To commemorate the new millennium and 50 issues of JEP, we have commissioned a series of essays in three broad areas. The first set of papers in this issue look back at key developments in the economy and economic thinking. In a second group of articles, we asked for predictions about the future...

The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)--and served as a convenient marker of the government's acceptance of the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. The willingness of post-WWII governments to let automatic stabilizers function in recessions may well have...

The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. But what has happened to monetarism at...

For more than a century, diversified long-horizon investments in America's stock market have consistently received much higher returns than investors in bonds: a return gap averaging 6 percent per year. An enormous amount of creative and ingenious work by a great many economists has gone into...

This paper provides new empirical evidence relevant to the debate over the desirability of reforms to the way that financial markets and the international community deal with sovereign debt crises. In particular, given the ongoing opposition of investors and some sovereigns to greater use of...

Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's "dual mandate," which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate and other international variables matter only insofar as they influence inflation and the...

The parallels between debt crises past and present have attracted a large number of social scientists to the history of foreign lending and default. In this article, I describe the findings of the recent literature on the subject. The questions posed have obvious relevance to the current policy...