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...

A comment on Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea's (2010) article, "It Can't Happen, It's a Bad Idea, It Won't Last: U.S. Economists on the EMU and the Euro, 1989-2002." _Econ Journal Watch_ 7(1):4-52. Link

Thomas Sargent and François Velde (2002) argue that it took government authorities centuries to solve the ‘big problem of small change’ because those authorities were constrained, first by the lack of a sound theory of small change, and then by the lack of adequate technology for...

In their 2003 Lawrence R. Klein Lecture, Michele Boldrin and David Levine argue that intellectual property rights may be damaging to social welfare. As empirical evidence for their theory they offer James Watt's steam engine patent, claiming that it delayed the Industrial Revolution by as much...

This paper uses a three-region framework to examine the effects of European currency unification on EMU and US inflation rates. It considers ways in which increased participation in the EMU might influence inflation choices in Europe and the United States. It also considers how alternative...