These collected articles constitute what is perhaps the definitive study of pricing models under inflation, providing a solid basis for further research on this elusive question. What are the real effects of inflation? These collected articles constitute what is perhaps the definitive study of pricing models under inflation, providing a solid basis for further research on this elusive question. Covering a broad range of theory and applications by well-known microeconomists, the eighteen contributions evaluate the effects of inflation on aggregate output and on welfare and reveal the scope of recent efforts to explicitly incorporate frictions in economic models. A basic building block common to most of the essays in this volume is the observation that individual firms change nominal prices intermittently. The frequency and size of nominal price changes are influenced by the cost of price adjustment and changes in the economic environment, production costs, market demand, market structure, and most important, inflation. Thus the degree of nominal rigidity is influenced by the economic environment, and in a dynamic context. Two introductory essays survey the empirical studies of pricing policies by individual firms and the theoretical efforts to integrate the nominal rigidities at the micro level into macro relationships. The essays that follow treat the general problem of optimal dynamic adjustment in the presence of convex costs of adjustment, include applications of the inventory models to the case of nominal price adjustment by an individual firm, address the question of aggregation, introduce active search by consumers, and provide empirical analysis of nominal price rigidities.

This clear, precisely written text presents an important branch of the modern, micro-economically based theory of industrial organization and of public finance, utilizing calculus only. Answers are provided to some pertinent economic questions, such as the pricing policies of vote-seeking politicians, of empire-building bureaucrats and of out-put-maximizing and energy-saving public utilities. These policies are compared with the welfare economic benchmark rules e.g. on marginal cost pricing and Ramsey pricing. Great significance is attached to price regulation. The book elucidates the recent replacement of rate of return regulation by price-cap regulation. It also explains why many simple rules like yardstick regulation fail to achieve optimal prices, which shows how complicated it is to induce managers to truthfully reveal their private information. How this can be achieved properly is shown in various principal-agent models on regulation with uncertain costs, uncertain demand and with soft budget constraints.

Including contributions from noted international scholars, this collection of papers provides a strong theoretical and empirical underpinning for the discussion of major public policy issues facing Turkey today. Matters addressed include: determinants of growth and productivity education and human capital accumulation income inequality corporate control and government performance of the government sector impact of major public policy issues on the future growth prospects of the Turkish economy. This volume relates the impact of major public policy issues on the future growth prospects of the Turkish economy. At a time when Turkey is currently attempting to gain membership to the European Union, this pertinent reference questions whether the country's economy is in fact ready for EU accession and membership.

Check out preview content for Money, Banking, and Financial Markets here. Monetary policy has changed. Has your textbook? Ball’s Money, Banking, and Financial Markets closes the gap between economic theory and the day-to-day behavior of banks and financial markets. Working from a macro framework based on the Fed’s use of the interest rate as its major policy instrument, Ball presents the core concepts necessary to understand the problems affecting the stock market and the causes of recessions and banking crises. Underlying this framework are the intellectual foundations for the Fed’s inflation targeting using the dynamic consistency problem facing policymakers. Ball doesn’t explain how the Fed and financial markets should work; he explains how they do work on a daily basis.

Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.

In The Economics of Inaction, leading economist Nancy Stokey shows how the tools of stochastic control can be applied to dynamic problems of decision making under uncertainty when fixed costs are present. Stokey provides a self-contained, rigorous, and clear treatment of two types of models, impulse and instantaneous control. She presents the relevant results about Brownian motion and other diffusion processes, develops methods for analyzing each type of problem, and discusses applications to price setting, investment, and durable goods purchases."--Pub. desc.

A new view of the economy as an evolving, complex system has been pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute over the last ten years, This volume is a collection of articles that shape and define this view?a view of the economy as emerging from the interactions of individual agents whose behavior constantly evolves, whose strategies and actions are always adapting.The traditional framework in economics portrays activity within an equilibrium steady state. The interacting agents in the economy are typically homogenous, solve well-defined problems using perfect rationality, and act within given legal and social structures. The complexity approach, by contrast, sees economic activity as continually changing?continually in process. The interacting agents are typically heterogeneous, they must cognitively interpret the problems they face, and together they create the structures?markets, legal and social institutions, price patters, expectations?to which they individually react. Such structures may never settle down. Agents may forever adapt and explore and evolve their behaviors within structures that continually emerge and change and disappear?structures these behaviors co-create. This complexity approach does not replace the equilibrium one?it complements it.The papers here collected originated at a recent conference at the Santa Fe Institute, which was called to follow up the well-known 1987 SFI conference organized by Philip Anderson, Kenneth Arrow, and David Pines. They survey the new study of complexity and the economy. They apply this approach to real economic problems and they show the extent to which the initial vision of the 1987 conference has come to fruition.

Brings together leading researchers from the USA and Europe to examine the literature on the new macroeconomics.

This pathbreaking book shows how credit markets functioned in Paris, through the agency of notaries, during a critical period of French history. Its authors challenge the usual assumption that organized financial markets—and hence the opportunity for economic growth—did not emerge outside of England and the Netherlands until the nineteenth century. Drawing on innovative research, the authors show that as early as the Old Regime, financial intermediaries in France were mobilizing a great tide of capital and arranging thousands of loans between borrowers and lenders. The implications for historians and economists are substantial. The role of notaries operating in Paris that Priceless Markets uncovers has never before been recognized. In the wake of this pathbreaking new study, historians will also have to rethink the origins of the French Revolution. As the authors show, the crisis of 1787-88 did not simply ignite revolt; it was intimately bound up in an economic struggle that reached far back into the eighteenth century, and continued well into the 1800s.

The unique and ingenious S.N. Afriat is back and writing on the subject of the Price Index. This book is totally unique and shall be of great interest to economists and statisticians everywhere.