The Behavior of U.S. Short-Term Interest Rates Since October 1979

Short-term interest rates in the United States have been "too high" since October 1979 in the sense that both unconditional and conditional forecasts, based on an estimated vector autoregression model summarizing the prior experience,under predict short-term interest rates during this period. Although a non-structural model cannot directly answer the question of why this has been so,comparisons of alternative conditional forecasts point to the post-October 1979 relationship between the growth of real income and the growth of real money balances as closely connected to the level and pattern of short-term interestrates. This finding is consistent with the authors' earlier conclusion, based on analysis of a small structural macroeconometric model, that the high average level of interest rates has been due to a combination of slow growth of (nominal)money supply and continuing price inflation, which together have kept real balances small in relation to prevailing levels of economic activity.

Why Have Short-Term Interest Rates Been So High?

macroeconomics, short-term, interest rates

Ethical Issues Arising When a Lawyer Leaves a Firm: Restrictions on Practice

Restriction on covenants not to compete have been a long-time feature of legal practice. Rules prohibiting law firms from restricting lawyers\u27 ability to practice or imposing penalties on lawyers that leave a firm attempt to balance the law firm\u27s interest in survival in a competitive market with the countervailing interests of attorney mobility, and protecting clients\u27 choice of counsel. Restrictions on covenants not to compete should be vigorously enforced, and the exception that allows for the forfeiture of retirement benefits by attorneys that choose to leave a firm should be narrowly applied to only those funds to which the departing attorney is not already entitled

Telling the Story of the Hughes Court

Toward a fuller picture of how the Hughes Court transformed American constitutional law, thanks in part to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise This article is based on a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Houston in October 1995. For a copy of the complete version, with footnotes, please contact LQN or Professor Friedman at (313) 747-107, [email protected] When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., died in 1935, he left the bulk of his estate to the United States Government. This gift, known as the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, sat in the Treasury for about twenty years, until Congress set up a Presidential Commission to determine what to do with it. The principal use of the money has been to fund a multivolume History of the United States Supreme Court. The history of the project itself has not always been a happy one, for some of the authors have been unable to complete their volumes. Among them was ·one of my teachers, the late Paul Freund, who was the first general editor of the project and also planned to write the volume on the period in which Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice, from 1930 to 1941. I have had the good fortune to receive the succeeding assignment to write this volume

Introduction: The Challenge of Risk Communication in a Democratic Society

The symposium editors review key issues concerning the relationship between risk communication and public participation