Macroeconomics

From what I can tell, the two main ideas of this book are:

1) Changes in exchange rates affect a firm not only through translation of transactions with foreign-based firms, but also because the changes potentially can alter the firms competetive situation. 2) Regression analysis can be used to measure cash flow and/or market value sensitivity to changes in macro economic variables such as exchange rates, interest rates and inflation. This gives you a neutral, statistical average relationship which tells you how big your true exposure to macro risk is (this measure captures the change in competetiveness too, as opposed to traditional ones). These regression coeffiecients can then be used to form a hedging-strategy.

The ideas in this book are strong. You get a much better picture of how risk could and should be managed. It also contains a lot of interesting discussions on the implications of market efficiency for the firms hedging policy. In short, it's a book practitioners in the field should read.

Its major drawback lies in the writing style of Mr Oxelheim. It's not very clearly written at all, and most numerical examples are annoyingly messy. I's a book I think you're going to find it hard to like. This is strange, considering it seems to be Mr Oxelheims wish that his methods be used by managers. For that purpose, the book should be re-written in a much more lucid and pedagogical way. To understand the book, a basic course in corporate finance and regression analysis will help a lot.

The price is a bit steep I think. You need to be really interested in risk to get your moneys worth.

There is no doubt that this book will be widely read. The book contains discussions of many Austrian themes and insights, though sometimes mixes these up with non-Austrian elements apparently in an attempt to make them look more acceptable to mainstreamers.
This also leads to less than full consistency on some occasions.
The link between the last chapter (about policy proposals and containing a defense of fractional reserve free banking) and the previous chapters is less tight than the author believes. Apparently the author hasn't fully absorbed the Austrian argument against fractional reserve banking. Paradoxically (for a book purportedly about microfoundations) this flaw can be related to inadequate attention paid to microfoundations. For instance it is utterly irrelevant to argue (or at least suggest) that a system of 100% reserve banking would be unable to handle a problem like the deflation during the Great Contraction: under such a system this problem simply would not occur in the first place...There is no reason to believe that in the unhampered market prices will be sticky downwards etc...

The book has a lot of detailed historical information about the financial systems. Unfortunatly the author pay too much attention to history and not enough on practical fundementals. There are several errors and steps deleted in the book. Plus not enough examples are provided in comparrison to the problems assigned. Even my professor stated that the 7th edition had plenty of problems that won't be resolved until the 12-13th edition.

Science and technology has been the subject of public interest and support for centuries. The acceptance of a utilitarian argument for the public support of basic scientific research actually predates the Industrial Revolution itself. However, with a few notable exceptions, the organisation of the process of innovation has not been thoroughly discussed so far. This book edited by Alfonso Gambardella and Franco Malerba presents an integrated collection of contributions providing new insights into the importance of the organisation of economic innovation by approaching the problem at stake from a European point of view. This is quite a challenge, since the European economies have many different measures and schemes to enhance innovation and cooperation, and mutual benefits are often hard to achieve.

The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the patterns of innovative activity in Europe and the second focuses on inter-firm collaborations and research networks.

After a short introduction, Giovanni Dosi and Luigi Marengo set the tone for the remaining part of the first part of the book by stressing the co- evolution of knowledge and organisation. They argue that path dependence, location and tacit knowledge are crucial for organising innovation. These arguments are also viewed as being important in the chapter by Keith Pavitt and Pari Patel (chapter 3). They find that in-house learning is an important determinant of the accumulation of these competencies. In chapter 4, Franco Malerba and Luigi Orsenigo deal with entry and exit of firms thereby dividing technological entry and exit into 'real' and 'lateral'. Their key finding is that while technological regimes affect both types of entry and exit, lateral entry and exit is also affected by technological proximity and by the degree of pervasiveness of a technology. Chapter 5 (Stefano Breschi) and 6 (Peter Swann) elaborate upon Dosi and Marengo's point of the importance of 'location'. Using patent data, Breschi finds important differences in the spatial agglomeration of different sectors and technological regimes. Swann observes that the larger European countries have many industrial clusters, while the smaller countries are probably too small to establish such clusters. Finally, the findings of the chapters in the first part are applied by Nick Von Tunzelmann (electronics industry) and Cristiano Antonelli and Mario Calderini (mechanical engineering) to show their empirical relevance.

In the second part of the book Patrick Llerena and Mireille Matt set the agenda for analysing inter-firm collaborations and research networks by discussing policy aspects of inter-firm collaborations. They focus on a market and an organisational perspective. These perspectives serve as a vehicle for the next three chapters, which all consider different industries. Antoine Bureth, Sandrine Wolff and Antonello Zanfei (chapter 10) look at the European electronics industry; Salvatore Torrisi (chapter 11) compares the European and US software industry; and Margaret Sharp and Jacqueline Senker (chapter 12) discuss learning and catching-up in the European biotechnology industry.

The most interesting parts of the book are chapters 13-15, which focus on research networks and the opportunities for cooperation in a European context. Paul David's work has shown that effective policies for the promotion of competitiveness and long-term economic growth through innovation in any country or region must be based on a consistent building block which generates, distributes, and exploits scientific and technological knowledge. In a relatively long but appealing and convincing contribution, David (with Dominique Foray and Edward Steinmueller) re-examines and extends his work by stressing the importance of explicitly dealing with the norms and behavioural styles of individuals and organisations in the institutions that form networks to develop science and technology. Only if consistent and useful complementarities are found and the right incentive structure is provided, will European efforts to organise innovation be able to blossom. This chapter is complemented by two studies of Aldo Geuna. The first (with Walter Garcia- Fontes) studies the effects of the funding effort by the European Commission (EC) on the supply and the demand of funds. The econometric results suggest that the EC generally serves short-term objectives, whereas long-term strategies are needed for a coherent innovation policy. In the final chapter, Geuna applies the framework of chapter 13 to an analysis of resource-allocation criteria between networks of universities.

The general tone in Gambardella and Malerba's book is that the concept, theoretical nature, and empirical application of the efficient organisation of economic innovation constitute an important contribution to a European science and technology framework. While the first part is a well- structured and thoughtful approach to going into patterns of innovative activity, it fails to provide many new insights into organising innovation in Europe. The more interesting contributions are found in the second part, which present an extremely useful and timely study of how to organise innovation.

This book presents a collection of "classic" (published) articles on the RBC literature. Nevertheless, the first two chapters (written by the editors) present a simplistic and incomplete account of the methodological improvements in Macro that are due to RBC.

The "Statistical Handbook on Consumption and Wealth in the United States" is a collection of tables and charts of different measures of American financial health, varying between a macroeconomic perspective to that of a typical household.

Despite the glowing editorial reviews, there were little touches that could have made this a more satisfying volume. For instance, when ranking states by average annual pay (Table B9-1), there is no mention as to whether the data is by household, by employee, or per capita. Sometimes this information is provided on other tables, sometimes not. Also on Table B9-1 (and similar ones using rank), the states are displayed in alphabetical order rather than by their designated rank. Displaying them by their rank would have allowed for far easier comparison by geographical area. Instead the reader is obligated to copy everything over to derive any additional conclusions.

Another example where a little effort would have gone a long way is Table A5-1, identifying states' Gross State Product (as obtained from the Survey of Current Business). The editors knew that resident population was key to putting Gross State Product in perspective, because they added that data (obtained from the Statistical Abstract of the United States) to the same table. Unfortunately, they didn't take the time to do the math that would have broken down the numbers down by capita. As before, the reader is obligated to do work out the figures for themselves, and then take them out of alphabetical order and rank them by the resultant figures for geographical comparison. Cleaning up little things like these throughout the book would have been a noticeable improvement.

My last point involves the title of this volume. This book is intended to be a "Statistical Handbook on Consumption and Wealth in the United States." Wealth is commonly defined as the value of assets that are owned minus any liabilities that need to be repaid. It provides a very different measure of economic health than the flow of income and expenditures. While I believe that this volume has done an excellent job at gathering (if not presenting) the available data to satisfy the "Consumption" part of the title, the information provided to satisfy the "Wealth" aspect of the title, in my opinion, was far too sparse. Unfortunately, that was my primary motivation in buying this volume. I recommend that readers seeking information on wealth look elsewhere.

I'd say this is a bad case of over-research or losing objectivity. It's a formidable work that he's put in. He has interviewed numerous top officials in the Bank of Japan, Ministry of Finance and Politicians to dig into the current Japanese recession. But the conclusion that he draws is as follows;

a. BOJ were under pressure, so they couldn't do anything.
b. MOF was busy, and they had no other choice.
c. Politicians had other interests, so they weren't available.

d. So, there was nothing that could have been done (or could be done in the future) to avoid (or get out of) the Japanese recession.

Now, this is meaningless. Of course everybody has some excuses if you ask them. I guess the Nazis had their reason for their gas chambers, too, and most of them "couldn't do anything." Stalin would have said he had no other choice. But should we just say "oh well" and let it go? I don't think so. What has happend, happened, but one point of thinking about history is to figure out the options that might have been taken to prepare for future situations. This book doesn't do that, it simply justifies the status quo.

This often happens when you get to close to the subject and sympathize too much.

His attitude is apparent in his arguments about the inflation targetting argument proposed by Krugman (and almost every other economist right and left). He discribes that BOJ can't do it, the current law doesn't allow it. Well, who said BOJ has to do it alone? But Grimes never even thinks about any possiblity of changing the present, or the possible merits that it would bring IF it happened.

That's the limit of this book. Three stars for the considerable research effort, but this is a result of much perspiration and no inspiration.

Oh, and next time, get a better caligrapher for the cover.

Professor Handa's graduate course, the notes of which he compiled into this text, is dry, dated, off-topic, and in most cases downright irrelevant. The text itself is much, much worse. What it lacks in style, it makes up for in tediousness. On the bright side for those of the classical school of thought, its obvious bias combines seamlessly with a reliance on dubious logical manipulations to discredit Keynesian theory far better than even the most eloquent neoclassical author could. Also, for an economics text it is very reasonably priced.

First off, the focus of this book is NOT monetary economics. This is a text on Keynesian macroeconomics. Not neo-Keynesian macroeconomics, either, but good old-fashioned Keynesianism from the 60's and 70's (the author got his PhD in the mid-60's, and the vast majority of the sources cited in the book are pre-1980). It is compendious, but dated (rather like professor Handa, himself). Because the text is 750 pages long, there is a fair amount of monetary material, but if a professor tried to use this book as a basis for a class, 1) it would take two or three semesters to teach, and 2) after the first semester there would be very few students left in the class. Curiously (or not), this is exactly how things work in McGill University's graduate-level courses in monetary economics, where the book was born.

Surprisingly, Professor Handa wrote this 750-page monstrosity of a text without managing to make it comprehensive. Take, for example, gold. One would think that a multi-semester course on money would cover the gold standard, its pros and cons, how it developed, how it was moved away from in modern economies, and why it was able to function with such success over thousands of years and hundreds of vastly differing cultures and governments. Well, in this case you'd be wrong. Look in the index of Handa's Monetary Economics and you will find gold referenced ONCE. Flip to that page and you will see that in Handa's view the sole importance of gold with respect to money and monetary theory was that the gold standard system used under Bretton Woods necessitated the formation of the IMF.

Okay, so there is no gold, but what is there? In short, Keynes-and lots of him. In fact, the old guy even pops up where you would least expect him. Take, for example, this line from the chapter on "Expectations in Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy":

"Many economists have, in fact, speculated that the rational expectations hypothesis been available in Keynes' days, he would have incorporated it into his work."

This may in fact be true (the book has no footnote naming the economists who allegedly speculated such things). It may also be true that Adam Smith would have incorporated REH into his work, but I hardly see the point making such a statement in a textbook.

What else do you get? How about a smoke-and-mirrors "disproof" of Walras' Law? Just how do you "disprove" Walras' Law, you might ask? And why would you want to? And what would that accomplish, anyway? Trust me, you have to read it to believe it.

So, is there anything worthwhile in this book? Surprisingly, yes. The text is actually designed a lot like a general historical account of macroeconomic theory, complete with short and concise summaries of some rather important papers and theories that many students would probably rather read in abbreviated summary form. What is the Baumol-Tobin transactions demand for money and how does it work? What is the Lucas Supply Rule and how does it compare to the Friedman Supply Rule? What authors and papers deal with sticky prices, efficiency wages, or labor hoarding? What is the proof behind the idea of Ricardian equivalence? Check the index, its all here.

In summary, this is text is poorly organized, strongly biased, incredibly boring, and mostly only tangentially relevant to monetary economics. It may possibly be useful to novice graduate students looking for a summary of many broad macroeconomic ideas (particularly old ones) and/or papers who don't want to plow through the equally tedious primary sources. In good conscience, however, I can only recommend it as a highly effective sleep aid, and not a tool of economic learning.

This book is comprehensive in covering all of the conventional, albeit dated, topics in monetary economics. However, it lacks the clarity and consistency of modern textbooks. By the end of the book you will have trouble differentiating one theory from another, as many key arguments are vague or self-contradictory. In addition, very little will be presented to spark your enthusiasm for the material. If you are a professor looking for a course text, this book may be a good guide for forming a curriculum, but please do not subject your students to its dull, meandering style of presentation. Advanced students deserve a book that is more cutting edge.

I am currently using the book for my Master Degree level class in money and banking. The book is EXCELLENT. It is up-to-date with current issues, comprehensive and complete. My students love it. The presentation at the beginning of each chapter is outstanding. One of very few books that presents money at both the micro and macro levels. The discussions of money in Walrasian general equilibrium models and overlapping generation models are exceptional. The review and discussion questions at the end of each chapter are very helpful to students.

If you cannot sleep at night, here is the sleeping pill you were looking for. Besides its dreary nature - one who struggles with concepts as they relate to graphing will certainly be frustrated.

For a textbook, I found this book to be entertaining. Not only was the reading easier than most texts, the real world examples were great and really helped to solidify the concepts.

Dr. Ted Ownby of the University of Mississippi has attempted to explain the social patterns of Mississippi from 1830-1995. In doing this, he has focussed on the buying patterns of the state's public. Through analyzing extensive sources and census records, Dr. Ownby has attempted to show that the buying power of poor Mississippians and the state's econommic caste system led to political differences between black, poor white, and wealthy white Mississippians. In analyzing buying power, Dr. Ownby has failed to take into account C. Vann Winwards famous essay on Race and Economics (1956). In Winwards address he stated that the caste system was much more racial than class. The buying power of black Mississippians was not effective because they were poor, but rather they were poor because they were black. Dr. Cecil M. Cooper's 1989 groundbreaking analysis : Dollar's and Cents Segregation : Black and Green in Rural Mississippi, speaks along the same lines. Dr. Cooper has stated that Black Mississipians and poor white Mississippians had little access to wealth. However, poor white Mississippians had more access to credit. Credit was denied to African-Americans for the most part. If not denied black credit was used agaisnt black poilitcal efforts. Although Dr. Ownby's work attempts to tackle a very important issue, race and economics, he fails to give a coherrant documentation on buying power froom 1830 -1990's. His reasons for choosing those dates are also unclear. It is one in a long line of academic books that fails to drive at the real reason for race division: social class. More research and documentaion are needed for this book to successfully overcome its deficiencies.

All I want to say is this book is so boring. All I wanted to do when I was reading it was shoot myself in the mouth with a pistol to end the constant eternal boredom. I think all it was trying to do was impress a few academic kooks who live in an academic bubble. Yeah well its boring.

...American Dreams in Mississippi is cultural (not economic) history. It is not about the reasons for poverty, but rather what it MEANS to live in a state that is perpetually impoverished while also living in a nation that bills itself as the Land of Opportunity. In this book, Ownby seeks to redefine the very concept of the American Dream. As his title suggests, there are in fact many dreams. Young and old, men and women, blacks and whites, rural and city folk all experience these dreams differently, and Ownby gives a voice to them all. With all due respect to the late C. Vann Woodword (who I am certain Dr. Ownby has the highest regard for) American Dreams in Mississippi goes beyond the boundaries of conventional history, asking questions historians have never asked about the South and using new kinds of sources like clothing, furniture, cars, and song lyrics as well as literature, general store ledgers, and obscure state documents to break new ground. The chapter "Men Buying Cloth" reveals the important discovery that Mississippi women, contrary to the national stereotype, were historically not consumers. The section on slave purchases is, to my knowledge, the only study of its kind, and the discussions of blues culture and Civil Rights boycotts add a fresh perspective to those topics.

If some parts of this book require a little effort on the reader's part, it is only because Ownby's research and documentation are so thorough that he provides not just one but many examples to back up each point. As Ownby lays out in his first chapter, the book is also grounded in solid theory. More works of history should be so "dry." I urge all readers of this book -- especially graduate students in history looking for an excellent example of their craft -- to stick with it. It is well worth the journey.