In recent decades the American economy has experienced the worst peace-time inflation in its history and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. These circumstances have prompted renewed interest in the concept of business cycles, which Joseph Schumpeter suggested are "like the...

In a presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 2001 symposium, “Economic Policy for the Information Economy,” Professor J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California-Berkeley, and Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers suggested that any attempt to analyze the meaning...