Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remains one of the greatest works of social theory written in the twentieth Century. Schumpeter's contention that the seeds of capitalism's decline were internal, and his equal and opposite hostility to centralist socialism have perplexed, engaged and...

The Economists' Voice: Top Economists Take On Today's Problems featured a core collection of accessible, timely essays on the challenges facing today's global markets and financial institutions. The Economists' Voice 2.0: The Financial Crisis, Health Care Reform, and More is the next installment...

Should we interpret the contributions of Edward C. Prescott and his collaborators, especially Finn Kydland and Rajnish Mehra, to dynamic general equilibrium as just a mathematical restatement of pre-Keynesian business cycle theory in the language of Arrow and Debreu? This essay advances the...

We analyze the pricing of a productive asset in a class of dynamic exchange economies with heterogeneous, infinitely-lived agents, and self-enforcing intertemporal trades. Individual incomes fluctuate and are correlated; preferences, dividends and aggregate income are fixed. Almost all economies...

We consider a linear growth model with idiosyncratic productivity shocks in which producers cannot commit to repay their loans. Borrowing constraints are determined endogenously by the borrowers’ incentives to repay, assuming that defaulters lose a share of output and are excluded from future...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...

We consider a linear growth model with idiosyncratic productivity shocks in whichproducers cannot commit to repay their loans. Borrowing constraints are determinedendogenously by the borrowers’ incentives to repay, assuming that defaulters lose a shareof output and are excluded from future...