Main description: Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the...

Main description: The concept of general equilibrium, one of the central components of economic theory, explains the behavior of supply, demand, and prices by showing that supply and demand exist in balance through pricing mechanisms. The mathematical tools and properties for this theory have...

Main description: Individuals and families make key decisions that impact many aspects of financial stability and determine the future of the economy. These decisions involve balancing current sacrifice against future benefits. People have to decide how much to invest in health care, exercise,...

Main description: Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however,...

Main description: Econometric models are widely used in the creation and evaluation of economic policy in the public and private sectors. But these models are useful only if they adequately account for the phenomena in question, and they can be quite misleading if they do not. In response,...

Biographical note: FrankRobert H.: Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and professor of economics at Cornell University, as well as an economics columnist for the "New York Times". His books include "The Winner-Take-All Society" (with Philip Cook), "What Price...

Main description: Karl Marx predicted a world in which technical innovation would increasingly devalue and impoverish workers, but other economists thought the opposite, that it would lead to increased wages and living standards--and the economists were right. Yet in the last three decades, the...

Main description: Almost every country in the world has sophisticated systems to prevent banking crises. Yet such crises--and the massive financial and social damage they can cause--remain common throughout the world. Does deposit insurance encourage depositors and bankers to take excessive...

Main description: Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only...

The privatization of large state-owned enterprises is one of the most radical policy developments of the last quarter century. Right-wing governments have privatized in an effort to decrease the size of government, while left-wing governments have privatized either to compensate for the failures...