Three interrelated issues must be faced in assessing the future of OASI. I shall discuss each in turn. Balancing Contributions and Benefits. The overriding long-run issue about OASI is the balance between the tax contributions of the young and the benefits of the old. The system is now geared to...

Eduard Marz's book was first published in German in 1983. I have read only his English translation, which he had completed with preliminary revisions, though not alas with final polishing, before his death in 1987. The book illuminates for us who knew him in America the intellectual and personal...

President George W. Bush is preparing a drastic permanent reduction in federal income and estate taxes. He cites as precedents tax cuts by Kennedy-Johnson 1962-64 and Reagan 1981. In those cases, however, the economy was operating well below full employment and needed a "demand-side" stimulus...

This is a critical survey of the literature on the implications of government financial policy for economic activity. The central question is whether the choice of how to finance a given path of government expenditures (i.e., through taxes, nonmonetary debt or money creation) has any real...

This is an essay on Financial Intermediaries written for the New Palgrave. It includes sections on national wealth, financial markets, assets, risk and regulation.

Fixed exchange rate, pegs to hard currencies that can be adjusted, are fragile, the more so the more mobile are capital funds across currencies and national markets. Once market participants doubt, for whatever reason, the ability of a developing or emerging economy's central bank to meet its...

The intellectual breakthroughs that mark the neoclassical revolution in economic analysis occurred in Europe around 1870. The next two decades witnessed lively debates in which the new theory more or less absorbed or was absorbed in the classical tradition that preceded and provoked it. In the...

The paper reviews the major developments of the last three decades: the rise and fall of monetarism as theory and as targeting of intermediate monetary aggregates; targeting of nominal GDP in order to escape volatility of velocity of money; the abandonment of intermediate targets as superfluous;...