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This collection of essays uses the lens of rational expectations theory to examine how governments anticipate and plan for inflation, and provides insight into the pioneering research for which the author was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics. Rational expectations theory is based on the simple premise that people will use all the information available to them in making economic decisions, yet applying the theory to macroeconomics and econometrics is technically demanding. This book engages with practical problems in economics in a less formal, noneconometric way, demonstrating how rational expectations can satisfactorily interpret a range of historical and contemporary events. It focuses on periods of actual or threatened depreciation in the value of a nation's currency. Drawing on historical attempts to counter inflation, from the French Revolution and the aftermath of World War I to the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the book finds that there is no purely monetary cure for inflation; rather, monetary and fiscal policies must be coordinated. This fully expanded edition includes the author's 2011 Nobel lecture, “United States Then, Europe Now.” It also features new articles on the macroeconomics of the French Revolution and government budget deficits.

A common set of mathematical tools underlies dynamic optimization, dynamic estimation, and filtering. This book uses these tools to create a class of econometrically tractable models of prices and quantities. The book presents examples from microeconomics, macroeconomics, and asset pricing. The models are cast in terms of a representative consumer. While the book demonstrates the analytical benefits acquired when an analysis with a representative consumer is possible, it also characterizes the restrictiveness of assumptions under which a representative household justifies a purely aggregative analysis. The book unites economic theory with a workable econometrics while going beyond and beneath demand and supply curves for dynamic economies. It constructs and applies competitive equilibria for a class of linear-quadratic-Gaussian dynamic economies with complete markets. The book, based on the 2012 Gorman lectures, stresses heterogeneity, aggregation, and how a common structure unites what superficially appear to be diverse applications. An appendix describes MATLAB programs that apply to the book's calculations.

This book builds on the belief that modern macroeconomics can hold its head high because so much of it is research directed at informing important public policy decisions. It is a noble aspiration to seek better rules for our central banks and fiscal authorities. Doing that attracted the contributors of this volume into macroeconomics. The contributors to this volume are leaders in patiently creating models and pushing forward technical frontiers. Their papers focus on forces that can help understand macroeconomic outcomes, including learning, multiple equilibria, moral hazard, asymmetric information, heterogeneity, and constraints on commitment technologies. The contributions follow modern macroeconomics in using mathematics and statistics to understand behaviour in situations where there is uncertainty about how the future unfolds from the past. They are thus united in a belief that the more dynamic, uncertain, and ambiguous the economic environment they seek to understand is, the more effort we have to put in to figure out how to apply mathematics in new ways. The contributions testify to a high research intensity in many areas of macroeconomics. They form the basis for warning against interpreting the scope of macroeconomics too narrowly. For example, the recent criticism against the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models for not predicting the recent financial crisis and for providing imperfect policies for managing its consequences. is misleading because it is inadequate and short‐sighted in missing the diversity of macroeconomic research on financial, information, learning, and other types of imperfections that long before the recent crisis were actively being studied in other parts of macroeconomics, and that had not yet made their way into many of the pre‐crisis DSGE models because practical econometric versions of those models were mainly designed to fit data periods that did not include financial crises.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Sweden carried out one of the most ambitious experiments by a capitalist market economy in developing a large and active welfare state. Sweden's generous social programs and the economic equality they fostered became an example for other countries to emulate. Of late, Sweden has also been much discussed as a model of how to deal with financial and economic crisis, due to the country's recovery from a banking crisis in the mid-1990s. At that time economists heatedly debated whether the welfare state caused Sweden's crisis and should be reformed—a debate with clear parallels to current concerns over capitalism. Bringing together leading economists, this book examines Sweden's policies in response to the mid-1990s crisis and the implications for the subsequent recovery. Among the issues investigated are the way changes in the labor market, tax and benefit policies, local government policy, industrial structure, and international trade affected Sweden's recovery. The way that Sweden addressed its economic challenges provides valuable insight into the viability of large welfare states, and more broadly, into the way modern economies deal with crisis.

This book restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. This book puts eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another—English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color.

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. Only recently have scholars begun to realize that there is another history of international affairs in the decade. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today—inequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples—asserted themselves powerfully during the 1960s. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson confronted tectonic shifts in the international environment and perhaps even the beginning of the post?Cold War world. While the East?West struggle was indisputably crucial, new forces and new actors altered international relations in profound and lasting ways. This book asks how the Johnson administration responded to this changing landscape. To what extent did US leaders understand the changes that we can now see clearly with the benefit of hindsight? How did they prioritize these issues alongside more immediate geostrategic concerns? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda?