It is widely believed that, in the wake of the dot.com crash, the Fed kept the federal funds target rate too low for too long, inadvertently contributing to the subprime boom. We attribute this and other Fed departures from a “neutral” policy stance to the Fed's failure to respond...

James Watt’s 1769 patent is widely supposed to have stood in the way of the development of high-pressure steam technology until it finally expired in 1800. We dispute this popular claim. We show that although it is true that high-pressure steam technology developed only after the expiration of...