Abstract
Finance is not only a catalyst for transactions as measured by income and product accounts. It is also an enabler of a wider spectrum of human goals. How can it do this? Financial innovation and advances in behavioral psychology together with information technology make it possible to work on diverse goals of a good society, such as reduction of crime, facilitating small investor participation in entrepreneurial enterprises, and mobilizing resources for enterprises whose success is not defined by conventional bottom lines. This paper provides examples of the potential of creative finance to pursue much more diverse goals than is conventionally believed.
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References
Shiller, Robert J. 2012. Finance and the Good Society. Princeton University Press.
Additional information
Based on a presentation at the NABE 54th Annual Meeting, New York City October 15, 2012, “The Path to Prosperity: Bridging the Gap between Finance and the Real Economy.”
*Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, statistical methods, and other topics. His repeat-sales home price indices, developed with Karl E. Case, are now published as the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller Home Price Indices He has been research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980. He served as Vice President of the American Economic Association in 2005 and President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2006–2007. He writes a regular column “Finance in the 21st Century” for Project Syndicate and “Economic View” for The New York Times. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972.
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Shiller, R. Finance Contributing to the Good Society. Bus Econ 48, 77–80 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/be.2012.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/be.2012.31