Since the 1970s, Robert Barro's academic research has significantly influenced macroeconomic theory. For more than a decade, his writing has also enlivened the pages of publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Business Week. In Nothing Is Sacred, Barro applies his well-honed free market arguments to a remarkably diverse range of issues. These include global problems such as growth and debt, as well as social issues such as the predictive value of SAT scores, drug legalization, the economics of beauty, and the relationship between abortion rights and crime reduction.

The Theory of Incomplete Markets provides a unified framework for analyzing the real, financial, and monetary sectors of an economy. It describes an innovative theory that takes into account the fact that in order to coordinate their activities and share their risks, agents are forced by the imperfections in their knowledge and their propensity for opportunistic behavior to trade sequentially and to make only limited contractual commitments into the future.

What determines the size and form of redistributive programs, the extent and type of public goods provision, the burden of taxation across alternative tax bases, the size of government deficits, and the stance of monetary policy during the course of business and electoral cycles? A large and rapidly growing literature in political economics attempts to answer these questions. But so far there is little consensus on the answers and disagreement on the appropriate mode of analysis.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical foundations of economics, from basic set theory to fixed point theorems and constrained optimization. Rather than simply offer a collection of problem-solving techniques, the book emphasizes the unifying mathematical principles that underlie economics. Features include an extended presentation of separation theorems and their applications, an account of constraint qualification in constrained optimization, and an introduction to monotone comparative statics. These topics are developed by way of more than 800 exercises.