We live in an “Information Age” of overabundant data and lightning-fast transmission. Yet although information and knowledge represent key factors in most economic decisions, we often forget that data, information, and knowledge are products created and traded within the knowledge economy....

Regulatory reform had its beginnings in the United States in the 1970s, and today it is taking place around the globe. One of the central questions for industrial policy is how to regulate firms with market power. Regulatory Reform tackles this important policy issue in two parts: it describes...

Internet telephony is the integration and convergence of voice and data networks, services, and applications. The rapidly developing technology can convert analog voice input to digital data, send it over available networked channels, and then convert it back to voice output. Traditional...

Today's wide economic gap between the postindustrial countries of the West and the poorer countries of the third world is not new. Fifty years ago, the world economic order--two hundred years in the making--was already characterized by a vast difference in per capita income between rich and poor...

The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the hidden network of relationships in corporate governance: who owes what to whom, who will stand by whom in times of crisis, what governs the provision of credit when no one seems to have credit. This book maps the influence of these types of economic and...

This rigorous and comprehensive textbook develops a basic small open economy model and shows how it can be extended to answer many important macroeconomic questions that arise in emerging markets and developing economies, particularly those regarding monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate issues....

David Fox (Ph.D. Economics, Columbia, Visiting Assistant Professor at Kester College, Knittersville, New York) is having a stressful year. He has a temporary position at a small college in a small town miles from everything except Albany. His students have never read Freakonomics. He thinks he...

Why do financial institutions, industrial companies, and households hold low-yielding money balances, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets? When and to what extent can the state and international financial markets make up for a shortage of liquid assets, allowing agents to save and share risk...

The assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin’s little tramp...

China is now the world’s second largest economy and may soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest. Despite its adoption of some free-market principles, China considers itself a “socialist-market economy,” suggesting that the government still plays a major role in the...