Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of policy-makers in controlling the amount of money in circulation. It gained prominence in the 1970s, but was mostly abandoned as a practical guidance to monetary policy during the following decade because the strategy was found to not work very well in practice.
Fischer Sheffey Black was an American economist, best known as one of the authors of the Black–Scholes equation.
Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.
The causes of the Great Depression in the early 20th century in the United States have been extensively discussed by economists and remain a matter of active debate. They are part of the larger debate about economic crises and recessions. The specific economic events that took place during the Great Depression are well established.
The quantity theory of money is a theory from monetary economics which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, and that the causality runs from money to prices. This implies that the theory potentially explains inflation. It originated in the 16th century and has been proclaimed the oldest surviving theory in economics.
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993, initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
Monetary inflation is a sustained increase in the money supply of a country. Depending on many factors, especially public expectations, the fundamental state and development of the economy, and the transmission mechanism, it is likely to result in price inflation, which is usually just called "inflation", which is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services.
The following is a list of works by the prominent American economist Milton Friedman.
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.
Paul Davidson is an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He is a prolific writer and has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position critical of mainstream economics.
Following the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, there was a worldwide resurgence of interest in Keynesian economics among prominent economists and policy makers. This included discussions and implementation of economic policies in accordance with the recommendations made by John Maynard Keynes in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, most especially fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Neil Wallace is an American economist and professor of economics at Penn State University. He is considered one of the main proponents of new classical macroeconomics in the field of economics.
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Market monetarism is a school of macroeconomic thought that advocates that central banks target the level of nominal income instead of inflation, unemployment, or other measures of economic activity, including in times of shocks such as the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2006, and in the financial crisis that followed. In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe monetary aggregates or commodity prices such as gold are the optimal guide to intervention. Market monetarists also reject the New Keynesian focus on interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy. Market monetarists prefer a nominal income target due to their twin beliefs that rational expectations are crucial to policy, and that markets react instantly to changes in their expectations about future policy, without the "long and variable lags" postulated by Milton Friedman.
Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey was an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the bank's flagship publication, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of British classical monetary thought.
Michael David Bordo is a Canadian and American economist, currently Board of Governors Professor of Economics and Distinguished Professor of Economics at Rutgers University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the third most influential economic historian worldwide according to the RePEc/IDEAS rankings. He was a student of Milton Friedman and has co-authored numerous books and articles with Anna Schwartz.
