A revealing collection from the intellectual titan whose work shaped the modern world.As an economist and public intellectual, Gary S. Becker was a giant. The recipient of a Nobel Prize, a John Bates Clark Medal, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, Becker is widely regarded as the greatest microeconomist in history.After forty years at the University of Chicago, Becker left a slew of unpublished writings that used an economic approach to human behavior, an...

Human Capital is Becker's classic study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Gary S. Becker is a pioneer of applying economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as discrimination, marriage, family relations, and education. Becker's research on human capital was considered by the Nobel committee to be his most noteworthy contribution to economics.

A collection of essays analyzing the economic factors underlying human decision-making from the Nobel Prize–winning American economist.Since his pioneering application of economic analysis to racial discrimination, Gary S. Becker has shown that an economic approach can provide a unified framework for understanding all human behavior. In a highly readable selection of essays Becker applies this approach to various aspects of human activity, including social interact...

Economists assume that people make choices based on their preferences and their budget constraints. The preferences and values of others play no role in the standard economic model. This feature has been sharply criticized by other social scientists, who believe that the choices people make are also conditioned by social and cultural forces. Economists, meanwhile, are not satisfied with standard sociological and anthropological concepts and explanations because they are not embedded in a t...

Imagine each family as a kind of little factory—a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary S. Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavio...

On his death in the autumn of 2006, Milton Friedman was lauded as "the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era" by the New York Times and "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century" by the Economist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Friedman was both a highly respected economist and a prominent public intellectual, the leader of a revolution in economic and political thought that argued robustly in favor of ...

Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains...

The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics presents a unified conceptual framework for analyzing taxation--the first to be systematically developed in several decades. An original treatment of the subject rather than a textbook synthesis, the book contains new analysis that generates novel results, including some that overturn long-standing conventional wisdom. This fresh approach should change thinking, research, and teaching for decades to come.Building on the work of J...

A powerful challenge to contemporary economics and a new agenda for global financeIn the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007, faith in the rationality of markets has lost ground to a new faith in their irrationality. The problem, Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg argue, is that both the rational and behavioral theories of the market rest on the same fatal assumption—that markets act mechanically and economic change is fully predictable. In B...

This important textbook offers a comprehensive look into the two main traditions in contemporary macroeconomics –- New Classical and Keynesian –- and examines the work of economists who have drawn on principles from both traditions to form a new, integrated approach known as New Neoclassical Synthesis. Importantly, this provides the theoretical foundation for much of current mainstream economics and the work done by central banks around the world. With a dual focus on research methods and ...

The current literature on central banking contains two distinct branches. On the one side, research focuses on the impact of monetary policy on economic growth, unemployment, and output-price inflation, while ignoring financial aspects. On the other side, some scholars leave aside macroeconomics in order to study the narrow, but crucial, subjects of financial behaviours, and financial supervision and regulation. This book aims at merging both approaches by using macroeconomic analysis to s...

These proceedings, from a conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on October 17-18, 1991, attempted to layout what we currently know about aggregate economic fluctuations. Identifying what we know inevitably reveals what we do not know about such fluctuations as well. From the vantage point of where the conference's participants view our current understanding to be, these proceedings can be seen as suggesting an agenda for further research. The conference was divided into ...