Financial guarantees, such as insurance against credit risk and contract default, serve an important function for virtually every player in the global economy - households, businesses, and governments. Without such guarantees, both implicit and explicit, many economic activities would be less...

I was born in New York, New York, on July 31, 1944, the middle child between two sisters, Stephanie and Vanessa. I grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a village of about 8000 outside the city, in a house that Vanessa and her family live in today. My father, born in Philadelphia the son of immigrant...

Interview with Professor Robert C. Merton at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

Nobel Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1997.

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of an economy with overlapping generations and two factors of production, labor and capital, is used to analyze the economic inefficiencies caused by the non- tradeability of human capital -and to derive a constrained pareto-optimal sys tern of taxes...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...