This paper aims to show why Irving Fisher’s own data on interest rates and inflation in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Calcutta, and Tokyo from 1825 to 1927 suggested to him that nominal interest rates adjusted neither quickly nor fully to changes in inflation, not even in the long run. In...

This paper reports recent events in Iceland where the political agents of oligarchs didn‘t even bother to try to influence, let alone contest, a national referendum on a new constitution because, if they didn‘t like the result, they would simply find ways to nullify the outcome ex post. The...

Most of the time, crises precede constitutions. Following a brief review of relevant historical background, this article aims to show why Iceland, after its financial collapse in 2008, is now at last on the road to adopting a new constitution to replace the provisional constitution from 1944....

This article is in three parts. First, it briefly describes the contribution of natural resources to economic growth around the world, pondering the question whether an abundance of natural resources is a blessing or a curse. Second, an attempt is made to provide a glimpse of recent empirical...

Macroeconomic Dynamics commissioned this interview with Assar Lindbeck for a series of such conversations with economists, starting with Duncan Foley's interview with Wassily Leontief in 1998. Other interviews in the series include Ben McCallum's interview with Robert Lucas (1999), Olivier...

This lecture addresses three related aspects of monetary and fiscal management in Europe and elsewhere. First, I discuss the implications of economic integration for monetary and fiscal policy, especially the narrow focus on low inflation as the main objective of monetary policy. I argue that...

This paper reviews the relationship between natural resources and economic growth, and stresses how natural capital tends to crowd out foreign capital, social capital, human capital, and physical capital, thereby impeding economic growth across countries and presumably also over time....

This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education,...

This paper reviews some reasons why natural resource abundance and extensive agriculture appear to impede economic growth around the world. The paper presents empirical, cross-sectional evidence of various aspects of this relationship in the transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe and...

This paper makes two main points. First, irrespective of nominal exchange rate arrangements, the real exchange rate always floats - if not through nominal exchange rate adjustment, then through price change. Further, because prices and wages tend to be sticky, the adjustment of real exchange...