The reader can find here a short introduction to the Macroeconomic Modeling and Empirical Evidence in the Wake of the Crisis discussion made at the “International Conference on Economics, Economic Policy and Sustainable Growth after the Crisis” (held at the Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona, Italy, September 8–10, 2016).

Considering macroeconomies as systems subject to stochastic forms of entropic equilibria, we shall consider how deviations driven by positive feedbacks as in a speculative bubble can drive such an economy into an anti-entropic state that can suddenly collapse back into an entropic state, with such a collapse taking the form of a Minsky moment. This can manifest itself as shifts in the boundary between the portion of the income distribution that is best modeled as Boltzmann–Gibbs and that best modeled as a Paretian power law.

In this paper, we investigate the causal effects of public and private debts on US output dynamics. We estimate a battery of Cointegrated Structural Vector Autoregressive models, and we identify structural shocks by employing Independent Component Analysis, a data-driven technique which avoids ad-hoc identification choices. The econometric results suggest that the impact of debt on economic activity is Janus-faced. Public debt shocks have positive and persistent influence on economic activity. In contrast, rising private debt has a milder positive impact on gross domestic product, but it fades out over time. The analysis of the possible transmission mechanisms reveals that public debt crowds in private consumption and investment. In contrast, mortgage debt fuels consumption and output in the short-run, but shrinks them in the medium-run.

Fiscal discipline is commonly evaluated on the basis of the debt–gross domestic product ratio, which exhibits a stock variable measured relative to a flow variable. This way of monitoring debt solvency is arguably not consistent with transversality conditions obtained from optimizing macroeconomic frameworks. In this paper, we consider a wealth-based sustainability index of government debt policy derived from a baseline endogenous growth model. We calculate the index from 1999 onward for countries in which the after-growth real interest rate is positive, consistently with the theoretical setup. Results are radically different from common wisdom. We show that the fiscal position is sustainable for both Germany and Italy, and strongly unsustainable for both Japan and France. Policy implications of our findings are discussed.

In this paper, we apply two novel methodological approaches, Tucker three-way principal component analysis and locally weighted principal component analysis, to construct financial conditions index for Eurozone countries. The aim is to point out how real and financial macroeconomic variables affect the credit channel and which variables are more relevant in each occasion, highlighting structural differences within the Eurozone. The results suggest that the Eurozone is involved into a low easing pattern, which is difficult to reverse and affects considerably the financial conditions, surrounding the hypothesis that this pattern has been worsened by structural differences between the European Monetary Union (EMU) countries. Empirical evidence shows that European Central Bank (ECB) policy has managed to cool financial tensions and has made financial conditions homogeneous, but it has not been able to restore them at a precrisis level.

We analyze the simplest possible model of endogenous growth to account for the role of financial development. In our setting, financial development affects productivity and determines the amount of resources subtracted to capital investment. We show that under very general assumptions, the relation between economic growth and financial depth is nonmonotonic, and eventually bell-shaped. We empirically assess our results in a framework that allows to distinguish between long-run and short-run effects. We establish a cointegrating relation and derive the long-run elasticities of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) with respect to employment, the physical capital stock, and financial depth–relying on linear as well as nonlinear models for the finance-growth nexus. We employ the results of the first step estimation to specify an error–correction model and find that there is strong evidence for a nonlinear relationship between financial depth and per capita GDP, consistently with what was predicted by our theoretical model.

In this paper, we adopt a Ramsey optimal approach to identify the combination of income taxes, public expenditure, and inflation designed to achieve a fiscal consolidation. In contrast with empirical contributions that emphasize the benefits of expenditure-based consolidations, the optimal policy calls for increases in taxes and inflation. Strong monetary accommodation is quite beneficial relative to a situation where the Central Bank is only concerned with inflation stability and the inflation target is defined as a ceiling, as in the Eurozone.

A monetary production model of financial firms is employed to investigate supply-side inside-money aggregation, augmented to include credit card transaction services. Inside money is a supply-side concept. Financial firms are conceived to produce monetary and credit card transaction services as outputs through financial intermediation. While credit cards provide transactions services, credit cards have never been included into measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities to assets. However, index number theory measures service flows and is based on microeconomic aggregation theory, not accounting. We derive theory needed to measure the supply of the joint services of credit cards and inside money, needed to estimate the output supply function and to compute value added. The data needed for empirical implementation of our theory are available online from the Center for Financial Stability in New York City.

We propose a simple short-run Post-Keynesian model in which the key aspects of shadow banking, namely securitization and the production of structured finance instruments, are explicitly formalized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to broaden purely real-side Post-Keynesian models and their traditional focus on shareholder-value orientation, the financialization of non-financial firms, and the profit-led vs. wage-led dichotomy. We rather put emphasis on the role of financial institutions and rentier-friendly environment in determining the predominance of specific growth and distribution regimes. First, we illustrate the macroeconomic rationale of shadow banking practices. We show how, before the 2007–08 crisis, securitization and shadow banking allowed for an increase in profitability for the whole financial sector, while apparently keeping leverage under control. Second, we define a variety of shadow-banking-led regimes in terms of economic activity, productive capital accumulation, and income distribution.

This paper aims at investigating the interplay between inequality, innovation dynamics, and investment behaviors in shaping the long-run patterns of growth of a closed economy. By extending the analysis proposed in Caiani et al. [(2018) Journal of Evolutionary Economics], we explore the effects of alternative wage regimes under different investment and technological change scenarios. Experimental results seem to de-emphasize the role of technological progress as a possible source of greater inequality. Overall, simulation results are consistent with the predominance of a wage-led growth regime in most of the scenarios analyzed: A faster growth of low- and middle-level workers’ wages, relative to managers’, generally exert beneficial effects on the economy and allows to counteract the labor-saving effects of technological progress. Furthermore, a distribution more favorable to workers does not compromise firms’ profitability, but rather strengthen it by creating a more favorable macroeconomic environment, which encourages further innovations, stimulates investment, and sustains economic growth.