Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and...

Not long ago, Republicans were trying to pass a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. Democrats were skeptical, overwhelmingly Keynesian, and believed that deficit spending had ended the Great Depression. Under Rubinomics the positions began to switch: Democrats became the defenders of...

The funding troubles of Social Security have been greatly exaggerated in an effort to push a privatization agenda. Privatization has laudable goals—increased choice and higher returns—but few would choose to risk their secure retirement income and unfortunately higher returns cannot be...

Joseph Stiglitz argues that in certain respects the economy is precarious and a crisis is possible, but global malaise is more likely in 2006.

Joseph E. Stiglitz calculates that the full cost of the Iraq War may reach $2 trillion, much more than the $60 billion OMB Director Mich Daniels originally foresaw.

Transfers and economic costs are indeed different in the war in Iraq, and transfers may be significant.

Joseph E. Stiglitz presents his plan for getting the United States and the Developing World to address global warming, and argues that by failing to address this problem, the United States is implicitly subsidizing energy usage and engaging in unfair trade practices.

In a dynamic model of moral hazard, competition can undermine prudent bank behavior. While capital-requirement regulation can induce prudent behavior, the policy yields Pareto-inefficient outcomes. Capital requirements reduce gambling incentives by putting bank equity at risk. However, they also...

Previous theories of financial market rationing focussed on a single market, either the credit or the equity market. An interesting question is whether credit and equity rationing are mutually compatible, and how they interact. We consider a model with two-dimensional asymmetric information,...