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In the wake of recent events, macroeconomics has come under intense scrutiny, often from non-economists. Yet because macroeconomics is now a highly technical undertaking, it will be very hard for non-specialists on their own to sift through the body of knowledge we have accumulated, or to assess the manner in which we structure inquiries. Unless one finds this satisfactory, and I do not, the profession has some work to do. This book is an attempt to describe, in entirely nontechnical (i.e. plain English) terms, where modern macroeconomics gets its ideas from and how it goes about its business. The target audience is that of thoughtful and curious readers who lack the narrow background or time needed to read either advanced textbooks or articles in academic economics journals.

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from four-day bills to thirty-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks. This book traces the development of the Treasury market from a financial backwater in the years before World War I to a multibillion dollar market on the eve of World War II. It focuses on Treasury debt management policies, describing the origins of several pillars of modern Treasury practice, including “regular and predictable” auction offerings and the integration of debt and cash management. The book recounts the actions of Secretaries of the Treasury, from William McAdoo in the Wilson administration to Henry Morgenthau in the Roosevelt administration, and their responses to economic conditions. His account covers the Treasury market in the two decades before World War I, how the Treasury financed the Great War, how it managed the postwar refinancing and paydowns, and how it financed the chronic deficits of the Great Depression. It concludes with an examination of aspects of modern Treasury debt management that grew out of developments from 1917 to 1939.

Developing local bond markets is high on the policy agenda of Latin America. Bond markets are an essential component of a well-functioning financial market. Facilitating the efforts of public and private borrowers to issue domestic-currency-denominated, long-term, fixed-rate bonds insulates them from the rollover and balance sheet risks that have been central elements in past financial crises. In addition, a robust bond market is a way for nonfinancial firms to retain their capacity to borrow when the banking system grows reluctant to lend. Latin American bond markets are growing, and may even approach a “big bang”-like surge, although significant challenges remain. This comprehensive examination of the importance of local bond market development in Latin America provides conceptual and comparative assessments, case studies of six countries, surveys of firms and investors, and a cross-country economic analysis of the determinants of bond market development. The book’s case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay, written by country experts, follow a common methodology, with each offering a history of that country’s bond market development, a comprehensive and unique data set on both private and public bond markets, surveys of firms and investors, and (in many chapters) firm-level analysis. A Web appendix makes available the unique data sets, including results of specially designed surveys of firms and investors participants, used in the book’s studies.

This book surveys the law and policy of regulating information flows in capital markets. Part I begins with an overview of the themes, regulatory principles, and challenges that animate information policy, and describes the principal industry, self-regulatory, and regulatory bodies that participate in the governance of information flows in capital markets. Part I further surveys four categories of information in the information production chain: corporate disclosures, quotation and transaction information, information used in credit analysis, and benchmarks. The book discusses how each category of information is generated and used and the reasons why regulators seek to intervene in its production or use. It also provides a summary of the relevant framework for securities regulation in the United States, European Union, and other jurisdictions. Part II articulates several objectives of information policy in capital markets—ensuring transparency and access, promoting standardization and higher orders of meaning, and upholding integrity. This Part considers how regulatory aims differ by category and surveys alternative regulatory strategies, often with a view to replacing relatively inflexible regulatory frameworks with more flexible market mechanisms. Part III considers three specific challenges to capital markets regulation—automation, information overload or anxiety, and globalization—and how they affect the utility, integrity, and availability of information flows. This Part assesses the strategies by which policy makers have confronted these challenges, and offers some concluding thoughts on the implications of these phenomena for financial regulation and information policy.

For decades the semiconductor industry has been a driver of global economic growth and social change. Semiconductors, particularly the microchips essential to most electronic devices, have transformed computing, communications, entertainment, and industry. This book traces the industry over more than twenty years through eight technical and competitive crises that forced it to adapt in order to continue its exponential rate of improved chip performance. The industry’s changes have in turn shifted the basis on which firms hold or gain global competitive advantage. These eight interrelated crises do not have tidy beginnings and ends. Most, in fact, are still ongoing, often in altered form. The US semiconductor industry’s fear that it would be overtaken by Japan in the 1980s, for example, foreshadows current concerns over the new global competitors China and India. The intersecting crises of rising costs for both design and manufacturing are compounded by consumer pressure for lower prices. Other crises discussed in the book include the industry’s steady march toward the limits of physics, the fierce competition that keeps its profits modest even as development costs soar, and the global search for engineering talent. Other high-tech industries face crises of their own, and the semiconductor industry has much to teach us about how industries are transformed in response to such powerful forces as technological change, shifting product markets, and globalization. The book also offers insights into how chip firms have developed, defended, and, in some cases, lost global competitive advantage.

Too rapidly rising carbon taxes or the introduction of subsidies for renewable energies induce owners of fossil fuel reserves to increase their extraction rates for fear of their reserves becoming worthless. Fossil fuel use is thus brought forward. The resulting acceleration of global warming and counter-productivity of well-intended climate policy has been coined the Green Paradox by Hans-Werner Sinn and is the intertemporal analogue of the often discussed problem of carbon leakage in the global economy. How robust are these insights? The answer is it depends. These policies typically induce fossil fuel owners to also leave more reserves unexploited in the crust of the earth, which limits the total stock of carbon in the atmosphere and thus curbs global warming ultimately. This volume presents a range of studies which extends the basic analysis to allow for clean energy alternatives such as solar and wind power, dirty energy alternative such as coal and the tar sands, the different elasticities of substitution between all these energy sources, and the intricate strategic issues between different countries on the globe. This offers deeper and more nuanced insights into the Green Paradox with some refreshing policy perspectives.

Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital investment today, influencing their rivals’ behavior; or they can take a “wait and see” approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow. This book describes an emerging paradigm that can quantify and balance commitment and flexibility—“option games” by which the decision-making approaches of real options and game theory can be combined. The book first discusses prerequisite concepts and tools from basic game theory, industrial organization, and real options analysis, bringing important materials and ideas together into a unified framework. It then presents the new approach in discrete time and later in continuous time, beginning with the building blocks of the basic ideas and tools and culminating in richer theoretical analyses.

Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years. One follows an older, rather neglected approach which emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions. The other emphasizes economies as complex adaptive systems. Important concepts from evolutionary theory include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene–culture coevolution. Relevant concepts from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. This book explores these two bodies of theory and their potential impact on economics. Central themes include the challenges that emerge through integration, evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions. Practical applications are provided and avenues for future research highlighted.

The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis—that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. This book argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system. Contagion is an indiscriminate run by short-term creditors of financial institutions that can render otherwise solvent institutions insolvent. It poses a serious risk because, as the book explains, our financial system still depends on approximately $7.4 to $8.2 trillion of runnable and uninsured short-term liabilities, 60 percent of which are held by nonbanks. The book argues that efforts by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury to stop the contagion that exploded after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers lessened the economic damage. And yet Congress, spurred by the public's aversion to bailouts, has dramatically weakened the power of the government to respond to contagion, including limitations on the Federal Reserve's powers as a lender of last resort. Offering uniquely detailed forensic analyses of the Lehman Brothers and AIG failures, and suggesting alternative regulatory approaches, the book makes the case that we need to restore and strengthen our weapons for fighting contagion.

The European Union began with efforts in the Cold War era to foster economic integration among a few Western European countries. Today’s EU constitutes an upper tier of government that affects almost every level of policymaking in each of its twenty-seven member states. The recent financial and economic crises have tested this still-evolving institutional framework, and this book surveys key economic challenges faced by the EU. European economists examine such topics as the stability of the financial markets and possible policy options to reduce future vulnerability to crises, including Glass–Steagull-style narrow banking; the effect of emerging economies such as China and India on Europe’s economic position; the protection of national interests in industrial policy; reforming and preserving the welfare state in the face of unemployment, population aging, and worker mobility within the EU; and improving the EU’s institutional framework by reassigning responsibilities among supranational, national, and local governments. Among the conclusions that emerge from these analyses are the necessity for banking regulation as well as budgetary discipline; the need to consider global as well as European integration; and the idea that an environment which fosters internal competition will increase Europe’s competitiveness internationally.