The world of economics is a complicated and messy place. Yet modern economic analysis rests on an attempt to represent the world by means of simple mathematical models. To what extent is this possible? How can such a program cope with the fact that economic outcomes are often driven by factors...

Published in 1964, My Years with General Motors was an immediate best-seller and today is considered one of the few classic books on management. The book is the ghostwritten memoir of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), whose business and management strategies enabled General Motors to overtake...

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert, the original time-and-motion man -- the father of scientific management, the inventor of a system that became known, inevitably enough, as Taylorism. "In the past the man has been first. In the future the System will be...

Over the past decade, Sanford Grossman's contributions to the economics of information have significantly altered the way economists think about rational expectations. Here his articles are collected in one place, providing a uniform framework for understanding how prices convey information in...

Arthur Okun - teacher at Yale in the 1950s, member and later Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s, and Fellow of the Brookings Institution throughout the 1970s - was one of the three or four most important macroeconomists of the past twenty years. He was perhaps...

Eli Heckscher (1879-1952) is celebrated for his contributions to international trade theory, particularly the factor proportions theory of comparative advantage in international trade known as the Heckscher-Ohlin theory. His work in both economic theory and economic history is notable for...

Guillermo Calvo, one of the most influential macroeconomists of the last thirty years, has made pathbreaking contributions in such areas as time-inconsistency, lack of credibility, stabilization, transition economies, debt maturity, capital flows, and financial crises. His work on macroeconomic...

Lives of the Laureates offers readers an informal history of modern economic thought as told through autobiographical essays by eighteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The essays not only provide unique insights into major economic ideas of our time but also shed light on the processes...

Influential neoclassical economist Lionel McKenzie has made major contributions to postwar economic thought in the fields of equilibrium, trade, and capital accumulation. This selection of his papers traces the development of his thinking in these three crucial areas. McKenzie's early academic...

Lives of the Laureates offers readers an informal history of modern economic thought as told through autobiographical essays by twenty-three Nobel Prize Laureates in Economics. The essays not only provide unique insights into major economic ideas of our time but also shed light on the processes...