Variations in the foreign exchange market influence all aspects of the world economy, and understanding these dynamics is one of the great challenges of international economics. This book provides a new, comprehensive, and in-depth examination of the standard theories and latest research in...

How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn't do for the poor world. In The Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu Lin--the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank--focuses on what developing...

In the last decade, behavioral economics, borrowing from psychology and sociology to explain decisions inconsistent with traditional economics, has revolutionized the way economists view the world. But despite this general success, behavioral thinking has fundamentally transformed only one field...

Since the early 1980s, a vast number of jobs have been created in the affluent economies of the industrialized world. Many workers are doing more skilled and fulfilling jobs, and getting paid more for their trouble. Yet it is often alleged that the quality of work life has deteriorated, with a...

To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth...

Why are elite jewelers reluctant to sell turquoise, despite strong demand? Why did leading investment bankers shun junk bonds for years, despite potential profits? <i>Status Signals</i> is the first major sociological examination of how concerns about status affect market competition. Starting from the...

In 1945, many Europeans still heated with coal, cooled their food with ice, and lacked indoor plumbing. Today, things could hardly be more different. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the average European's buying power tripled, while working hours fell by a third. <i>The European...</i>

Although China's economy has grown spectacularly over the last twenty-five years, economists disagree about how the Chinese economy is likely to fare in the short- and long-term future. Is China's growth sustainable, or has China relied too much on investment, which is subject to diminishing...

In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. It has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a...

In <i>Appeasing Bankers</i>, Jonathan Kirshner shows that bankers dread war--an aversion rooted in pragmatism, not idealism. "Sound money, not war" is hardly a pacifist rallying cry. The financial world values economic stability above all else, and crises and war threaten that stability. States that...