These volumes gather together a selection of autobiographical essays written by significant economists whose work is generally recognized to be at the forefront of the discipline as we enter the twenty-first century. The essays are largely based on introductions to volumes in the Edward Elgar...

Money and credit are key themes of Allan H. Meltzer's ground-breaking work which is celebrated in this outstanding collection of his essays and papers. Money, Credit and Policy covers the demand for money, the relation of money to output, the role of credit and debt, regulation of financial...

This paper builds on our earlier work, Meltzer and Richard (1981), on the size of government. How does the distribution of income changes as an economy grows? To answer this question we build a model of a labor economy in which consumers have diverse productivity. The government imposes a linear...

The Financial System and Economic Performance -- Commentary -- Commentary -- U.S. Banking in an Increasingly Integrated and Competitive World Economy -- Commentary -- Commentary -- Internationalization of the World’s Securities Markets: Economic Causes and Regulatory Consequences -- Commentary...

In the standard policy model, a policymaker optimizes the welfare of a representative agent. In practice, policies are chosen in a political process by agents elected by voters. Drawing on evidence from my two volume History of the Federal Reserve, the paper reports many examples of decisions...

The paper surveys some main issues in the monetarist-Keynesian debate of the 1960s and 1970s, and the outcome of the debate. The debate was not static; the issues changed. At first Keynesians argued that money was largely irrelevant for output and the price level. By the end of the 1970s, issues...

The paper summarizes some of the main findings about domestic monetary policy from my three volume history. It finds that the Federal Open Market Committee concentrates excessively on the very near-term and rarely discusses medium or long-term implications. Also it has never agreed on a model...