Non-market-clearing models continue to dominate analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations and discussions of macroeconomic policy. This situation is remarkable because non-market-clearing assumptions seem to be inconsistent with the essential presumption of neoclassical economic analysis that...

The main objective of this paper is to understand and to evaluate recently expressed popular anxiety about large American fiscal deficits. The paper begins with a discussion of problems involved in measuring the fiscal deficit. A general conclusion is that all interesting measures of the federal...

This paper analyzes the intertemporal efficiency and optimality of steady states within overlapping-generations models in which the utility of individual working couples , depends on the consumption of their parents and children as well as their own consumption. The analysis considers both a...

This paper considers the possible employment effects of reforming minimum-wage policy to incorporate indexation of the nominal minimum wage .The analysis assumes that both the demand for the labor services of minimum-wage workers and the setting of the nominal minimum wage rate under existing...

This paper explores one of the ways in which acceptance of the hypothesis that labor market transactions involve arrangements for shifting risk from workers to employers strengthens the case for accepting the hypothesis that incomplete information is the critical factor in producing the positive...

This paper develops an analysis of labor markets in which the use of layoffs to effect employment separations does not imply that markets fail to clear or that the amount of employment is suboptimal relative to current perceptions. This analysis focuses on the interaction between contractual...

Why do sovereign states sometimes fail to settle territorial disputes peacefully? Also, why do even peaceful settlements of territorial disputes rarely call for the resulting border to be unfortified? This paper explores a class of answers to these questions that is based on the following...

Although most disputes between groups of people are settled peacefully, sometimes disputes result in war. This lecture uses historical examples to illustrate how the ability to negotiate a credible peaceful settlement of a dispute between sovereign states, typically a dispute over the control of...

Some polities are able to use constitutionally prescribed political processes to settle distributional disputes, whereas in other polities distributional disputes result in civil conflict. Theoretical analysis reveals that the following properties help to make it possible to design a...

The dispute that resulted in the secession of eleven Southern states from the Union and the ensuing Civil War proximately concerned the geographical expansion of slavery, but ultimately bore on the existence of the institution of slavery itself. This paper asks why in 1861 after seventy years of...