Beyond Banks: Technology, Regulation, and the Future of Money
By: Dan Awrey – Cornell University
Dan Awrey traces the origins of our current bundled system of banking, money, and payments. He explains why the problem of bad money—the result of antiquated and inadequate laws and regulation that fail to establish credible commitments to hold, transfer, or return a customer’s money on demand—requires that policymakers fundamentally rethink their approach toward the design of the laws and institutions at the heart of this system. He presents ways to effectively unbundle banking from money and payments, ensure the credibility of monetary commitments, and promote the stability of this system. Awrey also envisions a more forward-looking role for policymakers in encouraging greater technological experimentation, competition, and innovation in the realm of payments.
Beyond Banks sheds critical light on the important but too often dysfunctional relationship among technology, regulation, and money, and lays the foundations for a safer, more nimble, and more inclusive system of money and payments. The first readers of Awrey’s masterwork should include the top economic policymakers in Congress, the White House, and the Federal Reserve. This is the go-to source for a commonsense understanding of our system of money and payments, how it has fallen behind, and what to do about that. The scholarship and clarity are outstanding!
Darrell Duffie, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Preventing the Greenlash – How to Overcome Opposition to Green Policies
By: Lorenzo Forni – University of Padua
Politicians stand at a crossroads where the path to green policies is fraught with political risks, as the immediate costs to society may overshadow the profound future benefits. Lorenzo Forni sets out the decisions we need to take to collectively save the world from the ravages of climate catastrophe and how politicians might keep voters on board with the green transition. He shows how reaching the net-zero emissions target to forestall further climatic change cannot be achieved by small changes in individual lifestyles alone, but requires big and brave public policy enacted by governments that is properly financed and economically sound.
This excellent book sets out a politically feasible approach to tackling the climate crisis and reaching net-zero emissions of carbon. It clearly and convincingly sets out the necessary policies and show that the costs are modest. Given the growing protests against climate policies, this makes essential reading for all policymakers and those interested in the green transition.
Rick van der Ploeg, University of Oxford
False Prophets of Economics Imperialism – The Limits of Mathematical Market Models
By: Matthew Watson – University of Warwick
In this deeply researched and wide-ranging intellectual history, Matthew Watson surveys the evolution of modern economics and its modelling methodology. With its origins in Jevons and Robbins and its culmination in Samuelson, Arrow and Debreu, he charts the escape from reality that has allowed economists’ hypothetical mathematical models to speak to increasingly self-referential mathematical truths. These are shown to perform badly as social truths, consequently imposing strict epistemic limits on economics imperialism.
The most thorough and persuasive account that exists of the origins of the cognitive authority of modern economics – and the sometimes rather tenuous claims on which that authority rests. A brilliant achievement that could really only have been written by Matthew Watson but which we can all learn from.
Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris
Unemployment Fluctuations and Stabilization Policies – A New Keynesian Perspective
By: Jordi Galí – Universitat Pompeu Fabra
The past fifteen years have witnessed the rise of the New Keynesian model as a framework of reference for the analysis of fluctuations and stabilization policies. That framework, which combines the rigor and internal consistency of dynamic general equilibrium models with such typically Keynesian assumptions as monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities, makes possible a meaningful, welfare-based analysis of the effects of monetary policy rules. But the conspicuous absence of unemployment from the standard New Keynesian model has given rise to both criticism and attempts to rectify this anomaly. In this book, Jordi Galí, one of the major contributors to the New Keynesian literature, offers a new approach to introducing unemployment into that framework.
Galí’s approach involves a reinterpretation of the labor market in the standard New Keynesian model with staggered wage setting (rather than a modification or extension of the model, as has been proposed by others). The resulting framework preserves the convenience of the representative household paradigm and allows one to determine the equilibrium levels of employment, the labor force, and hence the unemployment rate conditional on the monetary policy in place.
