Axel Leijonhufvud has made a unique contribution to the development of macroeconomic theory. This volume draws together his insightful essays dealing with the extremes of economic instability: great depressions, high inflation and the transition from socialism to a market economy. In several of the papers, Leijonhufvud brings a neo-institutionalist perspective to the problems of coordination in economic systems.The papers within Macroeconomic Instability and Coordination some of them already considered classics, deal with the questions that dominated Leijonhufvud's interest throughout his career as an economist: what are the limits to an economy's capacity to coordinate the activities of its members? How does the behavior of the system change under extreme conditions? In what ways does its performance depend upon the institutions that govern the market process? This book presents in one volume several of Axel Leijonhufvud's most important contributions to macroeconomic theory and monetary economics. It will be invaluable to monetary and financial economists as well as to historians of economic thought.

Robert W. Clower has had a profound effect on the theory and practice of economics. The distinguished group of contributors to this book celebrates his seminal contribution to economic methodology and theory by providing key accounts of important themes in the area of money, markets and method. The volume begins with a number of papers dealing with Robert Clower's work and his views on methodology. The contributors then discuss Keynes's General Theory and its relationship to conventional Keynesian macroeconomic theory as well as the origins of the General Theory itself, a subject that has been central to Clower's writings. The analysis is then expanded to concentrate on how institutions matter in thin markets. Finally, the authors analyse ways in which adaptive behaviour influences the stability of markets in the context of trading relationships, repeated games and retail stores.

Why do governments prefer to limit themselves to a specific inflation target? Specialists and senior officials of the European Central bank, the OECD and national central banks look beyond inflation targeting as the goal of monetary policy. Among the contributing, Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell surveys the history and prospects of the sovereignty of the state over money, while Michael Bordo and Lars Jonung use data of 14 industrialized countries to show relationships between fiscal and monetary regimes.

In the 1980s, several Latin American countries suffered through years of high inflation, as did Israel. Today, high inflations thwart reform and impede recovery in Russia, Ukraine, and most of the other former Soviet republics. This book examines the emergence of such inflation-prone monetary regimes, the financial predicaments besetting governments in high inflations, and the difficulties of devising policy strategies that can be sustained through disinflation to lasting stabilization. It discusses the manner in which these inflations cause the functioning of the market economy to deteriorate. High inflations interfere with information flows between agents and complicate economic calculations; they make the accounting measurement of economic results and the monitoring of principal-agent relationships more difficult; they undermine the basis for intertemporal contractual commitments, and cause many financial markets to disappear entirely. These high inflation phenomena challenge our understanding of monetary economics. Episodes of extreme monetary instability make us see the scope and limitations of current theory in clearer perspective. Theories of money and finance that introduce money only so as to determine the nominal scale of non-monetary general equilibrium will not explain the deterioration of economic performance characteristic of high inflations. The authors conclude this study with an exploration of the theoretical issues raised by the anomalous evidence from the high inflations.