Managing the American Economy, from Roosevelt to Reagan

Managing the American Economy, from Roosevelt to Reagan
Author: Nicolas Spulber
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1989
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780253336699

Describes and evaluates the views of theorists and practitioners directly involved with four major economic events in American history.

The Speculation Economy

The Speculation Economy
Author: Lawrence E. Mitchell
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2008-11-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1605093866

American companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen? In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge “combines”—today's giant corporations—so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders' “get rich quick” expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance. The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora's box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.

The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics

The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics
Author: Peter J. Boettke
Publisher:
Total Pages: 833
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199811768

The Austrian School of Economics is an intellectual tradition in economics and political economy dating back to Carl Menger in the late-19th century. Menger stressed the subjective nature of value in the individual decision calculus. Individual choices are indeed made on the margin, but the evaluations of rank ordering of ends sought in the act of choice are subjective to individual chooser. For Menger, the economic calculus was about scarce means being deployed to pursue an individual's highest valued ends. The act of choice is guided by subjective assessments of the individual, and is open ended as the individual is constantly discovering what ends to pursue, and learning the most effective way to use the means available to satisfy those ends. This school of economic thinking spread outside of Austria to the rest of Europe and the United States in the early-20th century and continued to develop and gain followers, establishing itself as a major stream of heterodox economics. The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics provides an overview of this school and its theories. The various contributions discussed in this book all reflect a tension between the Austrian School's orthodox argumentative structure (rational choice and invisible hand) and its addressing of a heterodox problem situations (uncertainty, differential knowledge, ceaseless change). The Austrian economists from the founders to today seek to derive the invisible hand theorem from the rational choice postulate via institutional analysis in a persistent and consistent manner. Scholars and students working in the field of History of Economic Thought, those following heterodox approaches, and those both familiar with the Austrian School or looking to learn more will find much to learn in this comprehensive volume.

Unemployment Fluctuations and Stabilization Policies

Unemployment Fluctuations and Stabilization Policies
Author: Jordi Gali
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2024-12-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262553821

A new approach for introducing unemployment into the New Keynesian framework. The past fifteen years have witnessed the rise of the New Keynesian model as a framework of reference for the analysis of fluctuations and stabilization policies. That framework, which combines the rigor and internal consistency of dynamic general equilibrium models with such typically Keynesian assumptions as monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities, makes possible a meaningful, welfare-based analysis of the effects of monetary policy rules. But the conspicuous absence of unemployment from the standard New Keynesian model has given rise to both criticism and attempts to rectify this anomaly. In this book, Jordi Galí, one of the major contributors to the New Keynesian literature, offers a new approach to introducing unemployment into that framework. Galí's approach involves a reinterpretation of the labor market in the standard New Keynesian model with staggered wage setting (rather than a modification or extension of the model, as has been proposed by others). The resulting framework preserves the convenience of the representative household paradigm and allows one to determine the equilibrium levels of employment, the labor force, and hence the unemployment rate conditional on the monetary policy in place. Galí develops the basic model, embedding it in a standard New Keynesian framework with staggered price and wage setting; revisits the relationship between economic fluctuations and efficiency through the lens of the new model, developing a measure of the output gap; and analyzes the relation between unemployment and the design of monetary policy.