Scott Fullwiler to UMKC

Scott Fullwiler on Facebook:

Yesterday I accepted an offer from the Economics Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Because there’s no such thing as “replacing” Randy Wray, I’ll just say that I will be joining the department this fall. The opportunity to work with UMKC’s excellent graduate students while being able to devote more time to furthering the development of a true alternative to neoclassical economics was too good (and too important, particularly given the times we are in) to pass on. I will be teaching the core graduate macro courses (with Stephanie Kelton), monetary economics, financial macro, and will be able to bring my mentor Greg Hayden’s Social Fabric Matrix methodology into the classroom for the first time in my career. I also plan to work on developing the field of ecological macroeconomics. During the past 15 years in Iowa, I’ve been blessed to have such wonderful colleagues and students here at Wartburg College. Waverly has been very good to us and it will be hard to say goodbye. But it is true that the only thing that is constant in life is change—this is just the beginning of a very big change for us.

Congratulations to Scott on his new appointment.

Terra Hall — UMKC professor among handful of economist to predict Eurozone fiscal downturn

Video and newspaper article on Randy Wray and UMKC.

KSHB
UMKC professor among handful of economist to predict Eurozone fiscal downturn
Terra Hall

Lucinda Shen — A high school drop out who delivered donuts and sold lingerie is a major advisor to Janet Yellen

After delivering donuts, working at a deli, and selling lingerie, Daly earned her GED and continued on to the University of Missouri-Kansas City and eventually got her Ph.D in economics at Syracuse University....

Daly grew up in Missouri as the daughter as a postman and a stay-at-home mom. Her parents' divorce would prompt her to drop out of school and earn her own living. At 16, Daly was living on her own — and it would be those experiences that prompted her interest in economics. 

“People lived on such a margin that they lived or died based on whether their job fell through,” she said in an interview. “That made me really interested in the labor market, interested in how people could be on this knife’s edge, of climbing up the economic ladder or falling down into the trench.”

Business Insider
A high school drop out who delivered donuts and sold lingerie is a major advisor to Janet Yellen
Lucinda Shen

ht Stephanie Kelton

David Ellerman — Talk on property theory at UMKC, Nov. 2014

These are the slides, with some minor additions and editing, for a talk On Property Theory given at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Economic Department November 17, 2014.

Glad to see Ellerman at UMKC.

The link at the page does not work as of now. Here is the correct link to download the slides.

David Ellerman
Talk on property theory at UMKC, Nov. 2014

Also
Talk on Alienation versus Delegation at Troy University

Hope From The Unlikeliest Of Sources

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Linfield, Oregon. My home state. And a curious marriage between places with and without water. For decades, Oregon has had a large number of Saudi students. Maybe it's the thrill of being dripping wet 6-9 months out of the year - at least west of the mountains.

Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

Neither is in Kansas anymore, but UMKC appears to be close enough.

Mark Gongloff — 2 More [UMKC] Grad Students Claim To Find Another Flaw In Reinhart-Rogoff Research

Woo hoo!

First, University of Massachusetts-Amherst grad student Thomas Herndon shot holes in their influential research paper, "Growth In A Time Of Debt," by pointing out several mistakes and omissions the Harvard economists had made. Now, two PhD students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City have a new paper that they say finds another flaw in that same research.

The students argue that Reinhart and Rogoff's paper leaned too heavily on data from one country, Japan, leading to all sorts of bad conclusions about the relationship between government debt and economic growth.

"The argument that high ratios of government debt-to-GDP cause low growth remains plagued by misconceptions, at least for nations which issue their own currency," wrote the UMKC students, Matthew Berg and Brian Hartley. They used the same data that Herndon used, correcting for Reinhart and Rogoff's earlier errors and omissions.

Berg and Hartley argued that, once you adjust for the outsize influence of Japan on the data, there is no evidence that high debt causes slow growth, as Reinhart and Rogoff strongly suggested in their original paper and in subsequent influential op-ed pieces. In fact, there is some evidence that the chain of events may work in the other direction, with slow growth leading to higher debt, Berg and Hartley wrote.

The Huffington Post
2 More [UMKC] Grad Students Claim To Find Another Flaw In Reinhart-Rogoff Research
Mark Gongloff

Link to interactive comments at FDL Book Salon with UMKC's Randy Wray, Bill Black and Eric Tymoigne

FDL Book Salon Welcomes L. Randall Wray, Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems
(h/t Clonal antibody in the comments)

Tschäff Reisberg — New Economic Perspectives

Tschäff Reisberg reflects on his recent trip to Kansas City.

This episode of life
New Economic Perspectives
Tschäff Reisberg

Matheus Grasselli — Further thoughts on mathematics and economics

Quantitative Finance: Foundations and Applications
Further thoughts on mathematics and economics
Matheus Grasselli | Associate Professor and Sharcnet Chair in Financial Mathematics working with the PhiMac group in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University, currently Deputy Director at the Fields Institute

I am substantially in agreement here. Of course, math modeling is necessary in economics, just as in any rigorous endeavor involving quantity and especially quantitative systems. It's just that a model's implications should be accurately represented in terms of the model's limitations. This has often been violated in policy recommendation and political advocacy.

Greg Hannsgen — What Are the Post Keynesians Up To?

I returned to the Levy Institute yesterday after the International Post Keynesian Conference in beautiful Kansas City. I will mention some of the news from the conference, for readers who are interested in the kinds of events that Levy Institute scholars attend.

Multiplier Effect
What Are the Post Keynesians Up To?
Greg Hannsgen

Matheus Grasselli — 2012 UMKC Keen model with government (video)

Matheus Grasselli, Professor of Mathematics at McMaster University, presents an extension of the Keen model of financial instability to include government spending which is able to compare the austerity approach to that of running deficits during a recession.

Steven Keen's YouTube Channel

To model or not to model, that is the question — An impression of the UMKC Post Keynesian conference

The conference itself was a bit of a sleepy affair, with most of the other talks I attended being more literary criticism (e.g several quotes from Keynes, Minsky, and others, strung together and compared with recent events) than actual modeling.

My overall impression is that if this is all that heterodoxy has to offer as an alternative to mainstream economics, then the profession is in deeper trouble than I thought.

Quantitative Finance: Foundations and Applications
Having fun with economics and Lord Skidelsky
Matheus Grasselli | Associate Professor and Sharcnet Chair in Financial Mathematics working with the PhiMac group in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University, currently Deputy Director at the Fields Institute

(h/t Clonal in the comments)

Studying Steve Keen — Economics at UWS (University of Western Sydney)

This could never have happened at an “Ivy League” University: the gatekeepers of the subject would have fought vigorously to undermine the program, which they would have seen as unprofessional–a topic covered at length in a (yes, I’m serious) Playboy article recently. That’s why places like UWS and the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) are where non-Neoclassical work flourished over the last 20 years–the mainstream ignored us.

Steve Keen's Debtwatch
Studying Economics at UWS
Steve Keen

Steve Keen reflects.

John Carney — The [UMKC] Buckaroo and the Demand for Money

Read it at CNBC | NetNet
The Buckaroo and the Demand for Money

by John Carney | Senior Editor

Not surprisingly, John agrees with MMR rather than MMT, as he does with respect to the MMT JG.

I believe the dependency of the value of money on productivity is one of the insights that has driven some former MMT folks, such as Cullen Roche of Pragmatic Capitalism, away from the tax-driven money assumption. As Roche put it recently, “production and not taxation sits atop the currency demand hierarchy.”

I read John as saying that he likes the MMT description of monetary operations that is the essence of MMR (so far), and rejects MMT monetary theory (Chartalism) and Post Keynesian macro (Hyman Minsky proposed a JG).

UMKC Conference — Sep 2012 — Reclaiming the Keynesian Revolution

Call for papers.

Multiplier Effect
Conference: Reclaiming the Keynesian Revolution
Posted by Michael Stephens