Review

Workers present employers with a range of tricky problems. They can be crooked, subversive, surly, or indolent, even if they are paid on time. The authors explore economists’ main theories of how compensation is used to address employee motivation and how these models help to explain puzzling features of labor markets.

Economists have traditionally been skeptical of the value of technical analysis, the use of past price behavior to guide trading decisions in asset markets. Instead, they have relied on the logic of the efficient market hypothesis.

Our perspective on the U.S. economy’s recent performance has been challenged recently by changes in the methodology used to adjust the National Income and Product Accounts for inflation. The author surveys the changes embodied in the revised data, examining the question of whether or not the revisions alter our view of the overall pattern of economic fluctuations known collectively as the business cycle.

Proponents of an aggregation theoretic approach to money demand argue that simple-sum measures do not capture the theoretical notion of money, especially for broad monetary aggregates. European monetary aggregation, which uses indices for monetary services, seems attractive because these indices can account for the imperfect substitutability between different currencies.