Japan's prolonged economic problems are due to more than faulty macro-economic policies. We do not deny the importance of bungled macro-economic policy, but argue that deeper maladies in Japanese corporate governance made that country increasingly vulnerable to such problems.

The Macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models--the Barro-Ramsey model of infinitely-lived families or the Diamond-Samuelson model of overlapping generations. This paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative. In the...

Money has always been something of an embarrassment to economic theory. Everyone agrees that it is important; indeed, much of macroeconomic policy discussion makes no sense without reference to money. Yet, for the most part, theory fails to provide a good account for it. Indeed in the...