Книги

This book examines how electoral laws, the timing of election, the ideological orientation of governments, and the nature of competition between political parties influence unemployment, economic growth, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The book presents both a thorough overview of the theoretical literature and a vast amount of empirical evidence.

Business cycle theory is a broad and disparate field. Different schools of thought offer alternative explanations for cycles, often using different mathematical methods. This book provides a compact exposition of the main theories since Keynes -- Keynesian economics, monetarism, new classical economics, the real business cycles theory, and new Keynesian economics -- using a unifying mathematical approach.

Among the most revolutionary and productive areas of economic research over the last two decades, modern business cycle theory is finally made accessible to students and professionals in this rigorous, unified, introductory volume. This theory starts with the view that growth and fluctuations are not distinct phenomena to be studied separately--and that business cycles result from shocks (such as the availability of new technologies), which regularly affect most economies. The unifying theme of this book is the use of the neoclassical growth framework to study the economic fluctuations associated with the business cycle. Presenting recent advances in dynamic economic theory and computational methods--with emphasis on the construction of equilibrium paths for simple artificial economies--leading experts orient readers in the quantitative study of aggregate fluctuations and apply its concepts to key issues in macroeconomics and business cycle theory.
This volume covers such issues as the aggregate labor market, the role of the household sector, the role of money, the behavior of asset markets, non-Walrasian economies, monopolistically competitive economies, international business cycles, and the design of economic policies. The contributors are David Backus, V. V. Chari, Lawrence Christiano, Thomas F. Cooley, Jean-Pierre Danthine, John Donaldson, Jeremy Greenwood, Gary D. Hansen, Patrick Kehoe, Finn Kydland, Edward C. Prescott, Richard Rogerson, Julio Rotemberg, Geert Rouwenhorst, Josй-Vнctor Rнos-Rull, Michael Woodford, and Randall Wright.

This textbook provides a comprehensive and up to date review of the rapidly expanding business cycle literature. It covers three key strands of the theory which have dominated recent literature in the subject: equilibrium (monetary and real) business cycles, nonlinear business, cycle models and political business cycle theories.
Business Cycles is designed for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of macroeconomics and monetary theory and policy and academic economists wishing to keep abreast of the substantial recent developments in this field.

This is the most sophisticated and up-to-date econometric analysis of business cycles now available. Francis Diebold and Glenn Rudebusch have long been acknowledged as leading experts on business cycles. And here they present a highly integrative collection of their most important essays on the subject, along with a detailed introduction that draws together the book's principal themes and findings.
Diebold and Rudebusch use the latest quantitative methods to address five principal questions about the measurement, modeling, and forecasting of business cycles. They ask whether business cycles have become more moderate in the postwar period, concluding that recessions have, in fact, been shorter and shallower. They consider whether economic expansions and contractions tend to die of "old age." Contrary to popular wisdom, they find little evidence that expansions become more fragile the longer they last, although they do find that contractions are increasingly likely to end as they age. The authors discuss the defining characteristics of business cycles, focusing on how economic variables move together and on the timing of the slow alternation between expansions and contractions. They explore the difficulties of distinguishing between long-term trends in the economy and cyclical fluctuations. And they examine how business cycles can be forecast, looking in particular at how to predict turning points in cycles, rather than merely the level of future economic activity. They show here that the index of leading economic indicators is a poor predictor of future economic activity, and consider what we can learn from other indicators, such as financial variables. Throughout, the authors make use of a variety of advanced econometric techniques, including nonparametric analysis, fractional integration, and regime-switching models. Business Cycles is crucial reading for policymakers, bankers, and business executives.

This paper shows that tax policy toward investment, by changing the relative prices of capital varieties, can have a direct effect on the quality of capital goods that firms purchase. The empirical results indicate that this impact is economically important and readily apparent in disaggregated data on farming, mining, and construction machinery. The paper also applies a general method for aggregation using index number theory which suggests that all of the investment increase generated by tax subsidies comes from buying higher quality capital goods as opposed to buying a larger number of capital goods. It shows, further, that the supply of capital is upward sloping with an elasticity of about one. The tax induced quality changes documented in the paper imply a tax distortion whose deadweight loss is neglected in the conventional literature but whose magnitude indicates may represent a substantial efficiency cost from capital taxation (or subsidy).

This paper utilizes a unique new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how people respond to changes in credit supply. The data consist of a panel of thousands of individual credit card accounts from several different card issuers, with associated credit bureau data. We estimate both marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) out of liquidity and interest-rate elasticities. We also evaluate the ability of different models of consumption to rationalize our results, distinguishing the Permanent-Income Hypothesis (PIH), liquidity constraints, precautionary saving, and behavioral models. We find that increases in credit limits generate an immediate and significant rise in debt, counter to the PIH. The average 'MPC out of liquidity' (dDebt/dLimit) ranges between 10%-14%. The MPC is much larger for people starting near their limits, consistent with binding liquidity constraints. However, the MPC is significant even for people starting well below their limit. We show this response is consistent with buffer-stock models of precautionary saving. Nonetheless there are other results that conventional models cannot easily explain, e.g. why so many people are borrowing on their credit cards, and simultaneously holding low yielding assets. Unlike most other studies, we also find strong effects from changes in account-specific interest rates. The long-run elasticity of debt to the interest rate is approximately -1.3. Less than half of this elasticity represents balance-shifting across cards, with most reflecting net changes in total borrowing. The elasticity is larger for decreases in interest rates than for increases, which can explain the widespread use of temporary promotional rates. The elasticity is smaller for people starting near their credit limits, again consistent with liquidity constraints.

Capital Theory and Investment Behavior presents pioneering studies of the cost of capital as a determinant of investment expenditures. The cost of capital summarizes the future consequences of investment essential for current decisions. This concept has become an indispensible tool for studying the dynamics of investment behavior. Both macroeconome tric models and intertemporal general equilibrium models have employed the cost of capital as a determinant of short- and long-term investment expenditures.

Since the inflationary 1970s, theoretical work on monetary policy has concentrated almost exclusively on price-level stabilization and the avoidance of nominal shocks. In the aftermath of the collapse of financial bubbles in various parts of the world, the accomplishments and limitations of this dominant approach are debated in this volume edited by Axel Leijonhufvud, with contributions by a number of noted monetary economists, including Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas.

Our two related goals in this paper are the following: Firstly and mainly, we want to examine the effects of major changes in modelling strategy and econometric methodology, over the past twenty years, on estimation of firm-level investment equations using panel data. Secondly, we try to assess whether the differences in the estimated investment equations, as between recent years and ten to twenty years go in the French and U.S. Manufacturing industries, are real' and economically meaningful. Thus our paper consists of a series of comparisons: a simple accelerator-profit specification versus one with error correction, traditional between- and within-firm estimation versus GMM estimation, the investment behavior of French firms versus that of U.S. firms, and investment behavior in recent years versus ten to twenty years ago. Although the important econometric advances of the past twenty years have been far from being as successful as we had hoped for, we do find some significant improvement in the specification, estimation and interpretation of firm investment equations; we also fin some real changes in the investment behavior of French and U.S. firms during these twenty years.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital presents a novel interpretation of the good and bad times in the economy, taking a long-term perspective and linking technology and finance in an original and convincing way.

This comprehensive textbook for a core course in modern macroeconomics deals with all the major topics, summarizes the important approaches, and gives students a coherent angle on all aspects of macroeconomic thought. Each chapter deals with a separate area of macroeconomics, and each contains a summary section of key points and a further reading list.

This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.
With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.

This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.
With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.