In assigning blame for the recent economic crisis, many have pointed to the proliferation of new, complex financial products--mortgage securitization in particular--as being at the heart of the meltdown. The prominent economists from academia, policy institutions, and financial practice who contribute to this book, however, take a more nuanced view of financial innovation. They argue that it was not too much innovation but too little innovation--and the lack of balance between debt-related products and asset-related products--that lies behind the crisis.
Recursive methods offer a powerful approach for characterizing and solving complicated problems in dynamic macroeconomics. Recursive Macroeconomic Theory provides both an introduction to recursive methods and advanced material, mixing tools and sample applications. Only experience in solving practical problems fully conveys the power of the recursive approach, and the book provides many applications. This third edition offers substantial new material, with three entirely new chapters and significant revisions to others.
Japan's economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country entered its famous "lost decade"—a period of stagnation and economic disruption that persisted until 2003. The current declines in global equity and real estate markets have eerie parallels to Japan's economic woes of the 1990s. If we are to avoid repeating Japan's experience on a global scale, we must understand what happened, why it happened, and the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of Japan's policy choices.
This introductory text offers an alternative to the encyclopedic, technically oriented approach taken by traditional textbooks on macroeconomic principles. Concise and nontechnical but rigorous, its goal is not to teach students to shift curves on diagrams but to help them understand fundamental macroeconomic concepts and their real-world applications. It accomplishes this by providing a clear exposition of introductory macroeconomic theory along with more than 700 one- or two-sentence "news clips" of economics media coverage that serve as illustrations of the concepts discussed.
with a previously unpublished paper by the author and a new foreword by Edward Glaeser
Fischer Black was known for his brilliance as well as for his sometimes controversial opinions. Highly respected for his scholarly writings in finance, with this book he moved into different territory, offering an incisive, unconventional assessment of general equilibrium theory and what that theory reveals about business cycles, growth, and labor economics.
In the early 1990s, trade and labor economists, noting the fall in wages for low-skilled workers relative to high-skilled workers, began to debate the impact of trade on wages. This debate—which led to a sometimes heated exchange on the role of trade versus the role of technological change in explaining wage movements—continues today, with the focus now shifting to workers in the middle of the wage distribution.
In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the Phillips curve became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then.
Contrary to general belief, and to Japan's own self-image, inequality of income and wealth distribution in Japan has grown in the past two decades. In this well-written and accessible book, Toshiaki Tachibanaki analyzes the movement toward more income inequality in Japan and offers policy recommendations to counter the trend.
Many countries have experienced major economic changes since the mid-1980s as a result of the deregulation and liberalization of national financial systems—two key aspects of globalization—with some experiencing boom and bust in rapid succession. The small Northern European country of Finland has been hailed as a success story for achieving renewed economic growth and prosperity after a financial crisis and deep depression in the early 1990s.
Policy makers need quantitative as well as qualitative answers to pressing policy questions. Because of advances in computational methods, quantitative estimates are now derived from coherent nonlinear dynamic macroeconomic models embodying measures of risk and calibrated to capture specific characteristics of real-world situations. This text shows how such models can be made accessible and operational for confronting policy issues.
