In Defense of Employer of Last Resort: A Response to Malcolm Sawyer

Mitchell, William; Wray, L. Randall

doi:10.1080/00213624.2005.11506788

Cited by 60 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 5 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…Sawyer, like Aspromourgos (2000) and Lopez-Gallardo (2000) before him, argues that price stability would not be assured by an ELR system. Sawyer's article spurred sharp responses from Mitchell/Wray (2005) as well as from Forstater (2005), and Sawyer (2005) provides a thoughtful reply to his critics. Lopez-Gallardo (2000: 549-552) would add that solving unemployment through an ELR is likely to increase a nation's trade deficit.…”

Section: Employment Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An ELR, funded at the federal level, would simply stand ready to hire all willing, able, and available workers at or above the minimum wage. Examples of these forms of public service employment include Forstater (1998;, Gordon (1997), Kregel (1999), Lerner (1943), Minsky (1986), Mitchell (1998), Mitchell/Mosler (2005, Mitchell/Wray (2005), Mosler (1998), Tcherneva/ Wray (2005), and Wray (1998), among others. Ironically Mehrling (2000, who is such a fierce critic of MMT's Chartalist foundation, is not a critic of ELR.…”

Section: Employment Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do Institutionalists and post-Keynesians share a common approach to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

Nesiba

2013

EJEEP

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Are Institutional and post-Keynesian economists converging on a shared approach to understanding Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)? The literature suggests growing recognition that post-Keynesians and Institutionalists share a common intellectual history, conceptual frameworks, and overlapping professional memberships. For this reason, PostKeynesian Institutionalism (PKI) has emerged as a unifying approach to heterodox economics. In this review of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) literature, I explore the degree to which this PKI convergence extends, or fails to extend, to the historical, theoretical, and policy issues surrounding MMT. The point of this paper is to delineate where scholars from these traditions agree, where they specifically disagree, and to explore whether or how these disagreements may be ameliorated with respect to MMT.

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Section: Employment Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Employment Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Institutionalists and post-Keynesians share a common approach to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

Nesiba

2013

EJEEP

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“…It has been argued that a national job guarantee would be too expensive, causing the budget deficit to grow on an unsustainable path (Aspromourgous 2000;King 2001). However, proponents have argued that these critics do not understand the proposal (see Mitchell and Wray 2005 for responses to these critiques). First, they do not see the difference between general demand pumping (which can be inflationary even before full employment is reached) and targeted spending (hiring only the unemployed that the private sector does not want to hire).…”

Section: The Employer Of Last Resort Job Guaranteee Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social and Economic Importance of Full Employment

Wray

2009

SSRN Journal

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“…Producing effective demand consistent with full employment is particularly difficult with such policies because the determinants of effective demand (investment, saving, and portfolio allocation) are highly subjective and not under the direct control of policy makers (Tcherneva 2011b). With ELR, however, government spending will be no more and no less than what is necessary to hire all who wish to work (Wray and Mitchell 2005).…”

Section: Elr Spending Is Always At the Appropriate Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Full Employment: The Employer of Last Resort as an Institution for Change

Tcherneva

2012

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in September 2012The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals.Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad. ABSTRACTOver the past decade and a half the ability of the employer-of-last-resort (ELR) proposal to deliver full employment and price stability has been discussed at length in the literature. A different issue has received relatively little attention-namely, the concern that even when the ELR produces these macroeconomic benefits, it does so by offering "low-paying" "dead-end" jobs, further denigrating the unemployed. In this context, the important buffer stock feature of the ELR is misconstrued as a hydraulic mechanism that prioritizes macroeconomic stability over the program's benefits to the unemployed.This paper argues that the two objectives are not mutually exclusive by revisiting Argentina's experience with Plan Jefes and its subsequent reform. Plan Jefes is the only direct job creation program in the world specifically modeled after the modern ELR proposal developed in the United States. With respect to macroeconomic stability, the paper reviews how it exhibits some of the key stabilizing features of ELR that have been postulated in the literature, even though it was not designed as an unconditional job guarantee. Plan Jefes also illustrated that public employment programs can have a transformative impact on persistent socioeconomic problems such as poverty and gender disparity. Women-by far the largest group of program beneficiaries-report key benefits to their communities, families, children, and (importantly) themselves from participation in Jefes.Argentina's experience shows that direct job creation programs that offer employment at a base wage can have the unique capacity to empower and undermine prevailing structures that produce and reproduce poverty and gender disparities. Because the latter two problems are multidimensional, the ELR cannot be treated as a panacea, but rather as an important policy t...

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In Defense of Employer of Last Resort: A Response to Malcolm Sawyer

Cited by 60 publications

References 5 publications

Do Institutionalists and post-Keynesians share a common approach to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

Do Institutionalists and post-Keynesians share a common approach to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

The Social and Economic Importance of Full Employment

Beyond Full Employment: The Employer of Last Resort as an Institution for Change

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