04/23/2026
While many know Levy President Pavlina Tcherneva’s work on the Job Guarantee, her broader research agenda has focused on evaluating macroeconomic policy by its effects on employment, inflation, and income distribution, rather than growth, stabilization, and stimulus alone.
"What criteria shall we use to ensure that public money is effectively employed for the public good?" This and other foundational JG ideas are explored in Tcherneva's 2020 book, The Case for a Job Guarantee.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/the-case-for-a-job-guarantee/
Tcherneva finds that Keynes’s fiscal policy vision aligns more with a Job Guarantee and broad socialization of investment than with conventional stimulus or pump priming.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/keyness-approach-to-full-employment/
Tcherneva uses Minsky’s fundamental price equation to develop a stylized model for evaluating alternative fiscal policies to assess their employment and income distribution effects and impact on the price level.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/inflationary-and-distributional-effects-of-alternative-fiscal-policies/
That matters because aggregate demand policy can raise output and prices and worsen inequality without actually producing full employment or solving the deeper problem of who gets decent work, good wages, and economic security.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/op_16.pdf
That distributional focus is clear in Tcherneva’s widely circulated illustration of the growth patterns in the US in the postwar era: Growth since the 70s has brought more inequality, and macro-stabilization policies have helped contribute to this problem.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/op_47.pdf
Tcherneva argues that 2008 stabilization efforts were not only tepid but misdirected. Fiscal policy stabilizes profits and closes the output gap, but it does not close the employment gap. Direct employment avoids prolonged jobless recoveries.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/wp_649.pdf
Tcherneva shows that fiscal & monetary coordination isn't rare but the norm - from Bernanke's stabilization post-2008 to COVID policy - illustrating core MMT claim. Still, fiscal policy remains more potent.
Tcherneva insists on a bottom-up approach to stabilization. The question is not “how to boost demand?” but how to design policy so prosperity is broadly shared, inflation contained, and unemployment no longer used as a policy tool?
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/that-vision-thing-formulating-a-winning-policy-agenda/
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