2026-03-26
Hiroaki Hayakawa
This paper offers a historically grounded reinterpretation of Keynesianism within the context of U.S. economic development and global capitalist transformation. It traces the evolution of Keynes’s core insights into a form of structural Keynesianism, shaped by institutionalism, post-Keynesian and new Keynesian economics, and broader heterodox traditions, while engaging critically with monetarism, rational expectations, supply-side economics, and computational macroeconomics. This evolution unfolded through successive global-scale crises amid accelerating technological change and the rising concentration of economic power. The paper argues that these dynamics facilitated rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and elite entrenchment, undermining democratic governance and exacerbating inequalities in income, wealth, and labor power. By synthesizing institutional, geopolitical, and macroeconomic analyses, the paper advances structural Keynesianism as an essential framework for understanding advanced economies increasingly characterized by financialization, market concentration, globalization, and shifting geopolitical constraints, and for rethinking economic governance beyond demand management toward institutional reform and democratic accountability.
2026-03-26
Toyoki Matsue
This study investigates the effects of changes in job-filling and job-separation rates on economic fluctuations using an efficiency wage model. It introduces a relationship between labor input and the strategic labor input target into the model. This framework enables us to analyze situations in which vacancies exist, along with employment and unemployment. In this study, the outward shift in the Beveridge curve is attributed to a decline in the job-filling rate and/or an increase in the job-separation rate. An analysis of responses to a positive productivity shock indicates that the changes in vacancies in response to the shock do not necessarily lead to employment changes but depend on the job-separation rate. This finding highlights the need to examine not only the change in vacancies but also the job-separation rate when discussing economic policies.
2026-03-26
Joshua Gans
This paper develops a transparent, simplified version of Carnehl and Schneider (2025)’s model of knowledge creation. Our tractable framework, which yields closed-form solutions for key welfare trade-offs, preserves the essential economic mechanisms while eliminating mathematical complexity. We derive four main insights. First, contrary to the original model's emphasis on ``moonshots," our analysis explicitly demonstrates that expanding knowledge and then deepening it (the moonshot approach) is never socially optimal under direct welfare comparisons. The original model's case for moonshots relies on second-best arguments involving research costs and dynamic externalities, not on direct welfare considerations. Second, we identify a novel misalignment between private and social incentives in multidisciplinary research contexts. Even without research costs — where the original model predicts perfect alignment — researchers bridging large knowledge gaps between disciplines choose locations that create suboptimal knowledge structures. Third, we analyse how citation-based incentive systems affect knowledge creation trajectories. We show that systems that privilege unique contributions over shared ones align private behaviour with social welfare objectives, while those that reward shared contributions lead to excessive knowledge deepening. Fourth, our analysis provides precise characterisations of optimal knowledge creation paths under various initial conditions and offers clear guidance for science policy. By clarifying when interventions can address misalignments between researchers' incentives and social welfare, our simplified model offers practical insights for the design of research funding mechanisms.