By Thomas J. Sargent

While rational expectations is often thought of as a school of economic thought, it is better regarded as a ubiquitous modeling technique used widely throughout economics. The theory of rational expectations was first proposed by John F. Muth of Indiana University in the early 1960s. He used the term to ...

By Robert A. Lawson

For well over a hundred years, the economic world has been engaged in a great intellectual debate. On one side of this debate have been those philosophers and economists who advocate an economic system based on private property and free markets—or what one might call economic freedom. The key ingredients of economic ...

1943-

Joseph Stiglitz, george akerlof, and michael spence shared the 2001 Nobel Prize “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.” The particular market with asymmetric information that Stiglitz analyzed was the insurance market. In 1976, Stiglitz and coauthor Michael Rothschild started from the plausible...

By Thomas W. Hazlett

The now-defunct apartheid system of South Africa presented a fascinating instance of interest-group competition for political advantage. In light of the extreme human rights abuses stemming from apartheid, it is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to the economic foundations of that torturous social struc...

When it was all over, I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as Secretary of Commerce and then as president. . . . The New Deal owed much to what he had begun.1 —FDR advisor Rexford G. Tugwell Many historians, most of the general public, and even many economists think of Herbert Hoo...

1727-1781

Turgot was the French Adam Smith. His Reflections on the Production and Distribution of Wealth, which predated Smith’s The Wealth of Nations by ten years, argues against government intervention in the economic sector. Turgot recognized the function of the division of labor, investigated how prices were determined, an...

By Anna J. Schwartz

What Is the Money Supply? The U.S. money supply comprises currency—dollar bills and coins issued by the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. Treasury—and various kinds of deposits held by the public at commercial banks and other depository institutions such as thrifts and credit unions. On June 30, 2004, the...