Actions aimed at supporting deleveraging and balance-sheet repair - such as recognizing losses, writing down assets, and recapitalizing banks - carry longer-term benefits but short-term costs.
Whatever advantage Trump thinks he will gain by positioning the U.S. in opposition to its natural allies will be dwarfed by the losses.
The combination of a workable basic formula and the capacity to improve over time is what one hopes for in any aspect of society: business, government, the non-profit sector.
It is a wonderful and unexpected honor to receive the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Receiving this prize with Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof, whose work I have learned from and admired, makes it even more gratifying.
Next to my family, it seems clear to me that the educational institutions and the teachers from whom I had the privilege of learning were especially important.
We tend to think that employment is employment, and we don't ask the question: is this rewarding employment? Research establishes pretty clearly that typical notions of happiness - that more is better - really don't correspond to the way people think and feel.
China's continued growth and rising household income are creating opportunities for lower-income economies in low-cost manufacturing.
The research side of academic life is often viewed from the outside as a solo and, at times, lonely activity. In fact, it is quite the opposite: a communal activity in significant part where interaction and interchange generate ideas and critiques of them.
For physical goods, there are costs associated with logistics and lead times, owing to inventories and poor forecasts of the market. With digital capital-intensive technology, however, production will inevitably move toward the final market, wherever it is. This re-localization constitutes a major shift in the structure of global supply networks.
My father once said about being a parent that it is the only thing you do that requires a very long period of learning, and at about the time that you are becoming competent, you don't need the skills anymore. Notwithstanding this modest assessment of their parenting skills, they were wonderful parents.
During my Ph.D. program, I became interested in the informational structure of markets that turned into the work on signaling, which was the part of my early work that was recognized for the Nobel Prize, but it was not really a subject at the time.
Monetary policy should never have been expected to shift economies to a sustainably higher growth trajectory by itself.
Education is, in the end, about individual interactions and about learning.
Productivity gains are vital to long-term growth because they typically translate into higher incomes, in turn boosting demand. That process takes time, of course - especially if, say, the initial recipients of increased income already have a high savings rate.
I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.
Reforms aimed at increasing an economy's flexibility are always hard - and even more so at a time of weak growth - because they require eliminating protections for vested interests in the short term for the sake of greater long-term prosperity.
