Dear Cliff,
I am interested in joining the PCP. My details follow, as requested:
1)Name
Steve Keen
2)Email address
steve.keen@unsw.edu.au
3)Postal address
c/- Department of Economics,
University of New South Wales
NSW 2052 Australia
4)Phone
61 2 558-8018
5)Affiliations
The Department of Economics at UNSW, doing a PhD on Post Keynesian monetary
economics
6)How did you hear about PCP?
Via Stephen Guastello and the Post Keynesian email discussion group,
pkt@csf.colorado.edu
7)Do you wish to be a full subscriber to PRNCYB-L, or just receive the Digest?
Full subscriber, though I might take a while to contribute actively
8)Please take at least one page to describe your work and how it might
relate to PCP
I am interested in modelling economic instability as an emergent property
of an economy with advanced financial institutions. This will be an
application of the theories of Hyman Minsky concerning what he calls the
"Financial Instability Hypothesis".
The hypothesis argues that an advanced capitalist economy is likely to
develop a period of euphoric investment behaviour as the memory of a
previous economic crisis recedes, leading to increased debt financing
of speculative investment, a debt-financed boom, and finally a debt-
deflation. In times without big government, such crises would lead to
depressions; with big government, the government response of deficit
financing stops debt deflation becoming self-fulfilling, but generates
problems of inflation or the rapid re-assertion of unstable behaviour.
I have to date developed a simple 6-dimensional continuous time nonlinear
model of Minsky's theories, and this is to be published in the June '94
issue of the _Journal of Post Keynesian Economics_ (Vol. 17 No. 4).
I wish to extend this model in two respects: firstly, to develop a more
complex price-based continuous or discrete time model, which I expect will
have about 14 dimensions; secondly, to model the FIH via an "Artificial
Life" simulation.
The last project in particular meshes with the interests of the PCP.
Yours sincerely,
Steve Keen