Past Events

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with Betsey Stevenson

28 April 2022

"Tight labour markets in the pandemic recovery "

While GDP has fully recovered, the labor market has not. In the United States there are 1.6 million fewer jobs as of the end of the first quarter of 2022 and the employment to population ratio remains 1.1 percentage points below its pandemic level. And yet job openings are at a measured high, with companies posting to fill more than 11 million job openings. This is more than three times the number of job openings at a similar stage in the recovery from the 2008 recession and roughly 50% more than the number of job openings available at the start of the pandemic. Will workers return to the labor market to fill these openings? I explore how labor supply and labor demand are impacting the unusual labor market recovery focusing on two fundamental shifts in the U.S. economy: the shift to a largely service sector based economy and the shift toward women as equal players in the labor market.

Mouradian Foundation - CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with John B Taylor

31 March 2022

The Need for a Modern and Consistent Monetary Policy Framework

The move toward monetary policy rules at the Fed was proceeding well under Janet Yellen and Jay Powell, who said, "I find these rule prescriptions helpful." But then the pandemic hit, the move was interrupted, and the Fed's February 25, 2022 Monetary Policy Report omitted any mention of policy rules. A big gap between the rules-based policy and the actions of the Fed was created. But recently Powell reported about rules at U.S. House and Senate hearings that "We'll have it in the next one" or "We'll bring them back for the July" though changes have not yet been seen in actual monetary policy. So the Fed has gotten behind the curve, even when you take account of international developments in Ukraine.

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with William English

3 March 2022

"The Case for Caution: Why the Fed Won't Rush to Reduce the Balance Sheet"

With a strong economic recovery and disruptions to supply chains boosting inflation to levels not seen for four decades, the Federal Reserve has shifted rapidly toward a tightening of monetary policy. While there is general agreement that the Fed will need to raise its short-term interest-rate target - perhaps steeply - this year, there is less agreement on what the Fed will do to reduce the size of its nearly $9 trillion balance sheet. When the Fed began reducing the size of its balance sheet in 2017, it moved gradually and with plenty of advance notice, allowing securities to roll off as they matured, but avoiding outright sales. Some commentators have suggested that this time will be different, with the Fed acting quickly to shrink its securities holdings, including through substantial sales. However, the arguments that led the Fed to move gradually last time are still persuasive, and the Fed is likely to follow a broadly similar approach this time.

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Markus Brunnermeier

25 November 2021

"The resilient society"

When the Covid-19 pandemic first began, he organized a series of webinars on the crisis to provide real-time insights from the field on how to best manage the crisis. Fifteen months later, he has turned many of those insights into a book that distills important learnings from many top economists, thought leaders, historians, and key policymakers, and shares his own perspective on the economic challenges we face moving forward.

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with Glenn Hubbard

11 November 2021

"The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009"

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, the disruptions in financial markets in March 2020 due to COVID and Next Steps in Improving Financial Stability.

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with Hyun Song Shin

28 October 2021

"The BIS Annual Economic Report, Chapter III"

Hyun Song will take stock of the public policy case for the issuance of a retail CBDC and outline several design choices that highlight the tradeoffs involved.

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Gillian Tett

14 October 2021

"Anthro Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life"

The book is a plea to those of us who may be unfamiliar with her academic discipline to think more like an anthropologist. Anthro-Vision is neatly divided into three parts. The first, Making the 'Strange' Familiar, offers the sorts of observations you might expect to come from an anthropologist interested in how societies function. Tett writes about the failures of what may loosely be described as "white western thinking" in other parts of the world.

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Margaret Levi and Federica Carugati

20 July 2021

Margaret Levi is Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences (CASBS), Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Federica Carugati, a Lecturer in History and Political Economy at King's College. Carugati and Levi's book, A Moral Political Economy, "argues that economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. The challenges of today reveal the need to redesign our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists."

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Adrian Wooldridge

06 June 2021

"The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World"

The Aristocracy of Talent provides an important and needed corrective to contemporary critiques of meritocracy. It puts meritocracy in an illuminating historical and cross-cultural perspective that shows how crucial the judgment of people by their talents rather than their bloodlines or connections has been to creating the modern world.

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with Lucrezia Reichlin

06 May 2021

"The future of monetary policy. Some lessons from the European monetary union."

It was a policy talk, and the discussion was on policy options and choices, not on model assumptions or estimator properties. But, of course the policy points can be informed by multiple pieces of research, and your audience is as sophisticated as it gets.

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Peter Boettke

05 May 2021

Peter Boettke, University Professor of Economics and Philosophy and Director of the F.A. Hayek Programme for Advance Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at George Mason University, will introduce his new book entitled "The Struggle for a Better World".

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with Jason Furman

01 April 2021

"Warm, Hot or Scaling: The Outlook for the US Economy"

He discussed the outlook for the US economy with a focus on fiscal policy, the question of whether the debt path is sustainable, and its implications for the US and global economy.

Mouradian Foundation-CFM Macroeconomic Policy Seminar with John Cochrane

04 March 2021

"Debt and Inflation"

The talk was based on "r<g", "low-interest rates and government debt," and "challenges for central banks."

Mouradian Foundation Seminar: Populism in the post-Covid-19 world

23 July 2020

An online panel discussion with guests Andrés Velasco, Sara Hobolt and Michael Ignatieff in occasion of the launch of the first issue of the new LSE Public Policy Review, Beveridge 2.0: Populism. This is part of the Spinoza Seminar under the Spinoza Foundation Programme. Until Covid-19 hit, populist politicians of the right and the left - many of them with evident authoritarian leanings - were on the rise around the world. This panel will focus on the causes and consequences of this populist surge, and will discuss ways in which liberal democracies can respond to the challenge of authoritarian populism. Because populist governments have been especially ineffective in dealing with the pandemic, the panel will also ask whether populists will pay a price at the polls or whether, on the contrary, the economic crunch resulting from Covid-19 will further enlarge their base of political support.

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Adrian Wooldridge

06 July 2019

This is an invitation to the first seminar with Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist's political editor, who writes the Bagehot column analysing British life and politics in the tradition of Walter Bagehot. He was Editor of The Economist from 1861-77. He is going to present his recently published book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. "The Aristocracy of Talent provides an important and needed corrective to contemporary critiques of meritocracy. It puts meritocracy in an illuminating historical and cross-cultural perspective that shows how crucial the judgment of people by their talents rather than their bloodlines or connections has been to creating the modern world."

Mouradian Foundation Seminar with Nicholas Stern

06 February 2020

"Unlocking the inclusive and resilient growth story of the 21st century: the drive to the zero-carbon economy and the role of policy and finance"

Mouradian Foundation Political Economy Seminar with Anne Case and Angus Deaton

17 June 2019

Professor Anne Case (Princeton University) and Professor Sir Angus Deaton (Princeton University and a Nobel Laureate in Economics) will present their new book manuscript ""Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism"". The book discusses some of the failings of markets and government which have contributed to the opioid epidemic and an increase in self-destructive behaviours in the United States, particularly among white men aged 45-54. They also offer a range of policy recommendations to address the problems.

Work in Progress Seminars

15 May 2019

Three ad hoc informal work-in-progress seminars by three young scholars organised as part of the STICERD Spinoza Program on Institutions, Organizations and Growth. The first two were by visitors to the programme who each spent a short while in STICERD: Didac Queralt from Yale Political Science and Matt Lowe from the Briq Institute, and the last featured our former PhD student, Nicola Limodio.

• Didac Queralt: "The Legacy of War on Fiscal Capacity"

  Didac is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. His interests lie at the intersection of comparative and international political economy, and examine the origins of fiscal institutions from three different angles: war, trade, and international finance.




• Matt Lowe: "Now You See Me: The Returns to Visibility for Politicians"

  Matt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the BRIQ institute who will be joining the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Economics next academic year. He is working in development, behavioural economics and political economy.

  Abstract: I use a long-running natural experiment in British Parliament to estimate the returns to visibility for politicians. Each week a lottery determines which politicians get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question in front of a packed House of Commons chamber. Using online and archival data from over 1,300 lotteries and over 9,000 questions asked from 1981 to 2010 I find that: (i) asking a question increases the probability of holding a ministerial-level position by up to 2.3 percentage points (15%), (ii) these career effects persist for five to six years, and (iii) visibility does not improve re-election chances, suggesting that it is visibility to party leaders, not voters, that explains career effects. Consistent with a learning channel, returns to visibility are diminishing - while the first question a politician asks in a session matters for advancement, subsequent questions do not. In addition, visibility has broader long-run health returns - asking a question reduces the probability of mortality as of 2019 by 8%. Together these wide-ranging returns to visibility provide empirical motivation for the pervasive visibility-seeking found in modern politics.




• Nicola Limodio: "Institutions, Competition and Non-Tradables; Global Evidence"

  Nicola is Assistant Professor at Bocconi Univerity. His research focuses on corporate finance, development economics and political economy.

Mouradian Foundation Seminar: Colin Mayer, Prosperity workshop

06 March 2019

A workshop hosted by the Spinoza Foundation, the Department of Economics and the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR). Professor Colin Mayer of Said Business School, University of Oxford will reflect on themes raised in his recent book Prosperity. The book covers a range of central issues affecting modern economic life. In it, he examines our notions of business, its roles and responsibilities, and the way it operates, argues that the prevailing beliefs about business cause inequality, low growth, poor innovation, and environmental degradation, and sets out a renewed vision of how the corporation can create both economic and social wellbeing, and how regulatory and taxation can make this a reality. The discussion will focus on implications for corporations, systems of accounting and regulation.The workshop is by invitation only and will be held under the Chatham House rule. It will be chaired by Professor Tim Besley and Professor Martin Lodge.

LSE seminar "Hayek at the LSE"

18 February 2019

A seminar hosted by the Spinoza Foundation, the Department of Economics and the STICERD Institutions, Organizations and Growth programme, in which Peter Boettke will talk about his recent book F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy, in particular, about Hayek's time at LSE. Peter Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University. The seminar will be chaired by Professor Sir Tim Besley. The seminar is open to academic and research faculty, and research students.

LSE workshop "Unelected power"

29 November 2018

A half-day workshop hosted by the Spinoza Foundation, the Department of Economics and the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR). Sir Paul Tucker of the Harvard Kennedy School (and former deputy governor of the Bank of England), will reflect on the themes raised in his recent book Unelected Power. The book covers a range of issues in economics and politics particularly raising issues around the move towards the greater use of experts to make and inform policy decisions. The discussion will focus on three central themes: design precepts and unelected power; regulators and central banks in the “emergency state” and central bank independence. The workshop is invitation-only and will be held under the Chatham House rule. The workshop will be chaired by Professor Sir Tim Besley and Professor Martin Lodge.

Mouradian Foundation Seminar: "The future of capitalism"

12 October 2018

A public lecture hosted by the Spinoza Foundation, the Department of Economics, and STICERD, in which Professor Sir Paul Collier discussed the topics covered in his most recent book, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties. The book examines the economic, social and cultural rifts opened by modern capitalism. As well as including his personal reflections moving from working-class Sheffield to Oxford and working between Britain and Africa, he offered a wider perspective on ethics, economics and the capacity of our system of government to respond to the challenges that he identifies. The event was free and open to all, and was chaired by Professor Sir Tim Besley.

Mouradian Foundation Seminar: "CIFAR meeting on Institutions, Organisations and Growth"

29 June 2018

The Programme extended support to the meeting of the Institutions, Organisations and Growth Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

Mouradian Foundation Seminar: Panel Discussion on "Private Currencies"

17 January 2018

A panel discussion to launch a collaboration between the Spinoza Foundation and LSE was held in the Shaw Library at the LSE before an audience of invited guests on the afternoon of Wednesday 17 January 2018. The discussion, which was held under Chatham House rules, explored the issues surrounding private currencies (with particular reference to bitcoin). The panel comprised Andy Haldane, the Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Minouche Shafik, the Director of the LSE, and Tim Besley, Professor of Economics and Political Science and W Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics. The panel was chaired by David Smith of the Sunday Times.