Francesco Caselli – författare

After the Crisis reassesses the twin projects of structural reform and European integration in the wake of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis.The introduction compares the pre-crises debate to the current situation, and highlights a number of ways in which both reform and further integration may have become more difficult. Chapter 1 surveys the state of the structural-reform agenda, its successes, failures, and priorities for further action. The second chapter focuses on the fiscal-policy response to the crisis and advocates a greater balance between supply-side reforms and demand-side management. The third chapter focuses on theasymmetric shocks across economies in the monetary union, and discusses institutional mechanisms to reduce their frequency and impact. Chapter 4 examines the cyclical behavior of output and financial indicators, as well as the counter-cyclical role of macro-financial policies, both at the national andthe European level. The fifth chapter studies changes in Europeans'' attitudes, showing how the recent crises have eroded public confidence in European institutions. The sixth chapter tackles the demographic challenges facing Europe, and particularly the way that demographic change may impact the reform agenda. Chapter 7 highlights the under-appreciated extent to which ''Europe'', taken as a whole, is characterized by a substantial amount of inequality and geographical income clustering, and thechallenge this poses for further integration.

After the Crisis reassesses the twin projects of structural reform and European integration in the wake of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis.The introduction compares the pre-crises debate to the current situation, and highlights a number of ways in which both reform and further integration may have become more difficult. Chapter 1 surveys the state of the structural-reform agenda, its successes, failures, and priorities for further action. The second chapter focuses on the fiscal-policy response to the crisis and advocates a greater balance between supply-side reforms and demand-side management. The third chapter focuses on theasymmetric shocks across economies in the monetary union, and discusses institutional mechanisms to reduce their frequency and impact. Chapter 4 examines the cyclical behavior of output and financial indicators, as well as the counter-cyclical role of macro-financial policies, both at the national andthe European level. The fifth chapter studies changes in Europeans'' attitudes, showing how the recent crises have eroded public confidence in European institutions. The sixth chapter tackles the demographic challenges facing Europe, and particularly the way that demographic change may impact the reform agenda. Chapter 7 highlights the under-appreciated extent to which ''Europe'', taken as a whole, is characterized by a substantial amount of inequality and geographical income clustering, and thechallenge this poses for further integration.

After the Crisis reassesses the twin projects of structural reform and European integration in the wake of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. The introduction compares the pre-crises debate to the current situation, and highlights a number of ways in which both reform and further integration may have become more difficult. Chapter 1 surveys the state of the structural-reform agenda, its successes, failures, and priorities for further action. The second chapter focuses on the fiscal-policy response to the crisis and advocates a greater balance between supply-side reforms and demand-side management. The third chapter focuses on the asymmetric shocks across economies in the monetary union, and discusses institutional mechanisms to reduce their frequency and impact. Chapter 4 examines the cyclical behavior of output and financial indicators, as well as the counter-cyclical role of macro-financial policies, both at the national and the European level. The fifth chapter studies changes in Europeans' attitudes, showing how the recent crises have eroded public confidence in European institutions. The sixth chapter tackles the demographic challenges facing Europe, and particularly the way that demographic change may impact the reform agenda. Chapter 7 highlights the under-appreciated extent to which 'Europe', taken as a whole, is characterized by a substantial amount of inequality and geographical income clustering, and the challenge this poses for further integration.

A blueprint for an economy that delivers true shared prosperity and inclusive growth.How can we address economic inequality? Most proposed solutions ask the rich to pay higher taxes to benefit the poor. But the rich have the political power to control whether redistribution happens and are unlikely to tolerate such arrangements. Therefore, Francesco Caselli argues, what’s needed is a system that generates wealth equitably at the source: an economy that retains free markets but replaces traditional corporations with worker-managed cooperatives, where every employee has an equal say in company governance.Cooperatives in the Twenty-First Century shows that properly designed worker coops can match the productivity of conventional firms while sharing the resulting prosperity more evenly. Hardly a radical, Caselli mobilizes decades of orthodox economics research to distill the principles required for cooperatives to succeed: He explains how to implement worker democracy, structure management, address worker discipline, and protect the rights of those who leave the coop, among other matters. If a coop follows these principles, it will be “incentive compatible”—that is, each member will work hard because it will be in their interest to do so. Crucially, this coop system does not assume worker altruism. A well-designed cooperative will succeed even if every worker is a purely selfish Homo economicus.Effective worker coops are not the stuff of utopian fantasy: Spain’s Mondragon federation, for example, has been around for seventy years and employs over 70,000 workers. But coops are still rarer than they should be. Caselli’s meticulous, accessible recommendations offer a vision of a more equal economic future and detail how we can get from here to there.

Technology Differences over Space and Time looks at how countries use their productive resources--such as workers, skills, equipment and structures, and natural resources. Francesco Caselli develops methods to assess the efficiency with which productive inputs are used, and how these efficiencies vary across countries and over time. Caselli finds that richer countries use skilled workers relatively more efficiently than unskilled workers, and equipment and structures relatively more efficiently than natural resources. They also are relatively more efficient users of labor than of capital. Technological change tends to make countries particularly efficient at using skills and less efficient at using capital. Technical change also favors experienced workers. In order to interpret and understand these findings, Caselli presents a theory of technology choice. In this theory, firms pick technologies that make the most efficient use of the most abundant production factors when these factors are good substitutes for the less abundant factors. Firms pick technologies that make the most of less abundant factors when other suitable factors are not available for substitution.For example, rich countries, where skilled workers are abundant, use skilled workers efficiently, as these are good substitutes for unskilled workers. This flexible framework can be applied to other pairs of inputs, over time, and across countries. Technology Differences over Space and Time has significant implications not only for the theoretical understanding of development and technological innovation, but also for government formulation of industrial policy and multinationals making decisions about what to invest in and where to make those investments.