The book aims to give non-economists a detailed understanding of how macroeconomic policy works in modern economies, and the issues it faces. The world has recently been through a huge economic crisis and thinking people everywhere have reason to wonder whether something is not seriously wrong...

1. Introduction : to Utopia and back -- 2. The demise of economic management -- 3. The monetarist experiment and its legacy -- 4. The 1990s synthesis -- 5. Problems under the 1990s synthesis -- 6. The global financial crisis -- 7. Monetary policy -- 8. Fiscal policy -- 9. Exchange rate policy --...

In a paper in the March 2004 AER, Justine Hastings concludes that the acquisition of an independent gasoline retailer, Thrifty, by a vertically integrated firm, ARCO, is associated with sizable price increases at competing stations. To better understand the novel mechanism to which she...

This paper develops a model of competition among multiproduct retailers that is consistent with observed pricing regularities, e.g., virtually all products have large mass points in their price distributions and most deviations fall below the mass point. The basis of the model is that, because...

This paper attempts to broaden our understanding of retail pricing dynamics by providing some systematic evidence about U.S. grocery prices. Using a large data set containing prices on twenty categories of goods from thirty U.S. metro areas for the period 1988–1997, we find a number of...