While serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan advocated unsupervised securitization, subprime lending, option ARMs, credit-default swaps, and all manner of financial alchemy in the belief that markets "work" to reduce and spread risk, and to allocate it to those best...

The President's commission claims that the Social Security program is "unsustainable" and requires a complete "overhaul." It also claims that the program is a bad deal for women and minorities. However, any honest accounting of all Social Security benefits finds that the program is a good deal...

Hyman P. Minsky's insights into the relationship between profits, economic growth, and the public and private financial balances are particularly relevant to today's conditions. How can a Minskian view be applied to explain the processes that brought the economy to its current state and to...

This policy note examines the case for large tax cuts, focusing on the issues surrounding the purpose and overall size of the needed cut. Although Congress has passed a significant package of tax relief, many have worried that the budget surplus on which it was based will never appear. Thus,...

Conventional theory makes the curious assumption that, in international trade, movements in the real exchange rate negate cost differences so as to make all countries equally competitive. But quite the contrary, it is absolute cost advantages that determine competition between countries, just as...

Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been ratified in global and national forums, they have not yet been incorporated into operational planning within governments or international organizations. The weak link between the policies and the investments needed for their...

This essay assesses the relationship between farm size and productivity. Both parametric and nonparametric methods are used to derive efficiency measures. Smaller farms are found to have higher net farm income per hectare, and to be more technically efficient, than larger farms.

The paper argues that the functional approach of money does not provide a good method to study monetary history and monetary mechanisms. An alternative approach is developed and illustrated by analyzing the role of tobacco and cowry shells in past monetary systems. It is shown that any monetary...

We use here a new measure of household economic well-being called LIMEW. LIMEW is different in scope from the official United States Census Bureau measure of gross money income (MI) in that it includes taxes, noncash transfers, public consumption, income from wealth, and household production. We...

This working paper concerns the local origins of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, circa 1900. New evidence is drawn from a large random sample of Russian-Jewish immigrant arrivals in the United States. It provides information on origins not merely by large regions, or even by the...