Books about Rigidities from Amazon.com

The years since World War II have seen rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions Leading political economist Mancur Olson offers a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune and then tests his theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts on the world..
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At the beginning of the 1990s, a massive speculative asset bubble burst in Japan, leaving the nation's banks with an enormous burden of nonperforming loans. Banking crises have become increasingly common across the globe, but what was distinctive about the Japanese case was the unusually long delay before the government intervened to aggressively address the bad debt problem. The postponed response by Japanese authorities to the nation's banking crisis has had enormous political and economic consequences for Japan as well as for the rest of the world. This book helps us understand the nature of the Japanese government's response while also providing important insights into why Japan seems unable to get its financial system back on track 13 years later.

The book focuses on the role of policy networks in Japanese finance, showing with nuance and detail how Japan's Finance Ministry was embedded within the political and financial worlds, how that structure was similar to and different from that of its counterparts in other countries, and how the distinctive nature of Japan's institutional arrangements affected the capacity of the government to manage change.

The book focuses in particular on two intervening variables that bring about a functional shift in the Finance Ministry's policy networks: domestic political change under coalition government and a dramatic rise in information requirements for effective regulation. As a result of change in these variables, networks that once enhanced policymaking capacity in Japanese finance became "paralyzing networks"--with disastrous results.

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Although rigidity has been studied since the time of Lagrange (1788) and Maxwell (1864), it is only in the last twenty-five years that it has begun to find applications in the basic sciences The modern era starts with Laman (1970), who made the subject rigorous in two dimensions, followed by the development of computer algorithms that can test over a million sites in seconds and find the rigid regions, and the associated pivots, leading to many applications. This workshop was organized to bring together leading researchers studying the underlying theory, and to explore the various areas of science where applications of these ideas are being implemented..
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Inverse Galois Theory is concerned with the question of which finite groups occur as Galois Groups over a given field. In particular, this includes the question of the structure and the representations of the absolute Galois group of K and also the question about its finite epimorphic images, the so-called inverse problem of Galois theory. In all these areas important progress was made in the last few years. The aim of the book is to give a consistent and reasonably complete survey of these results, with the main emphasis on the rigidity method and its applications. Among others the monograph presents the most successful known existence theorems and construction methods for Galois extensions and solutions of embedding problems combined with a collection of the existing Galois realizations..
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In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true..
Price: $41.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in seven parts that cover costly price adjustment, staggering of wages and prices, imperfect competition, coordination failures, and the markets for labor, credit, and goods. An overall introduction, brief introductions to each of the parts, and a bibliography of additional papers in the field round out this valuable collection.

Volume 1 focuses on how friction in price setting at the microeconomic level leads to nominal rigidity at the macroeconomic level, and on the macroeconomic consequences of imperfect competition, including aggregate demand externalities and multipliers. Volume 2 addresses recent research on non-Walrasian features of the labor, credit, and goods markets.

N. Gregory Mankiw is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. David Romer is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Contributors: George A Akerlof. Costas Azariadis. Laurence Ball. Ben S. Bernanke. Mark Bits. Olivier J. Blanchard. Alan S. Blinder. John Bryant. Andrew S. Caplin. Dennis W. Carlton. Stephen G. Cecchetti. Russell Cooper. Peter A. Diamond. Gary Fethke. Stanley Fischer. Robert E. Hall. Oliver Hart. Andrew John. Nobuhiro Kiyotaki. Alan B. Krueger. David M. Lilien. Ian M. McDonald. N. David Mankiw. Arthur M. Okun. Andres Policano. David Romer. Julio J. Rotemberg. Garth Saloner. Carl Shapiro. Andrei Shleifer. Robert M. Solow. Daniel F. Spulber. Joseph E. Stiglitz. Lawrence H. Summers. John Taylor. Andrew Weiss. Michael Woodford. Janet L. Yellen..
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Many European countries have experienced a significant increase of unemployment in recent years. This publication reviews several theoretical models that try to explain this phenomenon. Predominantly, these models claim a link between the poor performance of European labor markets and the high level of market regulation. Commonly referred to as the Eurosclerosis debate, prominent approaches consider insider-outsider relationships, search-models, and the influence of hiring and firing costs on equilibrium employment. The publication presents empirical evidence of each model and studies the relevance of the identified rigidities as a determinant of high unemployment in Europe. Furthermore, a case study analyzes high unemployment rates in Germany and critically discusses recent reform efforts. This study provides a sober and unprejudiced analysis of the European labor market and its weaknesses. According to the author's convincing argument, substantial efforts are still needed in the areas of institutional reform and incentive-based labor market policy. The book is a must read for political and economic decision-makers. Prof. Dr. Klaus F. Zimmermann; Director; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Germany. A superb piece, well documented, comprehensive and with many useful insights and policy recommendations, on one of the most important topics in Europe. A must for all those interested in unemployment and labor market issues. Javier Santiso; Acting Director and Chief Economist; OECD Development Centre, France..
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This volume is an offspring of the special semester "Ergodic Theory, Geometric Rigidity and Number Theory" held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK, from January until July, 2000. Some of the major recent developments in rigidity theory, geometric group theory, flows on homogeneous spaces and Teichmüller spaces, quasi-conformal geometry, negatively curved groups and spaces, Diophantine approximation, and bounded cohomology are presented here. The authors have given special consideration to making the papers accessible to graduate students, with most of the contributions starting at an introductory level and building up to presenting topics at the forefront in this active field of research. The volume contains surveys and original unpublished results as well, and is an invaluable source also for the experienced researcher. .
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