Search Results
Journal Article
Urban legends
For centuries, economists have struggled to explain why people and businesses gather in cities.
Journal Article
Review essay on an economist's perspective on history. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North, 1990
Douglass North earned a share of the 1993 Nobel prize for economics for two decades of research that culminated in the development of an innovative framework for analyzing economic history. This review essay discusses the book that most comprehensively presents North's paradigm, which characterizes history as the record of an evolving game in which institutions, organizations, and individuals function as the rules, teams, and players. Through examples, the reviewer illustrates how North's game theoretic paradigm can serve not only as a tool for analyzing historical events but also as a ...
Journal Article
Back to the future with Keynes
This article analyzes Keynes's "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"- an essay presenting Keynes's views about economic growth into the 21st century - from the perspective of modern growth theory. I find that the implicit theoretical framework used by Keynes to form his expectations about the 21st-century world economy is remarkably close to modern growth models, featuring a stable steady-state growth path driven by technological progress. On the other hand, Keynes's forecast of employment in the 21st century is far off the mark, reflecting a mistaken view that the income ...
Journal Article
Wildcat banking, banking panics, and free banking in the United States
Banks in the United States issued currency with no oversight of any kind by the federal goverment from 1837 to 1865. Many of these banks were part of "free banking" systems with no discretionary approval of entry into banking, and these banks issued notes that were used for payments in transactions just as Federal Reserve notes are today. There was no central bank or goverment insurance, and the ultimate guarantee of the value of a bank's notes was the value of the bank's assets. As the author indicates, these banknotes have similarities to some forms of electronic money. ; Free banking in ...
Journal Article
Economic history : The Queen's private Navy
Related links: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2010/q4/economic_history_weblinks.cfm
Journal Article
The state of modern economics : Unsteady state
The ongoing evolution of mainstream economics
Working Paper
A welfare comparison of pre- and post-WWII business cycles: some implications for the role of postwar macroeconomic policies
The authors compute the potential economic benefits that would accrue to a typical pre-WWII era U.S. worker from the post-WWII macroeconomic policy regime. The authors assume that workers face undiversifiable income risk but can self-insure by saving in nominal assets. The worker's average utility is computed for two eras: pre-WWII (1875-1941) and post-WWII. In the pre-WWII era, the worker endured business cycles that were large in amplitude and quite volatile, a procyclical aggregate price level with large cyclical amplitude, a high average unemployment rate, and virtually no trend in the ...
Journal Article
Claire Strom on James J. Hill's legacy and influence on the northern Great Plains
Interview with Claire Strom, author of Profiting From the Plains.