Oddný Helgadóttir

• PhD Student at Brown University

Over fifty years ago Andrew Shonfeld wrote a book, Modern Capitalism, which initiated a new field of inquiry about ‘comparative capitalism.’ His focus was the politics of the mixed economy and its national variants. At the basis of that politics was not just a concern with ‘who gets what’ in a static sense, but also how the various hybrid forms of...

Over fifty years ago Andrew Shonfeld wrote a book, Modern Capitalism, which initiated a new field of inquiry about ‘comparative capitalism.’ His focus was the politics of the mixed economy and its national variants. At the basis of that politics was not just a concern with ‘who gets what’ in a static sense, but also how the various hybrid forms of...

Reinterpreting the rise of contemporary macroeconomics, this article argues that what mattered most in the shift away from postwar Keynesianism was a new form of modeling called Real Business Cycles (RBC) – variations of which still dominate mainstream macroeconomics. But how could this form of modeling, championed by a handful of junior economists...

An emerging literature in political economy points to ‘hinges’ between academia and policy as important sites of analysis and emphasises the role of quantitative models in lending scientific legitimacy to economic ideas. This paper contributes to this literature by asking: what drives change in what is seen as authoritative macroeconomic modelling...

This paper examines how referendums on internationally contested issues can activate nationalist discourses. To this end, it carries out a case study of the ‘Icesave conflict’ between Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands. This conflict centered on whether the Icelandic government should insure British and Dutch deposits in the online accounts of the...

This chapter centres on ‘Luxury Freeports’, which are specialized storage sites where art and other high-end goods can be kept indefinitely without tax and duty-payments being made. The chapter makes the case that Luxury Freeports are best understood as new entrants in the ‘offshore world’, and shows how these sites have, over the course of the las...

This book showcases a multidisciplinary set of work on the impact of regulatory innovation on the scale and nature of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. We consider the international tax environment an ecosystem undergoing a period of rapid change as shocks such as the financial crisis, new business forms, scandals and novel regulato...

There is little systematic work on how much the core of mainstream macroeconomics has changed since the crisis of 2008 and even less on what explains patterns of stability and change. This paper addresses this gap by first, mapping out debates over the core assumption of rational expectations in high-prestige academic publications and the research...

This paper introduces the concept of a Luxury Freeport to describe a novel form of offshore where art and other high-end goods can be stored indefinitely without tax and duty-payments being made. The paper makes three key contributions to our understanding of these new actors in the global political economy. First, it conceptualizes Luxury Freeport...

What is shadow banking and what is political about it? To address these questions, the paper first unpacks the mechanics of shadow banking and compares them to traditional banking. Based on this stylized explanation, it problematizes the use of the term ‘banking’. Indeed, shadow banks turn long-term liabilities into short-term financial instruments...

This article shows how a specific set of Italian economic ideas, which were first formulated in the first half of the twentieth century and later espoused by a network of economists from Bocconi University, Milan, came to play an important role in shaping European policy responses to the Great Recession and establishing the doctrine of ‘expansionar...