This paper, prepared for the forthcoming Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics (Ross Emmett and Malcolm Rutherford eds.) describes monetary economics as it existed in four eras at the University of Chicago. It begins with analysis, based on the Real Bills Doctrine, developed by J....

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

Coase's seminal 1960 paper on externalities is associated with the so-called Coase Theorem which is stated in the literature in many forms. However, its main thrust was less to state a theorem than to challenge Pigou's earlier insistence on the need for government intervention through Pigouvian...

Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat?ʺ is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that statutory...

A "dispersion" specifies the relative probability between any two elements of a finite domain. It thereby partitions the domain into equivalence classes separated by infinite relative probability. The paper's novelty is to numerically represent not only the order of the equivalence classes, but...

Recent financial instability has called into question the sufficiency of low inflation as a goal for monetary policy. This paper discusses interwar literature bearing on this question. It begins with theories of the cycle based on the quantity theory, and their policy prescription of price...

The world is moving toward efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Net emission reduction efforts may involve the agricultural sector through options such as planting of trees, crop and livestock management changes, and production of biofuels. However, such options can be competitive with...