George Stigler, the Nobel prize winner in economics in 1982, once wrote that economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live. It’s not a proposition that Don Patinkin, who trained several generations of “Patinkin boys” and had quite an...

My assignment is to survey the main questions swirling around monetary policy today. I emphasize three words in this sentence, each for a different reason. “Main” is because one person’s side issue is another’s main issue. So I had to be both selective and judgmental in compiling my...

One thing you should never predict is the future. That is generally sage advice, which I try to live by. Futurology is a loser’s game. Nonetheless, I am going to ignore this wise canon in this essay and throw caution to the wind. Why? Because one aspect of our economic future seems to me so...

U.S. inflation data exhibit two notable spikes into the double-digit range in 1973-1974 and again in 1978-1980. The well-known “supply-shock” explanation attributes both spikes to large food and energy shocks plus, in the case of 1973-1974, the removal of price controls. Yet critics of this...

A long tradition in economic theory models economic policy decisions as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents: A single policymaker minimizes a loss function subject to some constraints. Another body of literature models policy decisions as if they were...

This paper reports on a pilot study of the use of conventional household survey methods to measure something unconventional: what we call offshorability, defined as the ability to perform one’s work duties (for the same employer and customers) from abroad. Notice that offshorability is a...

Central banks, which used to be so secretive, are communicating more and more these days about their monetary policy. This development has proceeded hand in glove with a burgeoning new scholarly literature on the subject. The empirical evidence, reviewed selectively here, suggests that...

We report the results of two sets of experiments comparing decisions made as individuals to those made in groups under majority and unanimity rule. The first setup posed a purely statistical problem devoid of any economic content: Subjects were asked to guess the composition of an (electronic)...

George Stigler, the Nobel prize winner in economics in 1982, once wrote that economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live. It’s not a proposition that Don Patinkin, who trained several generations of “Patinkin boys” and had quite an...

As the opening speaker, I may perhaps be permitted a short trip down memory lane. The trip is purposeful, and it will be mercifully short. While preparing my Marshall Lectures for delivery at Cambridge in 1995, I asked the Federal Reserve staff, for I was then Vice Chairman, to research what had...