When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted what had been effectively real government debt into nominal government debt to open the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. We argue that he followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary...

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted government debt from a tax-backed claim to gold to a claim to dollars, opening the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. Roosevelt followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary deficits until the...

The article discusses the economic difficulties from which the industrialized nations have been suffering for the past years giving special regard to the controversy as to what concept of economic policy should be adopted in order to overcome the present problems.

In our approach, the conditional expectation of asset return quantities, under the real-world probability measure, can be expressed as a linear combination of the prices of the risk-free bond, the asset, and options on the asset. The method is free of distributional assumptions, and we use it to...

The 1980s were a lost decade for Latin America, will the 1990s also be lost? For some countries stabilization has not even started. In other countries the stabilization accomplishments remain tentative and vulnerable. And even those countries that have established firmly a new path for their...

When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted what had been effectively real government debt into nominal government debt to open the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. We argue that he followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary...

In Milton Friedman's 1948 article, A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability, he put forward what he thought was a new proposal calling for the government to run a balanced budget only at full employment, with deficits in recession and surpluses in economic booms. What was unusual...