Review of Radical Political Economics

Economists' accounts of the experience of women and people of color in the United States completely omit the role of violence against them. This paper begins the process of incorporating violence into economic analysis, suggesting that violence maintains property rights in race and gender privileges. This paper presents the analytical underpinnings for this conceptualization, surveys the extent of race and gender violence in the United States, and sketches a research agenda investigating the dynamics of race and gender violence.

Low unemployment has revived concerns about accelerated inflation. This paper examines the relationship between price and nominal wage inflation. It finds that it varies by business cycle. Prior to the great oil shock of 1973, price and nominal wage inflation were unconnected in a Granger-causal sense. In the 1970s, wage inflation caused price inflation. In the 1980s, the relationship reversed and price inflation caused nominal wage inflation. In the 1990s, the pattern has changed again, and there is some weak evidence of bidirectional causality between wages and PPI inflation. However, wages continue to have no impact on CPI inflation, which is widely viewed as one of the Fed's target variables. This suggests that wage inflation should be de-emphasized as a monetary policy information variable.

This paper defines feminist research methods and econometrics and then constructs a feminist critique of traditional methods of econometrics, notably regression and time series analysis. The role of academe and economics programs in maintaining masculinist econometric practices is also addressed. A list of remedies to be followed includes multimethod and interdisciplinary research, as well as increased reliance on inductive rather than deductive methods.

Recent studies have conjectured that there may be a link between financial liberalization (FL) and financial instability in emerging economies. Most of these studies, however, do not investigate whether emerging economies are, in fact, becoming structurally more vulnerable to currency and banking crises. In this paper, I argue that emerging economies are becoming more susceptible to both currency and banking crises after FL. Using data for 27 emerging economies-excluding transition economies—from 1973 to the present, a univariate analysis indicates that the likelihood of currency crises may increase with stronger reactions to financial variables than to real or external trade variables. Similarly, for banking crises, interest rate, exchange rate, maturity, and default may increase, while simultaneously the support structure of the government seems to decline.

Accession to the European Union by countries in Central and Eastern Europe is a widely supported political imperative. Accession involves acceptance of the development of a fundamentally capitalistic economy in which the role of the state in these countries must be recast. The creation of such economies may take widely varying forms, ranging from crony dominated to the relatively honest and stable. These outcomes matter greatly to citizens of these states. The reform of the financial sector is particularly important, as its effective operation underpins the wider economy. The creation of an effective system of bank supervision, coupled with the development of strategic foreign investment in the banking system, seems to offer the best way of creating a more honest and stable financial regime.