David Hume (1711-1776) is arguably the most esteemed philosopher to have written in the English language. During his lifetime, however, Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published as the <em>Political Discourses</em> (1752). Hume...

Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerging financial markets. In his magisterial...

Roy Radner has been elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. To illustrate the Radner style, I have chosen the example of his turnpike theorem, even though this is not quite illustrative of his central concerns. I shall follow this with a brief survey of his...

This paper summarizes the research contributions of Lawrence Summers, who was awarded the 1993 John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association. It focuses on research in four subfields of economics: public finance, labor economies, financial economies, and macroeconomics. The paper...

The economics of Leon H. Keyserling influenced the Roosevelt era in terms of housing, agriculture, labor, and antitrust legislation. During the Truman era, discussed herein, Keyserling was influential as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, stressing long-term growth, general and selective...

Trygve Haavelmo was in the United States from 1939 to 1947, and in this period he published most of his path-breaking contributions to econometrics for which the Nobel committee awarded him the prize. His list of publications after 1947 contains more than 100 items. We review his contributions...

Guy Henderson Orcutt, Distinguished Fellow of our Association. has now moved to a new phase of his career (retirement). Most of Guy's career has been at four universities: Michigan, where he earned all three degrees, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale. In between, he spent periods at MIT, Cambridge...

This paper describes the contribution of David Card, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, to economics and the new empiricism that has become such an important part of the profession. Card's forte is creative and careful empirical scholarship that exploits modern computerized data sets with...

One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that "the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the currency." The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book <em>The Economic Consequences of the Peace</em>, which became an...

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to a paper by...