I teach what is, for me, a new course this semester together with Roberto Mangabeira Unger of the Law School, called “Political Economy After the Crisis.” Roberto and I end up arguing quite a bit, with plenty of contributions from the students. For those of you who are interested, here is the s...

My colleague Lant Pritchett teaches a course on globalization with Larry Summers, and he invited me to his class recently to debate Summers on free trade. I used a few thought experiments to get students to understand how thinking about trade policy requires going beyond economics to considering...

Many moons ago, I wrote a paper (with Alberto Alesina) called “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” which remains one of my most heavily cited publications. The paper has a simple idea: in highly unequal societies, the median voter is more likely to demand high taxes on capital, which in...