J Bradford De Long
Biographic Data
| ID | 1454857 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Bradford De Long |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Bradford |
| FAMILY NAME | De Long |
| SIGNATURE | DE LONG J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | United States Department of Veterans Affairs |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1958 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The time-lagged effect of noise exposure on noise annoyance: The role of temporal, spatial and social contexts
A Symposium on the North American Economy
T he North American economy in 1999 was made up of 395 million people, 193 million workers, and $10.3 trillion of annual GDP. According to the OECD, in the U.S. economy, 269 million people and 139 million workers produced $9190 billion in GDP in 1999. The 30 million people and the 16 million workers of Canada produced $624 billion in GDP. The 96 million people and 38 million workers of Mexico produced $475 billion in GDP. This continental economy…
Understanding America's Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism: Politics, the Depression, and the Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking
Reflections on Economics at the Turn of the Millennium
To commemorate the new millennium and 50 issues of JEP, we have commissioned a series of essays in three broad areas. The first set of papers in this issue look back at key developments in the economy and economic thinking. In a second group of articles, we asked for predictions about the future of the subject of economics. Finally, in a third group of articles, we encouraged authors to make predictions about future developments in the economy
The Triumph of Monetarism
The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. But what has happened to monetarism at the end of the 20th century? The short answer is that much of this current of thought is still there, but its insights pass under another name. We may not a…
Introduction to the Symposium on Business Cycles
N early every long economic expansion in the United States generates intellectual currents claiming that the boom-bust business cycle is over, that there is a “new economy.” The expansion of the 1920s led economists to hope that the new Federal Reserve had learned how to stabilize output— that the decade truly had seen a “New Era”—and to Irving Fisher’s claim on the eve of the 1929 crash that stock prices had reached a “permanent and high plateau…
Unemployment in America: Rejoinder to Vedder and Gallaway
In their Out of Work: Government and Unemployment in Twentieth Century America, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway contend that government intervention in American labor markets has caused unemployment by raising the real price of labor. In my critique of the book, I allowed that while this might sometimes be the case, it is not as important as Vedder and Gallaway claim. Their Reply does not succeed in vindicating their argument, because their wa…
It doesn't work
Vedder and Gallaway are mistaken in their attempted demonstration that government policies to raise real wages have been the source of most or all U.S. unemployment in the twentieth century. Their case depends on a presumed correlation between high unemployment and high real wages that has not existed since World War II, and on a naive confusion between correlation and causation: just because real wages and unemployment were both relatively high …
Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946
The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)--and served as a convenient marker of the government's acceptance of the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. The willingness of post-WWII governments to let automatic stabilizers function in recessions may well have moderated the post-WWII business cycle. The CEA has also served as an advocate of allocative efficiency in economic policy. Its relative success can be prim…
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
Productivity Growth and Machinery Investment: A Long-Run Look, 1870–1980
Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is t…
Equipment Investment and Economic Growth
Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over 1960–1985 each extra percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of one third of a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than found between growth and any of the other components of investment. A variety of considera…
The stock market bubble of 1929: Evidence from clsoed-end mutual funds
Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental” values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that th…
Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets
The authors present a simple overlapping generations model of an asset market in which irrational noise traders with erroneous stochastic beliefs both affect prices and earn higher expected returns. The unpredictability of noise traders' beliefs creates a risk in the price of the asset that deters rational arbitrageurs from aggressively betting against them. As a result, prices can diverge significantly from fundamental values even in the absence…
Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century
The bull and bear markets of this century have suggested that large stock market swings reflect irrational “fads and fashions.” We argue instead that investors perceived shifts in the long-run rate of future growth and that stock prices are sufficiently sensitive to expectations about the future that these perceived shifts plausibly generated the swings of the twentieth century. We document that analysts often viewed as “smart money” assessed fun…
Real Business Cycles
In this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption-production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles. Our explanation is entirely consistent with (i) rational expectations, (ii) complete current information, (iii) stable preferences, (iv) no technological change, (v) no long-lived commodities, (vi) no frictions or adjustment …
Food versus Water Reinforcement for Rats Deprived of Both
The effectiveness of food and of water as reinforcers was compared using 2 groups of 4 rats each that were deprived of both food and water. Running time to water was significantly greater than that to food ( P < .001). When all rats were reinforced with food, this difference in running times disappeared. As running time to water increased as a function of days of training ( P < .05), it was suggested that performance for water reflected extinctio…
Discriminative, Informational, Eliciting, and Contiguous Stimuli as Secondary Reinforcers for Human Subjects
128 humans (8 groups of 16 Ss) were used to test the efficacy of operations proposed for establishing a neutral stimulus (S N ) as a secondary reinforcer (S r ) by the discriminative, eliciting, informational and contiguous stimulus hypotheses. Phase I was a factorial design composed of 2 levels of consistency of pairing S N with verbal reinforcement (experimental vs control Ss) and 4 treatments (S N presented as a discriminative stimulus vs as a…
Secondary Reinforcement as a Function of the Interstimulus Interval: A Confutation
After bar training, 3 of 5 groups of 9 rats received runway discrimination training presenting a buzzer as the discriminative stimulus: I—in the start box; II—in the alley; III—as the goal box was entered. For Group IV the buzzer sounded after the reward was seized and Group V was not exposed to the buzzer. After Group I attained the criterion of discrimination, Ss were tested in the Skinner box with bar depression sounding the buzzer for .75 sec…
Resistance to Extinction under Variable Conditions as a Function of the Intertrial Interval
72 rats were given 8 acquisition trials under constant acquisition conditions and then extinguished under constant (C), variable (V) and interpolated rest (R) conditions. The V and R conditions did not differ significantly from one another but both differed significantly from the C condition. It was concluded that the rate of extinction is inhibited when extinction trials are widely distributed, regardless of whether the intertrial interval is fi…
Elicitation and Reinforcement as Separate Stimulus Functions
3 groups of 16 rats were trained to discriminate between two distinctive end boxes. Two groups discriminated between goal boxes while the third group discriminated between start boxes. These stimuli were then tested as secondary reinforcers in a T-maze. The groups trained to discriminate between goal boxes showed a statistically significant preference for the goal box previously associated with reinforcement. The third group showed no preference.…
Relation of Differential Reinforcement Histories to Selective Learning and Differential Consummatory Activity
The purpose was to study the relation of past history of reinforcement to selective learning and rate of reinforcement. Prior research suggested that there is a preference for a slow rare of reinforcement when amount is held constant; however, rate of reinforcement has been confounded with consummatory activity. In this study, amount of consummatory activity and amount of reward were held constant while varying the rate of reinforcement. The resu…
Affect, Fantasy, and Figure-Ground Organization
The effects of punishment (electric shock) on perceptual learning
Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets
The authors present a simple overlapping generations model of an asset market in which irrational noise traders with erroneous stochastic beliefs both affect prices and earn higher expected returns. The unpredictability of noise traders' beliefs creates a risk in the price of the asset that deters rational arbitrageurs from aggressively betting against them. As a result, prices can diverge significantly from fundamental values even in the absence…
Real Business Cycles
In this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption-production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles. Our explanation is entirely consistent with (i) rational expectations, (ii) complete current information, (iii) stable preferences, (iv) no technological change, (v) no long-lived commodities, (vi) no frictions or adjustment …
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
The Triumph of Monetarism
The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. But what has happened to monetarism at the end of the 20th century? The short answer is that much of this current of thought is still there, but its insights pass under another name. We may not a…
Productivity Growth and Machinery Investment: A Long-Run Look, 1870–1980
Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is t…
The stock market bubble of 1929: Evidence from clsoed-end mutual funds
Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental” values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that th…
It doesn't work
Vedder and Gallaway are mistaken in their attempted demonstration that government policies to raise real wages have been the source of most or all U.S. unemployment in the twentieth century. Their case depends on a presumed correlation between high unemployment and high real wages that has not existed since World War II, and on a naive confusion between correlation and causation: just because real wages and unemployment were both relatively high …
Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946
The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)--and served as a convenient marker of the government's acceptance of the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. The willingness of post-WWII governments to let automatic stabilizers function in recessions may well have moderated the post-WWII business cycle. The CEA has also served as an advocate of allocative efficiency in economic policy. Its relative success can be prim…
Understanding America's Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism: Politics, the Depression, and the Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking
Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century
The bull and bear markets of this century have suggested that large stock market swings reflect irrational “fads and fashions.” We argue instead that investors perceived shifts in the long-run rate of future growth and that stock prices are sufficiently sensitive to expectations about the future that these perceived shifts plausibly generated the swings of the twentieth century. We document that analysts often viewed as “smart money” assessed fun…
The effects of punishment (electric shock) on perceptual learning
Affect, Fantasy, and Figure-Ground Organization
Relation of Differential Reinforcement Histories to Selective Learning and Differential Consummatory Activity
The purpose was to study the relation of past history of reinforcement to selective learning and rate of reinforcement. Prior research suggested that there is a preference for a slow rare of reinforcement when amount is held constant; however, rate of reinforcement has been confounded with consummatory activity. In this study, amount of consummatory activity and amount of reward were held constant while varying the rate of reinforcement. The resu…
Resistance to Extinction under Variable Conditions as a Function of the Intertrial Interval
72 rats were given 8 acquisition trials under constant acquisition conditions and then extinguished under constant (C), variable (V) and interpolated rest (R) conditions. The V and R conditions did not differ significantly from one another but both differed significantly from the C condition. It was concluded that the rate of extinction is inhibited when extinction trials are widely distributed, regardless of whether the intertrial interval is fi…
Elicitation and Reinforcement as Separate Stimulus Functions
3 groups of 16 rats were trained to discriminate between two distinctive end boxes. Two groups discriminated between goal boxes while the third group discriminated between start boxes. These stimuli were then tested as secondary reinforcers in a T-maze. The groups trained to discriminate between goal boxes showed a statistically significant preference for the goal box previously associated with reinforcement. The third group showed no preference.…
Secondary Reinforcement as a Function of the Interstimulus Interval: A Confutation
After bar training, 3 of 5 groups of 9 rats received runway discrimination training presenting a buzzer as the discriminative stimulus: I—in the start box; II—in the alley; III—as the goal box was entered. For Group IV the buzzer sounded after the reward was seized and Group V was not exposed to the buzzer. After Group I attained the criterion of discrimination, Ss were tested in the Skinner box with bar depression sounding the buzzer for .75 sec…
Discriminative, Informational, Eliciting, and Contiguous Stimuli as Secondary Reinforcers for Human Subjects
128 humans (8 groups of 16 Ss) were used to test the efficacy of operations proposed for establishing a neutral stimulus (S N ) as a secondary reinforcer (S r ) by the discriminative, eliciting, informational and contiguous stimulus hypotheses. Phase I was a factorial design composed of 2 levels of consistency of pairing S N with verbal reinforcement (experimental vs control Ss) and 4 treatments (S N presented as a discriminative stimulus vs as a…
Food versus Water Reinforcement for Rats Deprived of Both
The effectiveness of food and of water as reinforcers was compared using 2 groups of 4 rats each that were deprived of both food and water. Running time to water was significantly greater than that to food ( P < .001). When all rats were reinforced with food, this difference in running times disappeared. As running time to water increased as a function of days of training ( P < .05), it was suggested that performance for water reflected extinctio…
Real Business Cycles
In this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption-production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles. Our explanation is entirely consistent with (i) rational expectations, (ii) complete current information, (iii) stable preferences, (iv) no technological change, (v) no long-lived commodities, (vi) no frictions or adjustment …
Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets
The authors present a simple overlapping generations model of an asset market in which irrational noise traders with erroneous stochastic beliefs both affect prices and earn higher expected returns. The unpredictability of noise traders' beliefs creates a risk in the price of the asset that deters rational arbitrageurs from aggressively betting against them. As a result, prices can diverge significantly from fundamental values even in the absence…
Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century
The bull and bear markets of this century have suggested that large stock market swings reflect irrational “fads and fashions.” We argue instead that investors perceived shifts in the long-run rate of future growth and that stock prices are sufficiently sensitive to expectations about the future that these perceived shifts plausibly generated the swings of the twentieth century. We document that analysts often viewed as “smart money” assessed fun…
Equipment Investment and Economic Growth
Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over 1960–1985 each extra percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of one third of a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than found between growth and any of the other components of investment. A variety of considera…
The stock market bubble of 1929: Evidence from clsoed-end mutual funds
Economists directly observe warranted “fundamental” values in only a few cases. One is that of closed-end mutual funds: their fundamental value is simply the current market value of the securities that make up their portfolios. We use the difference between prices and net asset values of closed-end mutual funds at the end of the 1920s to estimate the degree to which the stock market was overvalued on the eve of the 1929 crash. We conclude that th…
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
Productivity Growth and Machinery Investment: A Long-Run Look, 1870–1980
Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is t…
Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946
The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)--and served as a convenient marker of the government's acceptance of the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. The willingness of post-WWII governments to let automatic stabilizers function in recessions may well have moderated the post-WWII business cycle. The CEA has also served as an advocate of allocative efficiency in economic policy. Its relative success can be prim…
Unemployment in America: Rejoinder to Vedder and Gallaway
In their Out of Work: Government and Unemployment in Twentieth Century America, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway contend that government intervention in American labor markets has caused unemployment by raising the real price of labor. In my critique of the book, I allowed that while this might sometimes be the case, it is not as important as Vedder and Gallaway claim. Their Reply does not succeed in vindicating their argument, because their wa…
It doesn't work
Vedder and Gallaway are mistaken in their attempted demonstration that government policies to raise real wages have been the source of most or all U.S. unemployment in the twentieth century. Their case depends on a presumed correlation between high unemployment and high real wages that has not existed since World War II, and on a naive confusion between correlation and causation: just because real wages and unemployment were both relatively high …
Introduction to the Symposium on Business Cycles
N early every long economic expansion in the United States generates intellectual currents claiming that the boom-bust business cycle is over, that there is a “new economy.” The expansion of the 1920s led economists to hope that the new Federal Reserve had learned how to stabilize output— that the decade truly had seen a “New Era”—and to Irving Fisher’s claim on the eve of the 1929 crash that stock prices had reached a “permanent and high plateau…
Reflections on Economics at the Turn of the Millennium
To commemorate the new millennium and 50 issues of JEP, we have commissioned a series of essays in three broad areas. The first set of papers in this issue look back at key developments in the economy and economic thinking. In a second group of articles, we asked for predictions about the future of the subject of economics. Finally, in a third group of articles, we encouraged authors to make predictions about future developments in the economy
The Triumph of Monetarism
The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. But what has happened to monetarism at the end of the 20th century? The short answer is that much of this current of thought is still there, but its insights pass under another name. We may not a…
A Symposium on the North American Economy
T he North American economy in 1999 was made up of 395 million people, 193 million workers, and $10.3 trillion of annual GDP. According to the OECD, in the U.S. economy, 269 million people and 139 million workers produced $9190 billion in GDP in 1999. The 30 million people and the 16 million workers of Canada produced $624 billion in GDP. The 96 million people and 38 million workers of Mexico produced $475 billion in GDP. This continental economy…
Understanding America's Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism: Politics, the Depression, and the Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking
The time-lagged effect of noise exposure on noise annoyance: The role of temporal, spatial and social contexts
Economics (15 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Audiology (6 works) · Keynesian economics (6 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Monetary economics (6 works) · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact (6 works)