Most countries have recently experienced high fiscal deficits and real interest rates that depressed national saving and slowed economic growth. This study analyzes the reasons that underlie the skewed fiscal-monetary mix. The first section develops a game-theoretic model of fiscal and monetary...

In debates about economic unification or trade liberalization, it is often asked whether harmonization should go beyond taxes and macroeconomic policies to include regulations, particularly environmental policy. This issue also arises when countries, states, and cities engage in competition for...

The present study examines the importance of Schumpeterian profits in the United States economy. Schumpeterian profits are defined as those profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the returns from innovative activity. We first show the underlying equations for Schumpeterian...

In 1985-06, the Yale Economics Department sponsored a half-day conference on Martin Weitzman's striking proposal that sharing would be introduced into compensation arrangements. His suggestions have received wide attention in the popular press and from economists, but the organizers believed...

The present study reviews the "productivity slowdown" of the 1970s and 1980s. The study also develops a new data set -- industrial data available back to 1948 -- as well as a new set of tools for decomposing changes in productivity growth. The major result of this study is that the productivity...

The present study analyzes computer performance over the last century and a half. Three results stand out. First, there has been a phenomenal increase in computer power over the twentieth century. Performance in constant dollars or in terms of labor units has improved since 1900 by a factor in...

In a series of papers, Martin Weitzman has proposed a Dismal Theorem. The general idea is that, under limited conditions concerning the structure of uncertainty and preferences, society has an indefinitely large expected loss from high-consequence, low-probability events. Under such conditions,...

This essay examines the state of the United States economy as it emerges from the 2001 recession. A comparison of several central economic variables indicates that the 2001 recession was the mildest recession in the postwar period. In light of highly differentiated characteristics of recessions,...