Trends in Financial Innovation and their Welfare Impact: an Overview

There is evidence that financial innovations are sometimes undertaken to create complexity and exploit the purchaser. Thus financial innovation does have a dark side. As far as the financial crisis is concerned, securitisation and subprime mortgages may have exacerbated the problem. However, financial crises have occurred in a very wide range of circumstances, where these and other innovations were not important. There is evidence that financial liberalisation has been more of a problem. There are many financial innovations that have had a significant positive effect including venture capital and leveraged buyouts and innovations to fund environmental and health improvements.     

The Unemployment Effects of Proposed Changes in Social Security's “Normal Retirement Age”

This paper identifies and analyzes an inherent conflict between some proposed U. S. Social Security reform measures, which would encourage delayed retirement decisions, and the objective of minimizing the economy's unemployment rate. Using recent demographic trends in the age composition of the U.S. labor force, the study suggests that such proposed U.S. Social Security reform measures may actually increase the economy's unemployment rate. It concludes that measures to encourage older workers would relieve labor market pressures (while also helping the Social Security system) if and only if unemployment was persistently near the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). However, in an economy with above NAIRU unemployment, which has been the case most often in recent years, the opposite Social Security policy logic would apply. JEL Classification H557     

Ranking economics departments in the US South: an update

This study provides an update to Mixon and Upadhyaya’s (2001) ranking of Southern economics departments using research output indexed in EconLit. Ranking results from a ‘core’ (i.e. the top five faculty researchers) of each institution’s economics department reveal that Vanderbilt University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Georgia State University currently maintain the top five economics departments, respectively, in the US South. Relatedly, the five institutions rising the most from Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) are Tulane University, Georgia State University, University of Texas–Dallas, Rice University and Florida International University, respectively.