Research

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This page lists and links to my aca­d­e­m­ic papers. If you would like to sup­port my research, please click on this link: Research Fund­ing.

Research Financial Instability and Endogenous Money.

A mon­e­tary Min­sky mod­el of the Great Mod­er­a­tion & the Great Reces­sion. This paper is forth­com­ing in the Jour­nal of Eco­nom­ic Behav­ior and Orga­ni­za­tion. The sim­u­la­tions there are  slight­ly mis­lead­ing since the ini­tial con­di­tions con­tained an incon­sis­ten­cy; these have since been cor­rect­ed to yield the same long term out­come but far less volatile ini­tial fluc­tu­a­tions. I’ll pub­lish the paper with these revised con­di­tions short­ly

A mod­el of endoge­nous cred­it cre­ation and a cred­it crunch. This paper is very tech­ni­cal and out­lines my analy­sis of a cred­it crunch, which shows that if that was the only prob­lem we faced, a gov­ern­ment res­cue could work, and con­trary to stan­dard mon­e­tary the­o­ry (a.k.a. the “mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er” mod­el) it would be much bet­ter to give the gov­ern­ment mon­ey to debtors than to the banks. It also out­lines my pre­lim­i­nary mul­ti­sec­toral mon­e­tary mod­el of pro­duc­tion. This paper was pro­duced with the finan­cial assis­tance of theP­aul Wool­ley Cen­tre for Cap­i­tal Mar­ket Dys­func­tion­al­i­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, Syd­ney.

House­hold Debt—the final stage in an arti­fi­cial­ly extend­ed Ponzi Bub­ble, Aus­tralian Eco­nom­ic Review, Vol. 42 No. 3 Sep­tem­ber 2009, pp. 347–57. This paper shows that the growth in house­hold debt was not an equi­lib­ri­um response to falling inter­est rates, but a Ponzi spec­u­la­tive bub­ble whose burst­ing is caus­ing a seri­ous reces­sion. I present a mod­el of Min­sky’s “Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis” that includes Ponzi finance as well as pro­duc­tive invest­ment; the mod­el gen­er­ates a Depres­sion when debt accu­mu­lat­ed for spec­u­la­tive pur­pos­es over­whelms the pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty of the econ­o­my.

The Dynam­ics of the Mon­e­tary Cir­cuit, in The Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my Of Mon­e­tary Cir­cuits: Tra­di­tion And Change In Post-Key­ne­sian Eco­nom­ics, edit­ed by Jean-François Pon­sot and Ser­gio Rossi (Pal­grave, 2009, pp. 161–187). This is a rea­son­ably acces­si­ble expla­na­tion of the tech­nique I use to derive dynam­ic mod­els of finance, and advo­ca­cy of con­tin­u­ous time meth­ods over the dis­crete time approach that dom­i­nates Post Key­ne­sian eco­nom­ics today.

Bail­ing out the Titan­ic with a Thim­ble, Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy, Vol 39 Issue 1, pp. 3–24. Unlike most ref­er­eed aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, this one is freely acces­si­ble online. In this paper I explain why I don’t expect the bailouts to work, I present a mod­el of a cred­it crunch in a pure cred­it econ­o­my where the cred­it crunch alone caus­es a Great Depres­sion.

My PhD the­sis Eco­nom­ic Growth and Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty (UNSW, 1997).

Using Math­cad in Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis

This arti­cle, on Hearne Sci­en­tif­ic Soft­ware’s web­site, explains my use of Math­cad for both data analy­sis and mod­el­ling.

The Non­lin­ear Dynam­ics of Debt Defla­tion. This tech­ni­cal paper gives a math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el of Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis. It includes an extend­ed mod­el with a gov­ern­ment sec­tor that can con­tain the process of pri­vate debt accu­mu­la­tion, and a pre­lim­i­nary attempt to mod­el price dynam­ics

The Non­lin­ear Eco­nom­ics of Debt Defla­tion. This tech­ni­cal paper also has a gov­ern­ment sec­tor exten­sion to the basic non-mon­e­tary Min­sky mod­el from my 1995 paper, and shows that under some cir­cum­stances there is a bifur­ca­tion in gov­ern­ment debt when sta­bi­liz­ing an unsta­ble econ­o­my: in some cir­cum­stances, both pri­vate debt and gov­ern­ment debt sta­bi­lize as a per­cent­age of GDP, but in oth­ers run­away gov­ern­ment debt is need­ed to sta­bi­lize pri­vate debt.

The non-con­ser­va­tion of mon­ey

The process of endoge­nous mon­ey cre­ation

The “Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis”

Expert Opin­ion on Ponzi Loans

Other Topics

I’ll grad­u­al­ly link all my aca­d­e­m­ic papers here, since jour­nals now seem com­fort­able about aca­d­e­mics link­ing their papers on their own web­sites.

Econo­physics

Wor­ry­ing trends in econo­physics. Mau­ro Gal­le­gati, Steve Keen, Thomas Lux, Paul Ormerod, (2006). “Wor­ry­ing trends in econo­physics”, Phys­i­ca A 370, pp. 1–6.

Marx

A Marx for Post Key­ne­sians; unpub­lished

The Mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Marx’s The­o­ry of Val­ue; Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic Thought, 15 (2), Fall, 282–300

Use-val­ue, exchange-val­ue, and the demise of Marx’s Labour The­o­ry of Val­ue; Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic Thought, 15 (1), Spring, 107–121

Use, Val­ue and Exchange: The Mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Marx; my Mas­ters the­sis on Marx, UNSW 1990; unpub­lished

Theory of the Firm

The con­ven­tion­al the­o­ry of com­pe­ti­tion is non­sense. I explain why in Chap­ter 4 of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, “Size Does Mat­ter”. A more tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion is giv­en in this paper:

Steve Keen (2004). “Dereg­u­la­tor: Judg­ment Day for Micro­eco­nom­ics”, Util­i­ties Pol­i­cy, 12: 109 –125

This only cov­ers the Mar­shal­lian the­o­ry how­ev­er. More detailed cri­tiques that are rel­e­vant to the Cournot mod­el as well are pub­lished here:

Steve Keen and Rus­sell Stan­dish, (2006). “Prof­it Max­i­miza­tion, Indus­try Struc­ture, and Com­pe­ti­tion: A cri­tique of neo­clas­si­cal the­o­ry”, Phys­i­ca A 370: 81–85

Steve Keen and Rus­sell Stan­dish, (2010). “Debunk­ing the the­o­ry of the firm—a chronol­o­gy”, real-world eco­nom­ics review, issue no. 53, 26 June 2010, pp. 56–94, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue53/KeenStandish53.pdf

This paper gives a com­plete chrono­log­i­cal­ly laid out cov­er­age of our cri­tique, from its begin­nings when writ­ing Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics to a demon­stra­tion that the Cournot-Nash equi­lib­ri­um is meta-unsta­ble.

Say’s Law

“Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink Say No More!” in Steve Kates (ed.), Two Hun­dred Years of Say’s Law, Edward Elgar, Alder­shot, pp. 199–209.

Transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions and aggre­gate demand

The relo­ca­tion of pro­duc­tion and aggre­gate demand (Tech­ni­cal Appen­dix)