This paper estimates the nature and magnitude of the local externalities from own industry scale, as envisioned by Marshall. Census panel data on individual plants in high-tech and machinery industries across up to 487 countries are utilized, to quantify the direct effects of local external...

This essay offers a brief history of macroeconomics, together with an evaluation of what has been learned over the past several decades. It is based on the premise that the field has evolved through the efforts of two types of macroeconomist-- those who understand the field as a type of...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

This review article of Preston Miller's The Rational Expectations Revolution, Readings From the Front Line focuses on the impact of this research on macroeconomic policymaking. Although policymakers have generally not accepted the equilibrium business cycle models advocated in many of the...

The welfare state can be seen as an insurance device that makes lifetime careers safer, increases risk taking and suffers from moral hazard effects. Adopting this view, the paper studies the trade-off between average income and inequality, evaluating redistributive equilibria from an allocative...

This paper describes the development of the "triangle" model of inflation, which holds that the rate of inflation depends on inertia, demand. and supply. This model differs from most other versions of the Phillips curve by relating inflation directly to the level and rate of change of detrended...

Recent attempts to resolve the international debt crisis have lead some countries to engage in debt-equity swaps. The paper explores conditions under which such transactions are beneficial to the debtor as well as the creditors. It identifies a market failure that may prevent the emergence of...