There is one central fact about the economic history of the twentieth century: above all, the century just past has been the century of increasing material wealth and economic productivity. No previous era and no previous economy has seen material wealth and productive potential grow at such a...

The history of the twentieth century can be summarized excessively briefly in five propositions: First, that the history of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly economic history. Second, that the twentieth century saw the material wealth of humankind explode beyond all previous imagining....

A surprisingly large amount of commentary today marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s from either the Netscape Communications initial public offering of 1995 or Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech of 1996. We believe that this is wrong: we see little sign that...

We review and analyze the monetary and financial policies of the Clinton administration with a focus on the strong dollar policy, the Mexican rescue, the response to the Asian crisis, and the debate over reform of the international financial architecture. While we consider the role of ideas,...

The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers as an institution and serves as a convenient marker of a broader change in opinions: the assumption by the federal government of the role of stability the macro- economy. The magnitude of this shift should not be understated:...

The 1970s were America's only peacetime inflation, as uncertainty about prices made every business decision a speculation on monetary policy. In magnitude, the total rise in the price level from the spurt in inflation to the five-to-ten percent per year range in the 1970s was as large as the...

Over the past century the long-run growth of six economies shows a strong association between investment in machinery and economic growth that holds both within and across nations and periods. A similar strong association holds for the post-world War II period for a broader cross section of...

During the 1929-33 slide into the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve took almost no steps to keep the money supply or the price level stable. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted - disastrously - as if the gathering Great Depression could not be avoided, and was best endured. Such a...

The pre-WWI period saw the heyday of "financial capitalism" in the United States: the concentration of securities issues in the hands of a few investment bankers which had substantial representation on corporate boards of directors. This form of organization had costs: it created a conflict of...

Economists believe that because technology is a public good national productivity levels should "converge." William Baumol(1986) argues that the imprint of convergence can be seen over the past century if one focuses attention on relatively rich nations that had the social capability to take...