The challenge of creating a more diverse economics: Lessons from the UCR Minority Pipeline Project

This paper reflects on the experience of the 1999-2002 Minority Pipeline Program (MPP) at the University of California, Riverside. With support from the American Economic Association, the MPP identified students of color interested in economics, let them explore economic issues affecting minority communities, and encouraged them to consider post-graduate work in economics. The MPP’s successes and failures can be traced to the shifting balance in California’s racialized political economy, especially a state ballot initiative forbidding the use of applicant race or ethnicity in University of California admission decisions, and to the transformation of economics itself, especially at the level of doctoral training. The MPP experience may be of relevance for other efforts to increase racial/ethnic diversity in social science disciplines

Making Financial Instability Visible in Space as Well as Time: Towards a more Keynesian Geography

The financial crises of the past decade unfolded at a time when many geographers were already exploring the spatiality of innovative financial structures and globalizing financial markets. The depth and extent of crises raised questions not only about their spatiality, but about their causes and impacts. Geographers were well positioned to discuss the former; but their explorations of these crises’ causes have largely centred on the workings of capitalism as a whole, not on financial processes within capitalism. Hyman Minsky's ‘financial instability hypothesis’, which provides a useful point of departure for understanding the links between financial processes and financial crisis, has been overlooked within economic geography. This chapter explains this lacuna and argues that financial instability should be incorporated into geographic financial discourse. So doing means making analytical space for real time and uncertainty. These elements are at the core of John Maynard Keynes’ ideas, on which Minsky's work builds. Real time and uncertainty are needed if money and credit – and in turn financial instability – are to play an essential analytical role. So bringing financial instability into spatial analysis requires a more Keynesian geography

Intersectional Inequality and Global Economic Power: Self-Feeding Dynamics Within and Across National Borders

This paper explores the interlinkages among several trends that have accelerated in the years since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC): the inability of governments in open emerging-market economies to sustain countercyclical policies; central banks’ measures to ensure the stability of hyper-leveraged global financial markets; rising inequality within and between nations; nativist fervor and a search for political scapegoats among voting publics; and enhanced global economic control by unaccountable corporate elites. We “connect the dots” between global power-plays and national and local stratification processes by following the trajectory of six papers that Eugenia Correa authored or coauthored between 2012 and 2020 in English-language journals

Financial oversight, the third flawed pillar of the European Union: the missing piece in the Arestis-Sawyer critique of EMU macropolicy design

This paper presents a chronological survey of the 20 academic papers that Malcolm authored or co-authored between 1997 and 2017 on the flawed design – and hence flawed implementation – of the European Monetary Union (EMU)’s macroeconomic policy pillars. We augment his analyses by pointing out a third – complementary – design flaw: the EMU’s two-tiered structure of financial regulation and oversight. While this financial pillar aimed at reconciling Europe’s historically bank-based financial systems with large European banks’ entry into global financial competition, it created a combustible mix when combined with the EMU’s macroeconomic-policy pillars. The Global Financial Crisis lit the fire: member-nations, forced to rescue their domestically-chartered too-big-to-fail megabanks, had to adopt austerity policies that both slowed the pace of post-crisis economic growth and eroded support for pro-Union political leaders. Only marginal changes have been made in these policy pillars post-crisis. Consequently, Europe faces a financial bifurcation point: either to continue ‘whatever it takes’ support for its megabanks, or to rethink both its financial architecture and its macroeconomic and financial policy pillars

The Significance and Implications of Being a Subprime Homeowner in the UK

The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of the significance and implications of being a subprime homeowner in the UK. The results indicate that subprime individuals represent a mixture of socioeconomic groups, predominantly included in the light adverse and near prime categories of subprime lending, for whom credit adversity is generally a temporary phenomenon, which is likely to represent a transitory event in their lives. These borrowers have been at the heart of the UK subprime mortgage market, actively targeted not only by specialist lenders but also, more crucially, by mainstream players. Whereas for some individuals this market has provided an opportunity to experience the emotional and financial aspects of homeownership positively; for others becoming a subprime mortgage holder has increased the difficulties in their lives, affected their financial capability, and worsened their standards of living. Thus, the impact of the risk reward mechanisms of subprime products has proved to be a difficult reality for certain socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, given the progressive deterioration in the transparency of the financial services industry, a significant proportion of subprime individuals has, unsurprisingly, struggled to appreciate the reasons why they faced problems in obtaining credit or a mortgage

Money supply endogeneity and bank stock returns

This article presents results of tests on two related hypotheses on money supply. The first relates to an unresolved issue of money endogeneity while the second centres on the yet-explored relationship between money supply and bank stock returns if money is found to be endogenous. Our results, using long-horizon data of Group of Seven (G-7) economies, supports causality in money supply as running from bank lending to bank deposits, a result that is predicted by the post-Keynesian money supply endogeneity (bank-credit-driven) theory. Thus, the result is not consistent with exogeneity proposition. A new evidence of positive relationship between endogenous money supply and aggregate bank stock return is statistically significant on this hitherto unexplored topic. These findings are consistent with the post-Keynesian money supply theory and the dividend valuation theory, which predicts money supply changes to induce changes in bank earnings, so bank share prices change.money supply endogeneity, bank stock returns, credit market, liquidity provision, post-Keynesian theory, dividend valuation theory, G-7 countries,