This is an essay on Financial Intermediaries written for the New Palgrave. It includes sections on national wealth, financial markets, assets, risk and regulation.

What, ultimately, is different from quarter to quarter or year to year that accounts for the fact that macroeconomic variables change over these intervals? That is, which are the biggest ultimate sources, in terms we may say of tastes, technology, endowments, government policy, industrial...

Non-competitive conduct can be assessed by estimating the size of the markup or Lerner index achieves in a market. The markup implies a price elasticity of demand faced by the representative firm. For a given markup, non-competitive conduct that is insensitive to the value of the monopoly. To...

This paper uses data on nearly a million homes sold in four metropolitan areas -- Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco -- to construct quarterly indexes of existing home prices between 1970 and 1986. We propose and apply a new method of constructing such indexes which we call the method of...

We prove that the Strong Axiom of Revealed Preference tests the existence of a strictly quasiconcave (in fact, continuous, generically C(infinity), strictly concave, and strictly monotone) utility function generating finitely many demand observations. This sharpens earlier results of Afriat,...

Questionnaires were sent out at the time of the October 19, 1987 stock market crash to both individual and institutional investors inquiring about their behavior during the crash. Nearly 1000 responses were received. The survey results show that: 1. No news story or rumor appearing on the 19th...

Sales today were made possible by inputs of factor services and intermediate goods at various previous dates. Prices change between the input dates and the sale date. Especially in periods of general inflation, these price movements create ambiguities in the reckoning of profits. The accounting...

Supply shocks played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1970's. Supply shocks are also increasingly important in Keynesian and neo-classical models of the business cycle. This paper is a short survey of these theoretical models. It also discusses the history of supply...

A general model for noncooperative extraction of common-property resource is considered. The main result is that this sequential game has a Nash equilibrium in stationary strategies. The proof is based on an infinite dimensional fixed-point theorem, and relies crucially on the topology of...

We present versions of the two fundamental welfare theorems of economics for exchange economies with a countable number of agents and an infinite dimensional commodity space. These results are then specialized to the overlapping generations model.