Perry G. Mehrling is professor of economics at Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He was professor of economics at Barnard College in New York City for 30 years. There, he taught courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and the financial dimensions of the U.S. retirement, health, and education systems. His most recent book is The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011). His best-known book Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005, 2012) has recently been released in a revised paperback edition. Currently, Prof. Mehrling directs the educational initiatives of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, one of which is his course Economics of Money and Banking, available on Coursera at www.coursera.org/course/money.
Perry G. Mehrling
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Independence vs. Accountability in the Evolution of the Fed
Peter Conti Brown’s new book explores and debunks a powerful meme shaping public understanding of the role of the Fed
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The Survival of the Riskiest
Financial fragility does not fall from the sky. That’s why treating risk as if it comes from exogenous shocks can’t capture the reality of financial markets.
Human Capital in the Industrial Revolution
Did the industrial revolution increase the relative demand for skilled labor, or decrease it?
How Expectations Interact to Create Bubbles
How do economists make their models work? By assuming that investors have rational expectations and that every market participant is alike. However, things quickly get messy once economists start to acknowledge that people are different, interact with each other, and change heuristic forecasting strategies based on recent performance.
The Corn Laws: Seeing through the Eyes of Ricardo and Malthus
The British Corn Returns data provided the empirical basis for the fierce debate around the introduction and repeal of the 19th century British Corn Laws. Contemporary readers, like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, followed them as closely as stock market prices of today. Much of 19th century political economy rested on contemporaries’ interpretations of this data.