The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from 4-day bills to 30-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks.
Government regulation is ubiquitous today in rich and middle-income countries--present in areas that range from workplace conditions to food processing to school curricula--although standard economic theories predict that it should be rather uncommon. In this book, Andrei Shleifer argues that the ubiquity of regulation can be explained not so much by the failure of markets as by the failure of courts to solve contract and tort disputes cheaply, predictably, and impartially. When courts are expensive, unpredictable, and biased, the public will seek alternatives to dispute resolution.
Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital investment today, influencing their rivals' behavior; or they can take a "wait and see" approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow.
Blame for the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession has commonly been assigned to everyone from Wall Street firms to individual homeowners. It has been widely argued that the crisis and recession were caused by “greed” and the failure of mainstream economics. In Getting It Wrong, leading economist William Barnett argues instead that there was too little use of the relevant economics, especially from the literature on economic measurement.
As members of the baby boom generation head into retirement, they face an economic environment that has changed noticeably since their parents retired. Most of these new retirees will not be equipped, as many in the earlier generation were, with private pension plans, early retirement options, and fully paid retiree health benefits in addition to Social Security and Medicare. Today it is increasingly left to retirees themselves to plan how to maximize retirement income and minimize risk.
This concise introduction to the economic theories of taxation is intuitive yet rigorous, relating the theories both to existing tax systems and to key empirical studies. The Economics of Taxation offers a thorough discussion of the consequences of taxes on economic decisions and equilibrium outcomes, as well as useful insights into how policy makers should design taxes. It covers such issues of central policy importance as taxation of income from capital, environmental taxation, and tax credits for low-income families.
In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Ed Nosal and Guillaume Rocheteau provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money and payments by explicitly modeling trading frictions between agents. Adopting the search-theoretic approach pioneered by Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Randall Wright, Nosal and Rocheteau provide a logically coherent dynamic framework to examine the frictions in the economy that make money and liquid assets play a useful role in trade.
The financial crisis of 2008 raised crucial questions regarding the effectiveness of the way the United States regulates financial markets. What caused the crisis? What regulatory changes are most needed and desirable? What regulatory structure will best implement the desired changes? This volume addresses those questions with contributions from an ideologically diverse group of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners, including Paul Volcker, John Taylor, Richard Posner, and R. Glenn Hubbard.
Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed’s Board of Governors for more than thirty years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy.With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the last fifty years—writing about personalities as much as policy—based on his knowledge and observations of every Fed chairman since 1951.
The recent increase in cross-border flows of foreign direct investment has sharpened the research focus on multinational taxation. In this book, taxation experts Jack Mintz and Alfons Weichenrieder examine how multinational corporations use indirect financing structures—organizing themselves into groups with several tiers of ownership—to reduce worldwide taxes. They spell out in detail how different tax policies affect corporations' choice of financing structures, discussing the issues in both theoretical and empirical terms.
