No ONE WOULD dream of designing the human anatomy by disconnecting the controls of the left and right sides of the body. Yet, for the most important economic controls in a modern economy, monetary and fiscal policies, economists today generally endorse the separation of powers as a way of optimizing noninflationary growth. What are the costs and benefits of coordination and independence in macr...

The tax-expenditure hypothesis posed by Milton Friedman emphasizes a positive causal relationship between government tax revenues and government expenditures. If citizens do not have a correct perception of the real tax burden and under-estimate the price of public goods and services, there is a negative causal relationship between tax revenues and government expenditures, which indicates exist...

Early life environmental manipulations have been shown to affect hippocampal-dependent learning, hippocampal volume and cerebral lateralization. In this study, we investigated the effects of neonatal stimulation on hippocampal volumetric asymmetry. Long-Evans hooded rats were exposed to a novel non-home environment 3 min daily for the first 3 weeks of life. Histological measures of the left and...

Though fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that pro-cyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in eight federations, showing that own-source taxes are highly pro-cyclical and contra...

Introduction 1. The long-run historical record 2. International perspective: the role of growth and fiscal policy 3. Other reasons for the decline in saving 3.1 Credit and insurance markets 3.2 Social security 3.3 Demographic factors 4. Do micro data help us to understand the decline in saving?

This paper uses a model with a continuum of equilibrium steady state unemployment rates to explore the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The existence of multiple steady state equilibria is explained by the presence of search and recruiting costs. I use the model to explain the current financial crisis as a shift to a high unemployment equilibrium, induced by the self-fulfilling beliefs of market...

It is an honor and privilege to address you as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. For more than 100 years, this organization has represented the best of physician-scientists. Since it is now 2012, there is the possibility that this could be the last ASCI presidential address. But we will assume the Mayans miscalculated and that we should look to the future. With the A...

In recent decades political and economic interest has focused on a phenomenon known as the ‘growth of government’, a euphemism for rising public expenditure. Studies that have focused on the process are broadly classified into three distinct areas those that highlight the phenomenon (Saunders and Klau, 1985); those that identify the contributory factors (Henrekson, 1990) and those that embrace ...