Review
"Michael W. Klein's novel Something for Nothing is a fun romp through the life of a young, aspiring academic as he struggles to find his way in the world. It is often amusing, sometimes edifying, and always entertaining."--N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics, Harvard University, and author of Principles of Economics
(Greg Mankiw )
"Klein effectively taps into fears that every researcher must have felt at one time or another about the possible fragility of his or her results, and gives us a window to view how a desperate but otherwise normal everyday person may be tempted to behave unethically. He does so with humor and a heavy dose of irony. Klein perfectly captures the bumbling, bungling, and cluelessness of (at least some) new Economics PhDs beginning their careers."--Nelson C. Mark, Alfred C. DeCrane Jr. Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame
(Nelson Mark )
"The thrill in this book--as in the economics profession itself--comes from trying to determine what's real and what's satire. Klein expertly combines them by mixing the insights of an academic insider with an appreciation of the human comedy that was almost completely missing from his previous book, Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era." --Yoram Bauman, economist and stand-up comedian
(Yoram Bauman )
Product Description
David Fox (Ph.D. Economics, Columbia, Visiting Assistant Professor at Kester College, Knittersville, New York) is having a stressful year. He has a temporary position at a small college in a small town miles from everything except Albany. His students have never read Freakonomics. He thinks he is getting the hang of teaching, but a smart and beautiful young woman in his Economics of Social Issues class is distractingly flirtatious. His research is stagnant, to put it kindly. His search for a tenure-track job looms dauntingly. (The previous visiting assistant professor of economics is now working in a bookstore.) So when a right-wing think tank called the Center to Research Opportunities for a Spiritual Society (CROSS)--affiliated with the Salvation Academy for Value Economics (SAVE)--wants to publish (and publicize) a paper he wrote as a graduate student showing the benefits of high school abstinence programs, fetchingly retitled "Something for Nothing," he ignores his misgivings and accepts happily. After all, publication is "the coin of the realm," as a senior colleague puts it.But David faces a personal dilemma when his prized results are cast into doubt. The school year is filled with other challenges as well, including faculty politics, a romance with a Knittersville native, running the annual interview gauntlet, and delivering the culminating "job talk" lecture under trying circumstances. David's adventures offer an instructive fictional guide for the young economist and an entertaining and comic tale for everyone interested in questions of balancing career and life, success and integrity, and loyalty and desire.

A Course in Behavioral Economics is a concise and reader-friendly introduction to one of the most influential areas of economics today. Covering all core areas of the subject, the book requires no advanced mathematics and is full of examples, exercises, and problems drawn from the fields of economics, management, marketing, political science, and public policy, among others. It is an ideal first textbook for students coming to behavioral economics from a wide range of disciplines, and would also appeal to the general reader looking for a thorough and readable introduction to the subject. Available to lecturers: access to an Instructor's Manual at www.palgrave.com/economics/angner, containing sample syllabi, an instructor guide, sample handouts and examinations, and PowerPoint slides.

The New Keynesian framework has emerged as the workhorse for the analysis of monetary policy and its implications for inflation, economic fluctuations, and welfare. It is the backbone of the new generation of medium-scale models under development at major central banks and international policy institutions, and provides the theoretical underpinnings of the inflation stability-oriented strategies adopted by most central banks throughout the industrialized world. This graduate-level textbook provides an introduction to the New Keynesian framework and its applications to monetary policy. Using a canonical version of the New Keynesian model as a reference framework, Jordi Gal explores issues pertaining to the design of monetary policy, including the determination of the optimal monetary policy and the desirability of simple policy rules. He analyzes several extensions of the baseline model, allowing for cost-push shocks, nominal wage rigidities, and open economy factors. In each case, the implications for monetary policy are addressed, with a special emphasis on the desirability of inflation targeting policies. The most up-to-date and accessible introduction to the New Keynesian framework available Uses a single benchmark model throughout Concise and easy to use Includes exercises An ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and market analysts

This book is an effective, concise text for students and researchers that combines the tools of dynamic programming with numerical techniques and simulation-based econometric methods. Doing so, it bridges the traditional gap between theoretical and empirical research and offers an integrated framework for studying applied problems in macroeconomics and microeconomics.
In part I the authors first review the formal theory of dynamic optimization; they then present the numerical tools and econometric techniques necessary to evaluate the theoretical models. In language accessible to a reader with a limited background in econometrics, they explain most of the methods used in applied dynamic research today, from the estimation of probability in a coin flip to a complicated nonlinear stochastic structural model. These econometric techniques provide the final link between the dynamic programming problem and data. Part II is devoted to the application of dynamic programming to specific areas of applied economics, including the study of business cycles, consumption, and investment behavior. In each instance the authors present the specific optimization problem as a dynamic programming problem, characterize the optimal policy functions, estimate the parameters, and use models for policy evaluation.
The original contribution of Dynamic Economics: Quantitative Methods and Applications lies in the integrated approach to the empirical application of dynamic optimization programming models. This integration shows that empirical applications actually complement the underlying theory of optimization, while dynamic programming problems provide needed structure for estimation and policy evaluation.

The ABCs of RBCs is the first book to provide a basic introduction to Real Business Cycle (RBC) and New-Keynesian models. These models argue that random shocks—new inventions, droughts, and wars, in the case of pure RBC models, and monetary and fiscal policy and international investor risk aversion, in more open interpretations—can trigger booms and recessions and can account for much of observed output volatility.
George McCandless works through a sequence of these Real Business Cycle and New-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models in fine detail, showing how to solve them, and how to add important extensions to the basic model, such as money, price and wage rigidities, financial markets, and an open economy. The impulse response functions of each new model show how the added feature changes the dynamics.
The ABCs of RBCs is designed to teach the economic practitioner or student how to build simple RBC models. Matlab code for solving many of the models is provided, and careful readers should be able to construct, solve, and use their own models.
In the tradition of the “freshwater” economic schools of Chicago and Minnesota, McCandless enhances the methods and sophistication of current macroeconomic modeling.

Personalized and continuing relationships play a central role in any society. Economists have built upon the theories of repeated games and reputations to make important advances in understanding such relationships. Repeated Games and Reputations begins with a careful development of the fundamental concepts in these theories, including the notions of a repeated game, strategy, and equilibrium. Mailath and Samuelson then present the classic folk theorem and reputation results for games of perfect and imperfect public monitoring, with the benefit of the modern analytical tools of decomposability and self-generation. They also present more recent developments, including results beyond folk theorems and recent work in games of private monitoring and alternative approaches to reputations. Repeated Games and Reputations synthesizes and unifies the vast body of work in this area, bringing the reader to the research frontier. Detailed arguments and proofs are given throughout, interwoven with examples, discussions of how the theory is to be used in the study of relationships, and economic applications. The book will be useful to those doing basic research in the theory of repeated games and reputations as well as those using these tools in more applied research.

"I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I'm concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model." Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world's foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts in modern economic thought, Ariel Rubinstein offers some powerful and entertaining reflections on his childhood, family and career. In doing so, he challenges many of the central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can play in society at large. Economic Fables is as thought-provoking for seasoned economists as it is enlightening for newcomers to the field.

Over the past 15 years, the availability of cheap and convenient microcomputers has changed the collection methods and analysis of household survey data in developing countries, making the data available within months, rather than years. Simultaneously, analysts have become more interested in exploring ways in which such data may be used to inform and improve the steps involved in policymaking. This book reviews the analysis of household survey data, including the construction of household surveys, the econometric tools that are the most useful for such analysis, and a range of problems in development policy for which the econometric analysis of household surveys is useful and informative. The author's approach remains close to the data, relying on transparent econometric and graphical techniques to present the data so that policy and academic debates are clearly informed. The author illustrates the analysis through examples of policy issues from several countries, including Cote d'Ivoire, India, Pakistan, Taiwan (China), and Thailand. Two introductory chapters discuss the content and construction of surveys, as well as the econometric methods that can be used with survey data. Survey design and sampling are covered in some detail, as are the effect of survey design on the calculation of statistics and the estimation of parameters. A chapter on econometrics explores issues such as heteroskedasticity, sample selection, and instrumental variables. Four chapters focus on poverty and inequality, demand analysis and intrahousehold allocation, price and tax reform, and savings. Each chapter presents a self-contained development of the topic, introduces the important empirical issues, and provides substantive results. The book also includes the computer code used to calculate the results so that readers can adapt the methods to yield similar results for other data.

Foundations of International Macroeconomics is an innovative text that offers the first integrative modern treatment of the core issues in open economy macroeconomics and finance. With its clear and accessible style, it is suitable for first-year graduate macroeconomics courses as well as graduate courses in international macroeconomics and finance. Each chapter incorporates an extensive and eclectic array of empirical evidence. For the beginning student, these examples provide motivation and aid in understanding the practical value of the economic models developed. For advanced researchers, they highlight key insights and conundrums in the field.Topic coverage includes intertemporal consumption and investment theory, government spending and budget deficits, finance theory and asset pricing, the implications of (and problems inherent in) international capital market integration, growth, inflation and seignorage, policy credibility, real and nominal exchange rate determination, and many interesting special topics such as speculative attacks, target exchange rate zones, and parallels between immigration and capital mobility.Most main results are derived both for the small country and world economy cases. The first seven chapters cover models of the real economy, while the final three chapters incorporate the economy's monetary side, including an innovative approach to bridging the usual chasm between real and monetary models.

This landmark graduate-level text combines depth and breadth of coverage with recent, cutting-edge work in all the major areas of modern labor economics. Its command of the literature and its coverage of the latest theoretical, methodological, and empirical developments make it also a valuable resource for practicing labor economists.
This second edition has been substantially updated and augmented. It incorporates examples drawn from many countries, and it presents empirical methods using contributions that have proved to be milestones in labor economics. The data and codes of these research publications, as well as numerous tables and figures describing the functioning of labor markets, are all available on a dedicated website (www.labor-economics.org), along with slides that can be used as course aids and a discussion forum.
This edition devotes more space to the analysis of public policy and the levers available to policy makers, with new chapters on such topics as discrimination, globalization, income redistribution, employment protection, and the minimum wage or labor market programs for the unemployed. Theories are explained on the basis of the simplest possible models, which are in turn related to empirical results. Mathematical appendixes provide a toolkit for understanding the models.

The remarkable story and personalities behind one of the most important theories in modern economics
Finding Equilibrium explores the post–World War II transformation of economics by constructing a history of the proof of its central dogma—that a competitive market economy may possess a set of equilibrium prices. The model economy for which the theorem could be proved was mapped out in 1954 by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu collaboratively, and by Lionel McKenzie separately, and would become widely known as the "Arrow-Debreu Model." While Arrow and Debreu would later go on to win separate Nobel prizes in economics, McKenzie would never receive it. Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub explore the lives and work of these economists and the issues of scientific credit against the extraordinary backdrop of overlapping research communities and an economics discipline that was shifting dramatically to mathematical modes of expression.
Based on recently opened archives, Finding Equilibrium shows the complex interplay between each man's personal life and work, and examines compelling ideas about scientific credit, publication, regard for different research institutions, and the awarding of Nobel prizes. Instead of asking whether recognition was rightly or wrongly given, and who were the heroes or villains, the book considers attitudes toward intellectual credit and strategies to gain it vis-à-vis the communities that grant it.
Telling the story behind the proof of the central theorem in economics, Finding Equilibrium sheds light on the changing nature of the scientific community and the critical connections between the personal and public rewards of scientific work.

This book is intended as a textbook for a first-year Ph. D. course in mathematics for economists and as a reference for graduate students in economics. It provides a self-contained, rigorous treatment of most of the concepts and techniques required to follow the standard first-year theory sequence in micro and macroeconomics. The topics covered include an introduction to analysis in metric spaces, differential calculus, comparative statics, convexity, static optimization, dynamical systems and dynamic optimization. The book includes a large number of applications to standard economic models and over two hundred fully worked-out problems.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical foundations of economics, from basic set theory to fixed point theorems and constrained optimization. Rather than simply offer a collection of problem-solving techniques, the book emphasizes the unifying mathematical principles that underlie economics. Features include an extended presentation of separation theorems and their applications, an account of constraint qualification in constrained optimization, and an introduction to monotone comparative statics. These topics are developed by way of more than 800 exercises. The book is designed to be used as a graduate text, a resource for self-study, and a reference for the professional economist.

This book is a full-scale exposition of Charles Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers first ask what can be learned from data alone, and then ask what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Inferences predicated on weak assumptions, he argues, can achieve wide consensus, while ones that require strong assumptions almost inevitably are subject to sharp disagreements.Building on the foundation laid in the author's "Identification Problems in the Social Sciences" (Harvard, 1995), the book's fifteen chapters are organized in three parts. Part I studies prediction with missing or otherwise incomplete data. Part II concerns the analysis of treatment response, which aims to predict outcomes when alternative treatment rules are applied to a population. Part III studies prediction of choice behaviour.Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations. The book employs a simple notation and mathematical apparatus, using only basic elements of probability theory.

Microeconomic Foundations I develops the choice, price, and general equilibrium theory topics typically found in first-year theory sequences, but in deeper and more complete mathematical form than most standard texts provide. The objective is to take the reader from acquaintance with these foundational topics to something closer to mastery of the models and results connected to them.
Provides a rigorous treatment of some of the basic tools of economic modeling and reasoning, along with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these tools
Complements standard texts
Covers choice, preference, and utility; structural properties of preferences and utility functions; basics of consumer demand; revealed preference and Afriat's Theorem; choice under uncertainty; dynamic choice; social choice and efficiency; competitive and profit-maximizing firms; expenditure minimization; demand theory (duality methods); producer and consumer surplus; aggregation; general equilibrium; efficiency and the core; GET, time, and uncertainty; and other topics
Features a free web-based student's guide, which gives solutions to approximately half the problems, and a limited-access instructor's manual, which provides solutions to the rest of the problems
Contains appendixes that review most of the specific mathematics employed in the book, including a from-first-principles treatment of dynamic programming

In these notes, Professor Kreps surveys the standard models of choice under uncertainty that lie at the heart of microeconomic theory. Choice and preference, ordinal utility, von Neumann-Morganstern utility and utility functions for money, and subjective probability and subjective expected utility are among the standard topics covered. These notes provide a rigorous but accessible introduction to the theory of choice for mathematically inclined undergraduates and/or graduate students in economics, finance, and related disciplines.

"Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory" is the first publication of Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes from the first part of his well-known course in microeconomic theory, which he has taught for fifteen years to first-year graduate students at Tel Aviv, Princeton, and New York universities. The book will be an invaluable supplement to primary textbooks in microeconomic theory. Conveying the style and method of Rubinstein's lectures, it will benefit teachers and research economists, as well as students. The book focuses on and provides a critical assessment of models of rational economic agents, and it contains a large number of original problems. Rubinstein, one of the world's most-respected economics theorists, has made substantial contributions to several fields in economics, particularly game theory. His work is characterized by an unusual combination of deep originality and surprising simplicity. He is probably best known for his contributions to the bargaining problem and, more recently, to bounded rationality.

The last decade has brought dramatic changes in the way that researchers analyze economic and financial time series. This book synthesizes these recent advances and makes them accessible to first-year graduate students. James Hamilton provides the first adequate text-book treatments of important innovations such as vector autoregressions, generalized method of moments, the economic and statistical consequences of unit roots, time-varying variances, and nonlinear time series models. In addition, he presents basic tools for analyzing dynamic systems (including linear representations, autocovariance generating functions, spectral analysis, and the Kalman filter) in a way that integrates economic theory with the practical difficulties of analyzing and interpreting real-world data. "Time Series Analysis" fills an important need for a textbook that integrates economic theory, econometrics, and new results. The book is intended to provide students and researchers with a self-contained survey of time series analysis. It starts from first principles and should be readily accessible to any beginning graduate student, while it is also intended to serve as a reference book for researchers.

Recursive methods offer a powerful approach for characterizing and solving complicated problems in dynamic macroeconomics. Recursive Macroeconomic Theory provides both an introduction to recursive methods and advanced material, mixing tools and sample applications. Only experience in solving practical problems fully conveys the power of the recursive approach, and the book provides many applications. This third edition offers substantial new material, with three entirely new chapters and significant revisions to others. The new content reflects recent developments in the field, further illustrating the power and pervasiveness of recursive methods. New chapters cover asset pricing empirics with possible resolutions to puzzles; analysis of credible government policy that entails state variables other than reputation; and foundations of aggregate labor supply with time averaging replacing employment lotteries. Other new material includes a multi-country analysis of taxation in a growth model, elaborations of the fiscal theory of the price level, and age externalities in a matching model.
The book is suitable for both first- and second-year graduate courses in macroeconomics and monetary economics. Most chapters conclude with exercises. Many exercises and examples use Matlab programs, which are cited in a special index at the end of the book.