared Gaby-Biegle

Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.

The COVID-19 Economic Crisis

Collection

Find all of our COVID-19 pandemic articles, webinars, and working papers here.

Race and Economics From INET

Collection

A collection of INET’s research and articles on race and the US economy, reposted in connection with recent protests against police brutality in Black communities.

“Savings Glut” Fables and International Trade Theory: An Autopsy

Article By Lance Taylor

A “global saving glut” was invented by Ben Bernanke in 2005 as a label for positive net lending (imports exceeding exports) to the American economy by the rest of the world. However, there is a more plausible explanation for the persistent trade imbalance between the US and its major trading partners.

Why Do Economists Have Trouble Understanding Racialized Inequalities?

Article By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Surbhi Kesar

Mainstream economics ignores historical and structural factors by design

Why International Financial Regulation Still Falls Short

Article By William White

Despite post-2008 regulations, the boom-bust credit cycle continues to run wild

African Youth Lead Response to COVID-19

Article By Folashadé Soulé and Herbert Mba Aki

Chioma Agwuegbo of TechHer Nigeria, talks to Folashadé Soulé and Herbert Mba Aki about how the pandemic is impacting young people in Nigeria, especially young women, and how African youth are tackling the crisis.

Coronavirus Perceptions and Economic Anxiety

Article By Thiemo Fetzer, Lukas Hensel, Johannes Hermle, and Christopher Roth

When people recognize just how dangerous covid is, they worry more about the economy

Is Silicon Valley Nudging Us Towards an Authoritarian Future?

Article By Lynn Parramore

Margaret Heffernan’s new book “Uncharted” warns against giving up the power to shape our destiny to gurus and gadgets promising false certainty.

The $5.3 Trillion Question Behind America’s COVID-19 Failure

Article By William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins

That’s the amount of buybacks U.S. corporations funneled to shareholders during the past decade—rather than invest in technologies for the common good. This article is being published jointly by INET and The American Prospect

Professor Njuguna Ndung’u: COVID-19 is a wake-up call to reform the healthcare system and make it inclusive for all

Article By Folashadé Soulé and Camilla Toulmin

In this conversation with Folashadé Soulé and Camilla Toulmin, Pr Njuguna Ndung’u, a Kenyan economist, Director of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), a pan-African organization devoted to the advancement of economic policy research and training in sub-Saharan Africa, and former Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya (2007-2015) analyses how the pandemic creates more fragility in African economies, but also how reforms could be implemented during this crisis; and the urgent need for investment in strong health institutional capacities

Immaculate Deception

Article By Edward J. Kane

How and Why Bankers Still Enjoy a Global Rescue Network

Are American Colleges and Universities the Next Covid Casualties?

Article By Roger Benjamin and Thomas Ferguson

Colleges and universities need to be saved, not only from financial ruin, but also, all too often, from themselves.

More articles

INET Video

The Future of the Safety Net

Video Featuring Karen Dynan

A lot has changed since our taxes and benefits were designed, and the consequences of delaying reform are rising.

Is History Important?

Video Featuring Robert Skidelsky

An animated look at economic history with Robert Skidelsky

Learn the Language of Power

Video Featuring Ha-Joon Chang

Economists make what we do seem complicated, says Ha-Joon Chang. It’s not.

Why Economics Needs a Moral Dimension

Video Featuring Rob Johnson and Michael Sandel

Rob Johnson and Michael Sandel discuss the limits of rational choice

Economics & Beyond Podcast

Video Featuring Rob Johnson

Rob Johnson is not your average economist, and this is not your average economics podcast.

The Dangerous Ideological Bias of Economists

Video Featuring Mohsen Javdani

“We do not publish papers about our own profession.” – Top Five Journal

What is Work?

Video Featuring Nancy Folbre

What counts as work and what doesn’t?

How America Turned Its Police Into an Army

Video Featuring Olugbenga Ajilore

Economist Olugbenga Ajilore shows the high cost of the American government’s arming of local police with military weapons, which has exacerbated lethal use of force against black communities

Has China Won?

Video Featuring Kishore Mahbubani and Rob Johnson

The geopolitical showdown between the United States and China is both inevitable, and avoidable.

How Populists Use Economics to Exploit Crisis

Video Featuring Emil Verner

MIT Sloan Assistant Professor Emil Verner discusses his research into credit markets, and the role of economics in the rise of populism.

Gender Equality Works for Everyone.

Video Featuring Elissa Braunstein

If a tree falls outside of the market sector, does it make a sound?

One Dollar. One Vote.

Video Featuring Emmanuel Saez

Economist Emmanuel Saez explains how inequality is destroying society.

Measuring the Danger of Segregation

Video Featuring Trevon Logan

Trevon Logan discusses the impact of structural racism in health and economics

Why Data Is Like Fire

Video Featuring Chen Long

Dr. Chen Long, Director of the Luohan Academy, explains why the digital revolution is so different from the industrial revolution

Inequality 101

Video Featuring Branko Milanovic and Arjun Jayadev

Inequality, in many ways, may be the biggest question of our times. And yet it is a topic that is still underexplored in conventional economics curricula.

Economics for People

Video Featuring Ha-Joon Chang

Economics has long been the domain of the ivory tower, where specialized language and opaque theorems make it inaccessible to most people. That’s a problem.

More videos

Working Paper Series

Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation

Paper By Eileen Appelbaum and Jared Gaby-Biegle

Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.

Germany and China Have Savings Gluts, the USA Is a Sump: So What?

Paper By Lance Taylor

An alternative look at the “global savings glut”

International Financial Regulation: Why It Still Falls Short

Paper By William White

Despite post-2008 regulations, the boom-bust credit cycle continues to run wild

How “Maximizing Shareholder Value” Minimized the Strategic National Stockpile: The $5.3 Trillion Question for Pandemic Preparedness Raised by the Ventilator Fiasco

Paper By William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins

The success of projects for pandemic preparedness and response depends on the strength of government-business collaborations.

Employment and Earnings of African Americans Fifty Years After: Progress?

Paper By Philip Moss, William Lazonick, and Joshua Weitz

To fulfill MLK’s vision of jobs and freedom for Black Americans, Washington must rein in corporate greed

Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era

Paper By Peter Temin

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

The Geography of New Technologies

Paper By Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner, and Ahmed Tahoun

Rising inequality has focused attention on the benefits of new technologies. Do these accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?

How the Disappearance of Unionized Jobs Obliterated an Emergent Black Middle Class

Paper By William Lazonick, Philip Moss, and Joshua Weitz

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class.

The Economics and Politics of Social Democracy: A Reconsideration

Paper By Servaas Storm

The popular discontent and rise of ‘populist’ political parties is closely related to the failure of New Labor to navigate social democracy’s dilemma.

Three Comments on Storm “The Economics and Politics of Social Democracy: A Reconsideration"

Paper By Joseph Halevi, Peter Kriesler, Duncan Foley, and Thomas Ferguson

This Working Paper presents three separate comments on Servaas Storm’s “The Economics and Politics of Social Democracy: A Reconsideration”. The first is by Joseph Halevi and Peter Kriesler; the second is by Duncan Foley; and the third is by Thomas Ferguson.

Modigliani Meets Minsky: Inequality, Debt, and Financial Fragility in America, 1950-2016

Paper By Alina Bartscher, Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike Steins

Increased borrowing by middle-class families with low income growth played a central role in rising indebtedness

How Market Sentiment Drives Forecasts of Stock Returns

Paper By Roman Frydman, Nicholas Mangee, and Josh Stillwagon

We reveal a novel channel through which market participants’ sentiment influences how they forecast stock returns: their optimism (pessimism) affects the weights they assign to fundamentals.

Payroll Share, Real Wage and Labor Productivity across US States

Paper By Ivan Mendieta-Muñoz, Codrina Rada, Ansel Schiavone, and Rudi von Arnim

This paper analyzes regional contributions to the US payroll share from 1977 to 2017 and the four major business cycles throughout this period.

Profits, Innovation and Financialization in the Insulin Industry

Paper By Rosie Collington

This paper considers the relationship between profits realized from higher insulin list prices, pharmaceutical innovation, and the financial structures of the three dominant insulin manufacturing companies, which set list prices.

How Much Can the U.S. Congress Resist Political Money? A Quantitative Assessment

Paper By Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen

The links between campaign contributions from the financial sector and switches to a pro-bank vote were direct and substantial

More papers