Frontier Issues in Financial and Monetary Economics

Author: Kevin D. Dowd & K. E. Lewis
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-01-01
Features: The Frontiers of Financial and Monetary Economics is the 6th book in a series. This field has undergone profound changes in the last dozen years. The fundamental absence of reform and many financial crises have shown that this discipline will remain at the forefront of the policy agenda in the coming years. The editors of this volume deserve praise for their selection of topics and authors. As they mention in the Introduction, they deliberately avoided "lengthy discussions" on issues like money demand and avoided a sequential arrangement of monetary control. Instead, they chose topics that truly qualify as "frontier issues"—such as financial intermediation, the operations of financial markets, the impact of deregulation, and policy credibility. In doing so, they present us with a richly informative work that combines theory, empirical testing, and policy analysis. The scholars who contributed to this volume come from four different countries, providing an international perspective to the text, which, of course, enriches the work itself. Similarly, the authors should be commended for writing such excellent essays. Many of the issues discussed in the essays have recently appeared in leading journals and are quite complex. Nevertheless, we see a volume that is both in-depth and easy to understand. I enjoyed reading these essays and certainly learned something from the process, and I hope readers will feel the same way.