Books Published

Ed. Merritt B. Fox & Michael A. Heller

Corporate Governance Lessons from Transition Economy Reforms explores a timely topic at the intersection of economics, law, and policy reform. To date, most sophisticated theoretical work on corporate governance has focused on advanced market economies. In post-socialist countries, corporate finance and transition economics scholars have often done little more than convey the received theory to transition policymakers.

This volume focuses, for the first time, on the reverse concern: what, if anything, do the reform experiences of transition countries teach about corporate governance theory more generally? To investigate this question, Merritt Fox and Michael Heller have assembled a stellar group of corporate governance theorists. The answers are startling.

Together, these essays present a comprehensive new view on a provocative theme. Written in an accessible style, they will be of interest to a broad range of scholars, commentators, and policymakers. (Princeton University Press)

 

 

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John Kay

Most business books are bland or dull, or both. This volume is neither: John Kay combines insightful analysis with wit and verve. In this book, we meet heroes as diverse as Sun Tzu, Jacques Derrida, and Jack Welch: we study businesses as diverse as Honda Motors, the grandes marques of Champagne, and Jenners department store in Princes Street, Edinburgh; we learn why size doesn't matter, why brakes are different from signals, how to value businesses, and why the author was wrong to tell students that Boeing's position in the civil aircraft market was unassailable. In less than two hundred pages, John Kay provides a lively introduction to business strategy and a guide to many of the key issues in business today.  (Gazelle Book Service)

 

 

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Jeffrey Sachs

Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. The groundwork laid, he explains his methods for arriving, like a clinical internist, at a holistic diagnosis of a country's situation and the options it faces. Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate. He concludes by drawing on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back. In the end, he leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world's problems are, but how solvable they are-and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest. A work of profound moral and intellectual vision that grows out of unprecedented real-world experience, The End of Poverty is a road map to a safer, more prosperous future for the world. (Penguin)

 

 

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Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of the New York Times  bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents , Joseph E. Stiglitz here joins with fellow economist Andrew Charlton to offer a challenging and controversial argument about how globalization can actually help Third World countries to develop and prosper.
In Fair Trade For All , Stiglitz and Charlton address one of the key issues facing world leaders today--how can the poorer countries of the world be helped to help themselves through freer, fairer trade? To answer this question, the authors put forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the poorest countries. Their approach is designed to open up markets in the interests of all nations and not just the most powerful economies, to ensure that trade promotes development, and to minimize the costs of adjustments. Beginning with a brief history of the World Trade Organization and its agreements, the authors explore the issues and events which led to the failure of 2003 Cancun summit and the obstacles that face the successful completion of the Doha Round of negotiations. Finally they spell out the reforms and principles upon which a successful agreement must be based. (Oxford University Press)

 

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Richard Nelson

This volume mounts a full-blown attack on the standard neo-classical theory of economic growth, which Richard Nelson sees as hopelessly inadequate to explain the phenomenon of economic growth. He presents an alternative theory which highlights that economic growth driven by technological advance involves disequilibrium in a fundamental and continuing way. Nelson also argues that a theory of economic growth driven by technological advance must recognize a range of institutions, such as universities, public laboratories, and government agencies, in addition to business firms and markets. He further argues that growth theories that focus on an aggregate measure of growth, such as GNP per capita, are blind to what is going on beneath the aggregate, where differing rates of advance in different sectors, and the birth and death of industries are an essential part of the growth process. The broad theory of economic growth Nelson presents sees the process as involving the co-evolution of technologies, institutions, and industry structure. (Harvard University Press)

 

 

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R. Glenn Hubbard, John F. Cogan, Daniel P. Kessler

America's health-care system is the envy of the world, but it faces serious challenges. The costs of care are rising rapidly, the number of uninsured Americans is at an all-time high, and public dissatisfaction is steadily increasing. How can we preserve the strengths of our current system while correcting its weaknesses? Three of America's leading health-care scholars answer that question in Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise.

Poorly conceived federal tax policies, insurance regulations, and barriers to entry have distorted health-care markets and inhibited competition. John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel P. Kessler propose five key policies to build a better health-care system: (1) health-care tax reform, (2) insurance reform, (3) improvement of health-care information, (4) control of anticompetitive behavior, and (5) malpractice system reform.

Together, these changes would harness the power of markets to deliver better health care to Americans. These reforms would strengthen consumers' ability to be cost- and value-conscious shoppers, while promoting quality and innovation in health care, pharmaceuticals, and medical technology. And, by cutting the cost of care by $60 billion per year, these reforms would make health insurance affordable for at least 6 million--and perhaps as many as 20 million--uninsured Americans. (AEI Press)

 

 

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Ed. Patrick Bolton and Howard Rosenthal

Access to credit is an important means of providing people with the opportunity to make a better life for themselves. Loans are essential for most people who want to purchase a home, start a business, pay for college, or weather a spell of unemployment. Yet many people in poor and minority communities—regardless of their creditworthiness—find credit hard to come by, making the climb out of poverty extremely difficult. How dire are the lending markets in these communities and what can be done to improve access to credit for disadvantaged groups? In Credit Markets for the Poor, editors Patrick Bolton and Howard Rosenthal and an expert team of economists, political scientists, and legal and business scholars tackle these questions with shrewd analysis and a wealth of empirical data.

 
With clarity and insightful analysis, Credit Markets for the Poor demonstrates how weak credit markets are impeding the social and economic mobility of the needy. By detailing the many disadvantages that impoverished people face when seeking to borrow, this important new volume highlights a significant national problem and offers solutions for the future. (Russell Sage Foundation Publications)

 

 

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John Kay

Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why does a farmer in Sweden have a higher standard of living than a farmer in South Africa? Why does a schoolteacher in Switzerland earn more than one in Chicago? According to leading economic theorist John Kay, economic markets are key to the wealth or poverty of the world's nations. In Culture and Prosperity, Kay explores why market economies outperform socialist or centrally directed markets -- and why the imposition of market institutions often fails. His search for the truth about markets takes him from the shores of Lake Zurich to the streets of Mumbai, through theories of evolutionary psychology and moral philosophy to the flower market at San Remo and Christie's salesroom in New York.

Witty, engaging, and grounded in cutting-edge economic theory, Culture and Prosperity is essential for understanding the state of the world today. (Harper Paperbacks)

 

 

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Robert Shiller

The first edition of this book was a broad study, drawing on a wide range of published research and historical evidence, of the enormous stock market boom that started around 1982 and picked up incredible speed after 1995. Although it took as its specific starting point this ongoing boom, it placed it in the context of stock market booms generally, and it also made concrete suggestions regarding policy changes that should be initiated in response to this and other such booms. The book argued that the boom represents a speculative bubble, not grounded in sensible economic fundamentals.   Part one of the book considered structural factors behind the boom. A list of twelve precipitating factors that appear to be its ultimate causes was given. Amplification mechanisms, naturally-occurring Ponzi processes, that enlarge the effects of these precipitating factors, were described. Part Two discussed cultural factors, the effects of the news media, and of "new era" economic thinking. Part Three discussed psychological factors, psychological anchors for the market and herd behavior. Part Four discussed attempts to rationalize exuberance: efficient markets theory and theories that investors are learning. Part Five presented policy options and actions that should be taken. Hardcover 296 pages, paperback 304 pages.

The second edition, 2005, added an analysis of the real estate bubble as similar to the stock market bubble that preceded it, and warned that "Significant further rises in these markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines. The bad outcome could be that eventual declines would result in a substantial increase in the rate of personal bankruptcies, which could lead to a secondary string of bankruptcies of financial institutions as well. Another long-run consequence could be a decline in consumer and business confidence, and another, possibly worldwide, recession." Thus, the second edition of this book was among the first to warn of the global financial crisis that began with the subprime mortgage debacle in 2007. (Princeton University Press)

 

 

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Guillermo A. Calvo

Since the mid-1990s, emerging market economies have been hit by dramatic highs and lows: lifted by large capital inflows, then plunged into chaos by constrained credit and out-of-control exchange rates. The conventional wisdom about such crises is strongly influenced by the experience of advanced economies. In Emerging Capital Markets in Turmoil, Guillermo Calvo examines these issues instead from the perspective of emerging market economies themselves, taking into account the limitations and vulnerabilities these economies confront. (The MIT Press)

 

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