Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 102 - Aug 2020): Macroeconomics & Microeconomics

The Federal Reserve System, created in the early 20th century, is now more than a hundred years old. This book takes the reader through the founding and first century of Federal Reserve monetary policy, and uses the analysis of the past to address the present and future issues of central banking.With its focus on the actual policies, rather than the politics or individuals that determined those policies, this book addresses issues that have plagued monetarists since the onset of the Great Recession. Then, it proceeds to discuss the issues that will affect the efficacy of policy in the future. This section of the book is relevant for all central banks as central bank behavior post the onset of the Great Recession was similar throughout the world.The book presents an analysis of the path of inflation that puzzled the experts. It adds an analysis of central banking's ability or lack thereof to influence market interest rates. Lastly, it explains the current exploding crypto-currency craze, its potential to supplant traditional transactions media, and the future of these so-called currencies.

eBook Price : $98

In a world of negative interest rates, extreme inequality and trillion-dollar budget deficits, it is safe to say that conventional macroeconomics needs an overhaul. Common Sense Macroeconomics is an innovative guide to various concepts of macroeconomic analysis. Presented in a student-friendly and accessible way, this textbook is an ideal introduction to all who seek to foresee economic developments and address some of the key problems of our time.Specifically, this book innovates as follows.Ravi Batra, a Professor of Economics at Southern Methodist University and known for his accurate forecasts such as the 2008 crash, argues that the goal of macroeconomics is to raise the living standard of all, not just a privileged few. Contrary to popular belief, relentless monetary expansion to finance budget deficits actually makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, which has been happening all over the world. Ethical policies and efficiency that create general prosperity go together. In order to increase everyone's income, governments should generate competition and outlaw mergers among large and profitable firms. Inequality arises from monopoly capitalism, because then wages lag behind productivity and generate a rising wage-productivity gap. This is the ultimate source of almost all economic troubles and imbalances. While the growing gap is inherently unfair, it also leads to vast income disparity and wealth concentration, stock market bubbles and crashes, recessions and eventually depressions. It is the rise in the wage gap that preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s and now the Great Recession of 2008. Hence governments should not stifle competition and vigorously enforce anti-trust laws. Macroeconomic equilibrium nowadays requires thatSupply = Demand + New Debt

eBook Price : $108

As Singapore progresses from a newly-independent nation to a more mature economy, the economic challenges it faces have evolved.In the 50 years following Singapore's independence, the country tackled economic challenges relating to a fledgling nation, that included launching onto a path of economic take-off, and managing workers' wage aspirations without rising unemployment. It met those challenges, successfully transiting from relative poverty in the 1960s to relative prosperity today.As the country enters the next phase of its economic development, having now surpassed the US standard of living as measured by real GDP per capita, it faces another set of challenges: How to transit from catch-up growth arising from technological diffusion from frontier economies, to generating indigenous innovation? How to face the problem of a shrinking local workforce? How to manage a shift in job preferences with rising wealth and educational attainments?This volume provides a theory of Singapore's economic development. With a coherent theory capable of explaining how Singapore got to where it is, the book analyses how the future might look like for the Singapore economy. With its forward-looking analysis, this book is valuable to students as it weaves macroeconomic data together with growth theory and highlights the interaction of economic forces with social influences and political institutions. It also serves as a good reference for other emerging economies that, like Singapore, want to avoid the middle-income trap, and for researchers interested in analysing the economic possibilities for current and future Singaporeans.

eBook Price : $78

Economics Gone Astray is a collection of essays on critical topics in macroeconomics that frame the issues in terms of clearly stated assumptions, highlighting the errors often made by professional economists, and allowing readers to better analyze market behavior and the economic consequences of policy decisions.The book differs from textbook economics, as it tackles sophisticated topics without using mathematics or technical jargon. This makes the book highly accessible to all types of readers, from investors and investment professionals, to professors and their students.The book's style integrates a large quantity of clearly drawn charts which help anchor the readers' perceptions of the topics being examined, from inflation to taxes, to demographics.

eBook Price : $58

This book discusses the formation of the current huge property bubbles in many Asian economies and the high likelihood of another Asian financial crisis due to the eventual bursting of these property bubbles. In particular, it explains: In view of the huge costs due to the macroeconomic policy mistakes in many developing economies and some advanced economies, this book recommends the development of a new economic discipline on macroeconomic management and rigorous selection procedures of key economic and monetary officials. If properly done, these would help pre-empt financial crises, currency crises and asset bubbles in the future

eBook Price : $98

The book documents the evolution of Asia's infrastructure over the past half-century and reviews existing literature on the role of infrastructure investment in supporting growth and social development. It highlights the implications of tax financing and mass transit investments on land and property values and infrastructure financing. It then examines Asia's current practices and new solutions that can help meet the infrastructure gap. It discusses the role of institutions, how innovation can foster energy infrastructure investments, and the role of bond markets in infrastructure investments. The book explores ASEAN+3 efforts in developing local currency bond markets to provide long-term local financing for infrastructure investment while providing financial resilience. It also examines the use of green bonds to finance sustainable growth in Asia.

eBook Price : $98

It is impossible to understand modern economics without knowledge of the basic tools of gametheory and mechanism design. This book provides a graduate-level introduction to the economic modeling of strategic behavior. The goal is to teach Economics doctoral students the tools of game theory and mechanism design that all economists should know.

eBook Price : $118

This book is based on lectures conducted for two classes at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University: A Public Finance Seminar for PhD students in public administration and State and Local Public Finance for master's students in public administration.Topics covered include the role of voters in a federal system, the sorting of different households into different communities, the determinants of public service costs, the property tax and other sources of local (and state) revenue, fiscal aspects of economic development, and intergovernmental aid (especially for education).The notes for the Ph.D. class also cover several more advanced topics, such as the estimation of education production and cost functions, the capitalization of school quality into house values, and tax competition among jurisdictions. The focus in these notes is on the highly decentralized federal system in the United States, but many of the principles and much of the behavioral analysis in the class apply to other countries as well.These notes draw on Professor Yinger's extensive teaching experience and publication record in state and local public finance. They should prove useful to many teachers, scholars, and students who find topics in state and local public finance that they wish to pursue.

eBook Price : $148

This book presents articles that focus on the inter-related issues of choice of exchange rate and monetary policy regimes, and others that use a global macroeconomic model developed by the author and collaborators to quantify the effects of the 'baby boom' on global imbalances, costs of disinflation, and the effects of German unification. The book presents new analysis of the euro-zone experience and its applicability to other monetary unions, as well as a discussion of the prerequisites for successful inflation targeting. It is grounded in real-world data, readily accessible to non-specialists, and addresses important economic policy issues.

eBook Price : $148

This book covers a wide range of topics in education finance. It is designed to introduce the literature on education finance to scholars and prospective scholars and can be used as a textbook for a graduate-level education finance class. The topics in the book include the incidence of the property tax as a source of revenue for elementary and secondary education, how much more it costs to reach a state's education targets in a high-poverty school district than in a rich district, the design of state education aid programs, the impact of school quality on house values, the cost implications of school district consolidations, and the impact of state aid on school infrastructure.

eBook Price : $148

Written by production economics and finance specialists Rolf F re and Shawna Grosskopf of Oregon State University and Dimitris Margaritis of the University of Auckland, Pricing Non-marketed Goods Using Distance Functions, is an inspiring new contribution highlighting the importance of duality theory for valuation purposes, especially for hard to price inputs or resources, intended or unintended goods and assets. The theoretical pricing models are supplemented by self-standing empirical applications covering real estate pricing, environmental preservation, transfer pricing, shadow prices of university knowledge outputs and spillovers, and the pricing of bank equity capital and non-performing loans.

eBook Price : $78

Drawing from current examples from a variety of countries, Public Finance: An International Perspective addresses the main issues in contemporary public finance, including fiscal sustainability, state enterprises, and a variety of subsidies. There are relatively few textbooks on public finance, and many of them focus on the experience and issues facing the United States. This book sets out to address the critical issues from other countries, particularly those from the developing world or emerging market countries, who have received less attention in other texts. Written in a highly accessible manner, this book is a useful reference for students and practitioners alike.

eBook Price : $128

This volume is a collection of the author's scholarly work spanning a quarter century of inquiry into the causes of international business cycles. It starts with an introduction to international business cycle research. Part I reviews salient business cycle facts relating to quantities, prices and the driving forces of business cycles. Part II focuses on the role of risk-sharing and asset market structure in shaping business cycles and welfare. Part III deals with relative prices and the terms of trade stressing retail distribution, information frictions, and the need to tie commodity-specific shocks to particular nations or world regions. Part IV is a collection of work focusing on the inefficiencies brought about by the Hawley-Smoot tariffs and foreign retaliation. Further, because the tariffs were often specific (nominal amounts per physical quantity imported), they interacted with monetary policy in a way that exacerbated the Great Depression.The book provides the reader with an overview of key developments in international business cycle research that build upon the pioneering work of Nobel Laureates Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, who built the first dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the closed economy, patterned along the lines of the US economy. As globalization has extended the span of international economic relationships, these modeling approaches have become essential for understanding business cycles today. These models and empirical methods are particularly relevant to our understanding of how domestic innovation, productivity change or policy action (fiscal, monetary and trade-related) feeds back across economies.

eBook Price : $158