Power, norms, and inflation

Power, norms, and inflation

Recent Books Constraint; Finance, Risk and the Growth sian Corridor; and Long-Period Dynamics of the Firm; the Keyneof Growth and Debt. Power, Norms...

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Recent Books Constraint; Finance, Risk and the Growth sian Corridor; and Long-Period Dynamics

of the Firm; the Keyneof Growth and Debt.

Power, Norms, and Inflation. Michael R. Smith. Hawthorne, NY: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 1992. 305 pp. $21.95 ISBN 0-202-30430Smith examines orthodox economic theories regarding postwar inflation and compares them to theories on inflation from the fields of sociology and political science. In the Chapter on economic treatments of inflation he studies and compares three macroeconomic theories. He then discusses the politics of inflation, concentrating on a democratic basis for inflation and public choice accounts of inflation. In the chapters on sociological explanations for inflation, Smith presents theories of secular decline, wage-push and corporatism. He also covers Marxist theories, and he concludes with powers and norms and their effect on economic behavior. Michael R. Smith is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at McGill University, Montreal. Rational Expectations Macroeconomics: An Zntroductory Handbook. Patrick Minford. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 243 pp. $64.95 ISBN O-631-17787-6. This text presents principles and uses of rational expectations methods in macroeconomics. It illustrates several methods for solving rational expectations models and examines subjects often associated with the use of these models, including stabilization policy, fiscal policy, the political economy of democracy, and the Phillips curve. The book also covers several methods of testing the rational expectations hypothesis, including the efficient market hypothesis and the reduced-form equation method. This text is the second edition of Rational Expectations and the New Macroeconomics by Patrick Minford and David Peel. The Strategy and Consistency of Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, 1924-1933. David C. Wheelock. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 126 pp. ISBN O-521-39155-5. This book attempts to answer questions about the reasons for the Federal Reserve’s errors during the Great Depression. It suggests that monetary policy administered by the Fed during the depression was, for the most part, the extension of a strategy begun in the 1920s and that such a strategy required that the Fed deal

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