How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies...

Annuities are financial products that guarantee the holder a fixed return so long as the holder remains alive, thereby providing insurance against lifetime uncertainty. The terms of these contracts depend on the information available to insurance firms. Unlike age and gender, information about...

A Kalman filtering technique is employed to test the convergent expectation hypothesis in the great German hyperinflation when the money supply is endogenously determined. After converting the model structure to a state space form, the parameters are estimated via minimization of a Gaussian...