My grandfathers were both immigrants to the US, one from Estonia, then part of the Russian empire, and the other from England. The Estonian, William Morris Leiserson, was Jewish. He fled Estonia in 1890 at the age of seven, through a forest in the dark of night, with his mother and two brothers....

Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2011

Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2011

Most macroeconomic models treat the central bank and the trea-sury as a unified entity. The balance sheet of the central bank is therefore implicitly treated as an accounting fiction. While this is often realistic, the central bank balance sheet has implications for central bank independence....

The literature applying information-theoretic ideas to economics has so far considered only Gaussian uncertainty. Ex post Gaussian uncertainty can be justified as optimal when the associated optimization problem is linear-quadratic, but the literature has often assumed Gaussian uncertainty even...

Asset prices set in a competitive market need not be martingales; that is, it need not be true that the best predictor of future prices is the current price. Nonetheless, statistical tests for this property are sometimes treated as tests for the proper functioning of an asset market; asset...

When monthly data on production, prices, and the money stock are interpreted, via a vector autoregression, as generated by dynamic responses to "surprises" in each of the variables, a remarkable similarity in dynamics between interwar and postwar business cycles emerges, though the size of the...

To what extent should the government intervene in the marketplace? Economists often consider fiercely competitive markets to be in the public interest. When producers in such markets strive to earn a profit, they are led — as if by an invisible hand — to deliver high quality at low cost. But...

I was born on December 18, 1951 in the New York City borough of Queens. My parents, Ernest and Lillian, were both public high school teachers of a subject that is probably no longer taught, called Secretarial Studies, which focused on typing and taking dictation via two methods of shorthand...