Growth
Government Bond Markets See Ecological Decline as a Growth Problem
Summary Teaser: In new research, Jitendra Aswani and William W. Xiong show that countries facing greater risks to their natural assets, from overfishing to deforestation, pay more to borrow, as investors discount their long-run growth prospects. Governments can reduce that premium by implementing green projects that address the risks they actually face, but announcing an intention to do so is not enough.
Increased Campaign Spending Grows the Economic Pie Instead of Splitting It Up
The United States has relaxed campaign finance laws over the past few decades. As a result, there exist concerns about politicians favoring special business interests over the welfare of other constituents, such as workers. In a new paper, Pat Akey, Tania Babina, Greg Buchak, and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva examine how the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission affected earnings for firms and workers, as well as political turnover and polarization at the state level.
The Historical Cost of Populism
Most work on populism has investigated the reasons why voters choose populist leaders and governments. In new research, Moritz Schularick, Christoph Trebesch, and Manuel...
The Invention of Economic Growth: The Forgotten Origins of Gross Domestic Product in American Institutionalist Economics
Contemporary critiques of GDP’s role in policymaking see it as an ideological abstraction, emblematic of neoliberalism, that misrepresents “real” economic conditions. What these critiques...
Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Growth, Amazon, and Baseball
Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
In school, our kids learn about having...
