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.

An article in Fortune a few years ago identified Robert Lucas as "the intellectual leader of the rational-expectations school." An academic colleague has called Lucas "the dominant figure in American macroeconomics." And another refers to this group of 14 essays, nearly all of which were first published during the 1970s, as the most influential contribution to macroeconomics in that decade.This volume includes: Real Wages, Employment, and Inflation (with Leonard A. Rapping); Unemployment in the Great Depression: Is there a Full Explanation? (with Leonard Rapping); Expectations and the Neutrality of Money; Econometric Testing of the Natural Rate Hypothesis; Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique; Some International Evidence on Output-Inflation Tradeoffs; Capacity, Overtime, and Empirical Production Function; Equilibrium Search and Unemployment (with Edward C. Prescott); An Equilibrium Model of the Business Cycle; Understanding Business Cycles; Unemployment Policy, Rules, Discretion, and the Role of the Economic Advisor a review of Towards Full Employment and Price Stability, A Report to the OECD by a Group of Independent Experts, by Paul McCracken et al.; and Methods and Problems in Business-Cycle Theory.

"Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice " was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Assumptions about how people form expectations for the future shape the properties of any dynamic economic model. To make economic decisions in an uncertain environment people must forecast such variables as future rates of inflation, tax rates, government subsidy schemes and regulations. The doctrine of rational expectations uses standard economic methods to explain how those expectations are formed.

This work collects the papers that have made significant contributions to formulating the idea of rational expectations. Most of the papers deal with the connections between observed economic behavior and the evaluation of alternative economic policies.

Robert E. Lucas, Jr., is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Thomas J. Sargent is professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota.

In this book the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas collects his writings on economic growth, from his seminal "On the Mechanics of Economic Development" to his previously unpublished 1997 Kuznets Lectures.

The chapters progress from a general theory of how growth could be sustained and why growth rates might differ in different countries, to a model of exceptional growth in certain countries in the twentieth century, to an account of the take-off of growth in the Industrial Revolution, and finally to a prediction about patterns of growth in this new century. The framework in all the chapters is a model with accumulation of both physical and human capital, with emphasis on the external benefits of human capital through diffusion of new knowledge or on-the-job learning, often stimulated by trade. The Kuznets Lectures consider the interaction of human capital growth and the demographic transition in the early stages of industrialization. In the final chapter, Lucas uses a diffusion model to illustrate the possibility that the vast intersociety income inequality created in the course of the Industrial Revolution may have already reached its peak, and that income differences will decline in this century.