Macroeconomics

It is not easy to summarize Ned Phelps's monumental contribution to economics.

This essay concerns the process of globalization, the integration of economies around the world which has put new demands on nation-states at the very same time that, in many ways, it has reduced their capacities to deal with those demands. The nation-state today is squeezed, on the one side, by the forces of global economics and, on the other side, by the political demands for devolution of power.

From the publisher:: Expanding upon the literature of new institutional economics, the first part of this study stresses the significance of imperfections in information, bankruptcy and banks. The second part examines the policy implications of the new paradigm emphasizing loanable fund demand and supply, and demonstrates its relevance to our understanding of two recent historical episodes - the East Asian financial crisis and the 1991 U.S. recession and subsequent recovery and boom.

From the publisher:From the author of Globalization and Its Discontents comes a history of the boom and bust of the 1990s - how and why it happened, how the seeds of destruction were sown in the midst of apparent prosperity, and how America and the world are still failing to learn the lessons from what went wrong. One reason the invisible hand of market economics may be invisible is that it may not exist. So says former World Bank economist Stiglitz in his analysis of what went wrong with the economic boom and bust of the 1990s.

This paper analyzes a social insurance system that integrates unemployment insurance with a pension program, allowing workers to borrow against their future wage income to finance consumption during an unemployment episode and thus improving search incentives while reducing the risks arising from unemployment. This paper identifies the conditions under which integration improves welfare and the factors which determine the optimal degree of integration.

In their paper, Sydney Ludvigson, Charles Stendel, and Martin Lettau examine empirically the narrow but important issue of to what extent monetary policy affects consumer spending by altering the aggregate value of wealth. Here, I first comment on the paper itsef, then discuss implications for the broader question of whether the wealth effect is important (independent of monetary policy), and then suggest some avenues for future research.

This paper argues that the use of monetary policy in response to the Asian financial crisis worsened the economic downturn and contributed to global economic instability, that we have spent too little time thinking about the behavior of the international economic and financial institutions given the important role that they play in the global economy and that reforms are needed to return the IMF to its original mandate of focusing on global financial stability.

We examine the valuation performance of a comprehensive list of value drivers and find that multiples derived from forward earnings explain stock prices remarkably well: pricing errors are within 15 percent of stock prices for about half our sample. In terms of relative performance, the following general rankings are observed consistently each year: forward earnings measures are followed by historical earnings measures, cash flow measures and book value of equity are tied for third, and sales performs the worst.

Medicare, which provides health insurance to Americans over the age of 65 and to Americans living with disabilities, is one of the government's largest social programs. It accounts for 12 percent of federal on- and off-budget outlays, and in fiscal year 1999, $212 billion in Medicare benefits were paid. The largest shares of spending are for inpatient hospital services (48 percent) and physician services (27 percent). In thirty years, the number of Americans covered by Medicare will nearly double to 77 million, or 22 percent of the U.S. population.