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Money, Uncertainty and the Macroeconomy

Workshop

Jointly organized by

COST Action KNOWeSCAPE and Complex Systems Research Centre (CORE), NUI Galway

March 14-16, 2016

The financial meltdown of 2008 in the US stock markets and the subsequent protracted recession in the developed economies have accentuated the need to understand the implication of the dynamic interaction between the modern financial sector and the real economy. The mainstream approach in economics has turned out to be grossly inadequate, both at substantive, methodological levels, in providing an understanding of the current crisis.

There is a long-standing tradition in Classical Political Economy, which recognizes the central role of money in production and distribution of income in the economy. The modern proponents of this lineage have been advancing the frontiers by explicitly considering the endogenous nature of money in the context of modern financial sector and its implication for production and distribution of income.

At the same time, Physicists, Mathematicians and others have been exploring the dynamics of the modern financial sector and its impact on a systemic level using models from statistical mechanics, ecology/biology and information theory. Their work provides a way to break away from the tradition of viewing the economy as homogenous entity to a network of heterogeneous agents and entities.

The question then is how does this new knowledge helps to further our understanding on some of the classical questions such as the role of money in production of commodities and distribution of income? This short workshop seeks to bring together economists and noneconomists working on these questions for a dialogue on the conceptual, methodological, and applied issues related to the role of money in the wider economy.

• Workshop Programme