Theoretical issues of liquidity effects: commentary

Liquidity (Economics)

Monetary and fiscal impacts on exchange rates

Foreign exchange rates ; Fiscal policy ; Monetary policy ; Budget deficits ; Dollar, American

Classical reflections on the deficit

Deficit financing ; Debt management ; Crowding out (Economics) ; Interest rates

Man and Machine in Macroeconomics

The potted histories of macroeconomics textbooks are typically Keynes-centric. Keynes is credited with founding macroeconomics, and the central developments in the field through the early 1970s, including large-scale macroeconometric models are usually termed "Keynesian." The story of macroeconomics is framed as support or opposition (e.g., monetarism or the new classical macroeconomics) to Keynes. The real story is more complicated and involves at least two distinct threads. Keynes was important, but perhaps more important for the detailed development of the field were the early macroeconometricians – Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. Frisch and Tinbergen adopted physical or mechanical metaphors in which aggregate quantities are central. Keynes's vision of macroeconomics is better described as "medical." It is based in human psychology and individual decision-making and sees the economy as an organic system. Whereas policymakers and economic advisers in Keynes view can operate only within the economic system, Frisch and Tinbergen laid the basis for an optimal-control approach to economic policy in which the policymaker stands outside the system. Recent new classical macroeconomics has adopted an uneasy amalgam of the medical and mechanical metaphors

A review of Alan Bollard's 'A Few Hares to Chase: The Economic Life and Times of Bill Phillips'

A.W.H. Phillips is little known to the economics profession today, except at the creator of the Phillips curve. Bollard's engaging biography tells the story of a provincial New Zealander and practical engineer, who emerges as a hero in World War II, and plots a spectacular rise from 3rd class sociology degree to Tooke Professor of Economics at the LSE in just eight years. Bollard's biograph is a welcome corrective - both in demonstrating that Phillips' most important contributions to economics lay in the realms of macroeconomic dynamics and time-series econometrics and in showing how those aspects of his work must be appreciated to place the more famous Phillips curve into perspective

Against Psychosis: A Review of Roman Frydman & Michael D. Goldberg's Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State

A review essay of Roman Frydman & Michael D. Goldberg's Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State

A NeoWicksellian in a new classical world: the methodology of Michael Woodford's Interest and Prices

Woodford's Interest and Prices is considered from a methodological point of view. While innovative as a work of macroeconomic theory, it is decidedly in the mainstream methodologically. As such, it provides a good example of the methodological puzzles posed by modern macroeconomics: first, the notion that representative-agent models (or models with very constrained sorts of heterogeneous agents) provide genuine microfoundations; second, the idea that Paretian welfare economics in the context of such models gives any useful policy guidance

Measuring systematic monetary policy

Monetary policy