In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.
The determinants of economic growth and development are hotly debated among economists. Financial crises and failed transition experiments have highlighted the fact that functioning institutions are fundamental to the goal of achieving economic growth. The growth literature has seen an abundance of empirical studies on the influence of institutions and the mechanisms by which institutions affect development. This CESifo volume provides a systematic overview of the current scholarship on the impact of institutions on growth.
Public economics studies how government taxing and spending activities affect the economy—economic efficiency and the distribution of income and wealth. This comprehensive text in public economics covers the core topics market failure and taxation as well as recent developments in the political economy and public choice literatures. It is unique not only in its broad scope but in its balance between public finance and public choice and its combination of theory and relevant empirical evidence.
The enemies of globalization—whether they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional cultures—see the new world economy as forcing a system on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter, writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century communications, shows people a world of material prosperity that they do want—a vivid world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled.
Neither socialism nor free-market neoliberalism has been a very helpful model for Latin America, writes Javier Santiso in this witty and literate reading of that region's economic and political condition. Latin America must move beyond utopian schemes and rigid ideologies invented in other hemispheres and acknowledge its own social realities of inequality and poverty.
This text, intended for both graduate students and professional researchers, is an effective, concise introduction to the structural econometrics of auctions. Tools from recent developments in theoretical econometrics are combined with established numerical methods to provide a practical guide to most of the main concepts in the empirical analysis of field data from auctions. Among other things, the text is remarkable for a large number of mathematical problems and computer exercises for which sample solutions are provided at the end of the book.
The United States's post-World War II emphasis on activist fiscal policy for short-term economic stabilization was called into question in the 1960s, and by the late 1980s was superseded by the view that fiscal policy should focus on long-run structural concerns. For the past two decades both public policy and economic research emphasized monetary policy as a stabilization tool. But there remain issues in American macroeconomic policy having to do with budget deficits, present and projected, as well as a recent revival of interest in fiscal policy as a stabilization tool.
A country's stance on international trade is an important component of its economic welfare. Yet relatively little theoretical attention has been paid to developing accurate methods to assess trade policies, leaving practitioners and policy makers with ad hoc solutions that lack theoretical foundation. In this book, James Anderson and Peter Neary present a new approach to gauging trade restrictiveness. Extending the standard theory of index numbers that apply to prices, output, or productivity, Anderson and Neary develop index numbers that apply directly to policy variables.
The process of monetary integration in Europe began amid widespread skepticism among economists about the project. But today the success of the euro has prompted a reconsideration of whether monetary unions should be implemented elsewhere. This CESifo volume assesses contemporary theoretical and empirical work on optimal currency areas, considering such questions as the expansion of the eurozone, the institution of monetary unions in Latin America and East Asia, and the effect of monetary unions on the working of the "real economy."
This volume of papers, articles, and essays by the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Franco Modigliani contains writings published during the last decade of his life as well as three seminal earlier papers on the life-cycle hypothesis. As in the previous Collected Papers, the writings are organized by topic; within each topic, the order is chronological. Part I treats the life-cycle hypothesis.
