I subject some aspects of Roosevelt's "New Deal" to critical analysis, with particular attention to what is termed "liberal democracy". This analysis demonstrates the limits to reform, given the power of "vested interests" as articulated by Thorstein Veblen. While progressive economists and...

Following the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of March 3, 1951, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) focused on free reserves - the difference between excess reserves (reserve deposits in excess of reserve requirements) and borrowed reserves - as the touchstone of U.S. monetary policy....

Banks play a greater role in the German financial system than in the UnitedStates or Britain. Germany s large universal banks are admired by those whoadvocate bank deregulation in the United States. Others admire the universalbanks for their supposed role in corporate governance and industrial...

The capital structure of firms is known to be different not only due to firm characteristics but also to the sources of capital. Therefore, there is a need to understand the supply side effects on a firmś capital structure. A small firmś choice of financing sources may be limited by the...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

For the past decade, the U.S. economy has been driven not by industrial investment but by a real estate bubble. Although the United States may seem to be the leading example of industrial capitalism, its economy is no longer based mainly on investing in capital goods to employ labor to produce...