The Editor, Advisory Board, and Associate Editors of Macroeconomic Dynamics extend their heartiest congratulations to Finn Kydland and Ed Prescott as the co-recipients of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Finn has served on the MD advisory board since the journal's founding, and his advice during the journal's formative years has helped make MD the success it is today.

Much of the work which the Nobel Committee cited as the basis for awarding the prize to Finn and Ed was done while Ed was a junior faculty member at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now the Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University, and while Finn was earning his doctorate at GSIA. As a result, the Board thought it would be appropriate to include a brief explication of the significance of Finn and Ed's work written by one of Finn's current Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon, Espen Henriksen. Espen is currently working to complete his thesis under Finn's supervision.

This paper presents a computable general equilibrium model of endogenous (stochastic) growth and cycles that can account for two key features of the aggregate data: balanced growth in the long run and business cycles in the short run. The model is built on Schumpeter's idea that economic development is the consequence of the periodic arrival of innovations. There is growth because each subsequent innovation leads to a permanent improvement in the production technology. Cycles arise because innovations trigger a reallocation of resources between production and R&D. The quantitative implications of the calibrated version of our model are very similar to those of Kydland and Prescott's (1982) model. Moreover, under some parameterizations, our model can correct two shortcomings of RBC models: It can account for the persistence in output growth and the asymmetry of growth within the business cycle.

This paper analyzes the global dynamics of a convex overlapping generations model with land. It derives a competitive equilibrium such that for every given initial level of capital per capita, the economy has a unique perfect-foresight equilibrium. It shows that the existence and uniqueness of this perfect-foresight equilibrium is robust to the presence of multiple steady-state levels of capital per capita. Furthermore, it shows that this model can provide an interesting insight into the economics of land taxation. Specifically, it shows that changes in the rate of land taxation may cause a bifurcation in the model's dynamical system and so may allow an economy with a low initial capital stock to break out of a “poverty trap” steady-state equilibrium.

This paper explores multiasset market dynamics. We consider a limited number of markets on which two types of agents are active. Fundamentalists specialize in a certain market to gather expertise. Chartists may switch between markets since they use simple extrapolative methods. Specifically, chartists prefer markets that display price trends but that are not too misaligned. The interaction between the traders causes complex dynamics. Even in the absence of random shocks, our artificial markets mimic the behavior of actual asset markets closely. Our model also offers reasons for the high degree of comovements in stock prices observed empirically.

This paper studies the role played by differences in risk aversion in affecting the long-run distribution of wealth across agents in the context of an endowment economy. The economy is populated by two types of Epstein-Zin agents who differ only in their attitudes toward risk. By choosing riskier portfolio strategies, less-risk-averse agents enjoy returns on their investments characterized by a higher mean and a higher variance than the ones enjoyed by more-risk-averse agents. The former effect tends to make less-risk-averse agents wealthier over time, whereas the latter tends to make them poorer. The paper shows that, contrary to the results obtained using standard expected utility preferences, for some parameter values the long-run distribution of wealth is dominated by more-risk-averse agents.

This paper explores the possible real effects of inflation within a two-sector neoclassical growth model of the Heckscher–Ohlin type with a cash-in-advance constraint on the purchases of consumption goods. The main findings are that the relative prices of both factors and of both goods, which are linked via a Stolper–Samuelson relation, depend only on the rate of time preference, not on any monetary variable; that the steady-state level of total capital can be influenced by inflation if the capital intensities and the cash requirements in both sectors differ, leading to Tobin effects or reversed Tobin effects; and that higher inflation unambiguously reduces total labor supply and leads to a reversed Tobin effect in most cases if the labor/leisure choice is endogenized.

A recent article in The Economist magazine divided economists into “poets” and “plumbers,” the former articulating radical new visions of the field and the latter patiently installing the infrastructure needed to implement those visions. Bob Shiller is the rare economist who is both poet and plumber. Not only that, he is also entrepreneur and pundit. His work has fundamentally changed the theory, econometrics, practice, and popular understanding of finance.

Starting in the late 1970's, Bob boldly challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of financial economics. He showed that financial asset prices often deviate substantially from the levels predicted by simple efficient-markets models, and he developed new empirical methods to measure these price deviations. In the early 1980's, Bob went on to argue that economists need a much more detailed understanding of investor psychology if they are to understand asset price movements. He pioneered the emerging field of behavioral economics and its most successful branch, behavioral finance. At the end of the century, Bob articulated his vision of finance in a wildly successful popular book, Irrational Exuberance. He became so well known that TIAA-CREF asked him to appear in a series of full-page advertisements in the popular press.

Although Bob does not believe that investors use financial markets in a perfectly rational manner, he does believe that these markets offer great possibilities to improve the human condition. His recent work asks how existing financial markets can be used, and new financial markets can be designed, to improve the sharing of risks across groups of people in different regions, countries, and occupations. He has explored risk-sharing possibilities not only in journal articles, but also in business ventures and a 2003 book, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century.

It was a great privilege for me to interview Bob Shiller. Bob's arrival at Yale when I was a Ph.D. student there set the course of my career as an economist. Bob reinvigorated the Yale tradition of macroeconomics, with its emphasis on the central role of financial markets in the macroeconomy and its idealism about the possibility of improving macroeconomic outcomes. First as a thesis adviser, then as a coauthor, mentor, and friend, Bob showed me how to contribute to this tradition.

The interview took place at the 2003 annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Associations in Washington, D.C. We met in a hotel suite, ate a room service meal, and had the enjoyable conversation that is reproduced below.