Alberto Chilosi belongs to the last generation of scholars who studied the socialist system and have been able to gain first-hand experience of its operation under “real socialism”. His extraordinary testimony features a series of analyses, thoughts, and anecdotes on the workings of this system that have often been overlooked […]
What modern monetary theory is, and what it is not
Modern monetary theory (MMT) has grown in popularity in recent years. Several central bankers have made passing comments about it. However, the publication of two papers by Drumetz and Pfister of the Banque de France in 2021 represents the first attempt at a more systematic assessment of MMT by two […]
Inequality and Exchange Rate Movements in an Open-Economy Macroeconomic Model
This article – written with Francesco Ruggeri and Marco Veronese Passarella – presents a complete macroeconomic (SFC) model to study income and wealth distribution in an open economy. We argue that exchange rates and the stock of foreign debt play a major role in shaping inequality across and within countries. Using the ‘relative […]
Competitive vs Cumulative Approach in Teaching Macroeconomics: Some Thoughts on Recent Popular Textbooks
In this paper I critically evaluate two different approaches to teaching macroeconomics at the undergraduate level through the comparison of two popular, recent handbooks: Olivier Blanchard’s Macroeconomics (2021) and William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts’s Macroeconomics (2019). These textbooks are taken as benchmarks of two opposite views of the discipline: the cumulative as […]
The Trade-Off between Inflation and Unemployment in an ‘MMT World’: An Open-Economy Perspective.
This paper – written with Matteo Deleidi – is focused on modern monetary theory’s (MMT) treatment of inflation from an open-economy perspective. It analyses how the inflation process is explained within the MMT framework and provides empirical evidence in support of this vision. However, it also makes use of a […]
Is socialism back? A review of contemporary economic literature
The paper – written with André Pedersen Ystehede (Statistics Denmark) – deals with the recent resurgence of interest in the concept of “socialism” from an economic perspective. The most significant contemporary proposals for a new model of socialism are surveyed across five major thematic areas: socialism as a voluntary endeavour […]
A New, Simple SFC Open Economy Framework
Olivier Blanchard has made the point that macroeconomic modelling should become more pluralistic: ‘we need different types of macroeconomic models for different purposes (…) No model can be all things to all people’ (Blanchard 2018). Among the five classes of models that Blanchard envisages, there should be the so-called ‘toy […]
Inflation and unemployment in a “MMT world”
Central Banks are playing a crucial role in the economic response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The scale of their intervention would have been considered “unbelievable” few months ago. In the US the size of the balance sheet of the Federal reserve increased from $4.3 trillion in mid-March 2020 to a […]
Price mechanism and endogenous productivity in an open economy stock‐flow consistent model
Abstract – This paper combines a Stock‐Flow Consistent open economy two‐country model with the Verdoorn‐Kaldor law, which posits a positive relationship between the rate of growth of output and productivity growth. The model shows the role of endogenous productivity as a shock magnifier and underlines the limits of the mechanisms […]
Cross-border financial flows and global warming in a two-area ecological SFC model
Abstarct – with Matteo Deleidi, Riccardo Pariboni and MarcoVeronese Passarella – Socio-Economic Planning Sciences – We develop an ecological open-economy stock-flow consistent model that enables testing cross-area interactions among productive sectors, financial markets, social groups and the ecosystem. We argue that green financial investments can bring about unwanted ecological implications. […]