A pioneer in bringing mathematical methods into everyday use in economics, Lloyd A. Metzler is well known for his adroit use of formal tools and exceptionally readable prose style which have provided a generation of economists with clear solutions to difficult analytical problems. The papers collected in this volume, including four previously unpublished, retain a freshness and clarity that is readily recognized by today's students of economics.

Over the years Mr. Metzler's contributions to economic theory have ranged widely over the fields of international economics, macroeconomic theory, business fluctuations, and the mathematical theory of general equilibrium. Most notably, he carries Lord Keynes's theories further, working out the essential properties of the foreign-trade multiplier. His discussions of tariff repercussions, capital transfers, and stability conditions in the foreign-exchange market are of vital importance to today's dramatic efforts to achieve economic stability throughout the world.

Collected Papers, enhanced by many tables and figures and clearly indicative of the author's far-reaching economic mind, is organized into four sections: The Theory of International Trade; Money, Interest, and Prices; Business Cycles and Economic Fluctuations; and Mathematical Economics and Statistics. Two of the articles in this volume were part of the author's doctoral thesis which was awarded the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard University.

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century.

John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes’s lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins.

Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes’s intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand.

Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes’s message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose.

Fleshing out Keynes’s intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

Three eminent economists provide in this book a rigorous, self-contained treatment of modern economic dynamics. Nancy L. Stokey, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott develop the basic methods of recursive analysis and emphasize the many areas where they can usefully be applied.

After presenting an overview of the recursive approach, the authors develop economic applications for deterministic dynamic programming and the stability theory of first-order difference equations. They then treat stochastic dynamic programming and the convergence theory of discrete-time Markov processes, illustrating each with additional economic applications. They also derive a strong law of large numbers for Markov processes. Finally, they present the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics and show how to apply the methods developed earlier to general equilibrium systems.

The authors go on to apply their methods to many areas of economics. Models of firm and industry investment, household consumption behavior, long-run growth, capital accumulation, job search, job matching, inventory behavior, asset pricing, and money demand are among those they use to show how predictions can be made about individual and social behavior. Researchers and graduate students in many areas of economics, both theoretical and applied, will find this book essential.

This solutions manual is a valuable companion volume to the classic textbook Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics by Nancy L. Stokey, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott. The exercises in the Stokey et al. book are integral to the text, and thus, a reader cannot fully appreciate the text without understanding the results developed in the exercises. This manual provides detailed answers to the central exercises in Recursive Methods.

The authors’ selection of exercises is designed to maximize the reader’s understanding of Recursive Methods. Solutions are presented to every question in the core chapters on recursive methods, as well as most questions from the chapters on mathematical background. Some questions from the chapters on applications of these techniques to economic models have been reserved so as to provide instructors with a crucial “test bank” of questions.

Efficient and lucid in approach, this manual will greatly enhance the value of Recursive Methods as a text for self-study.