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The article reviews the book "Trends and Cycles in the Commercial Paper Market," by Richard T. Selden.

The article reviews the book "The Commercial Paper Market," by Nevins D. Baxter.

In focusing upon the band/crawl proposals, The Burgenstock Papers makes a serious and important contribution to discussions of changing the international monetary system. The only viable alternative to a widened band and crawl (assuming flexible rates will not be adopted) is probably to have fixed exchange rates within major currency areas and flexible rates between them. Under this proposal, the Common Market countries would probably have fixed exchange rates between themselves, but a floating rate versus the dollar. There might also be a pound-based group, a yen-based group, and so on. Each country could then decide for itself whether to float its rate, or to which currency group to tie its rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a review of the book "Value, Capital and Growth: Papers in Honour of Sir John Hicks," edited by J.N. Wolfe.

This collection of papers results from a conference on Research in Income and Wealth, under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research, held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. The primary concern lies with the measurement and explanation of differences in the wealth and incomes of various entities. The definitions and procedures are unique and suggest the rather diverse framework that must accompany such an undertaking. The first two papers are devoted to the distribution of wealth, and the remaining four pertain for the most part to income. Comments are offered on each paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this compendium are arranged under five topical headings: program appraisal and management, manpower and education, income maintenance, health, and housing and the "quality of man's environment." The last phrase is a synonym for air and water pollution. With that addendum, the topical headings accurately convey the scope of the two volumes. As they suggest, the scope is extremely wide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to its preface, this book is the outgrowth of a symposium concerning methodology in finance and investments held at Rutgers University in May 1971. It consists of eleven separate papers, varying in length from 16 to 53 pages, and covering a variety of topics grouped into five categories. A good introduction sets forth the main points of each paper. As indicated by the editor, the primary objective of the book is to contribute to the "knowledge, awareness, or understanding of" (1) methodological foundations common to finance, investments, and other fields of inquiry; (2) the essential nature of the postulates of normative behavior in finance and investments; and (3) the continuing "explosion of knowledge about the structure of the finance world." After commenting briefly on each paper, we consider the relationship between the book's purpose and its contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the book "Trade, Balance of Payments, and Growth, Papers in International Economics in Honor of Charles P. Kindleberger," edited by J.N. Bhagwati and R.W. Jones.

Essays in International Economics contains eleven of Fleming's previously published papers, and two hitherto unpublished ones. Many of the papers will already be familiar to academic economists: several constitute classics in the field. The Essays are grouped into three categories: trade restrictions and welfare; international monetary reform; and balance of payments policy and the adjustment process. Despite the fact that the arrangement within each group is chronological, the three subjects also correspond closely to the chronological order in which various issues in international economics have emerged since World War II. Thus, the first three papers are concerned with ways in which welfare can be maximized when trade restrictions and exchange control must be accepted as givens. The first paper, "On Making the Best of Balance-of-Payments Restrictions," focusses upon ways in which one could approach optimality given that some currencies are "stronger" than others, and that quantitative restrictions must therefore result. As an early attempt to deal with a "second-best" problem, the paper is of considerable interest. The second paper--"The Optimal Tariff from an International Standpoint"--concerns the ways in which poor countries could use their monopoly power in trade to enhance international welfare if the world welfare function attaches greater weights to improvements in real income in poor countries than in rich. Despite the fact that the developing countries generally impose duties upon imports, in which their monopoly power is probably zero, rather than taxing exports where some monopoly power does exist, the result is of some theoretical importance. The final paper of the first section, published in 1956, focusses upon estimating the real income loss associated with trade restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book contains a collection of papers presented at a Monash University Conference in September 1969. There was no unifying theme to the Conference, except for being in the field of international economics, broadly conceived. Therefore, the papers range over various aspects of international trade and finance. They include contributions in the area of trade theory (Corden, Grubel, Johnson, Laing, McDougan), various treatments of tariffs and preferences (Evans, Gruen and Corden, Lloyd), considerations of international capital movements and the international corporation (Johnson, Webb, Snape, Pitchford), and a paper on the international monetary system (Johnson). Methodologically, the contributions range from abstract theory to applied economics to consideration of current policy issues. Under the first category fall the paper by McDougall on non-traded goods in international trade; Pitchford on foreign investments and the national advantage in a dynamic context; Webb on international capital movement and the optimum taxation of capital flows. The second category includes among others the paper by Lloyd on the Australian preference scheme (subsequently extended in a follow-up paper in the Economic Records of March 1971), while under the third heading belongs the paper by Johnson on the current international monetary "crisis." These examples illustrate the diversity of topics covered in the book; diversity which defies a comprehensive review of its contents. The following discussion concentrates on the papers thought to be of interest to the readers of the Journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume reports the proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in September 1972. This is the ninth such conference since June 1969 and the fourth in the area of monetary policy. As the title indicates, this is the second conference on the problem of controlling monetary aggregates, accurately reflecting both the magnitude of the importance and the continuity of the interest of the subject. The other volumes in the series include financial structure, international finance, and state and local finance. On the whole, the conferences encompassed high class, well prepared papers presented by respected authorities in the respective areas. The volumes deserve space on every monetary analyst's bookshelf and should receive considerable reference use. It would be difficult to praise the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston too highly for this service they provide the public at large, the financial community, and the academic community, and of course to themselves and the rest of the Federal Reserve System in opening controversial subject areas to free debate. Of all the public information and research funds expended by the Federal Reserve System, these conferences and the publication of the proceedings must rank among the most worthwhile and those generating the highest returns. May this series have a long and healthy life! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This attractively thin book contains 17 papers by 14 internationally known economists on the spectrum of problems involved in restoring and maintaining balance in international payments within the constraint of the Bretton Woods philosophy of fixed exchange rates. Comprehensive essays by Fellner, Machlup, and Triffin comprise Part I and serve as an introduction to the broad nature and complexities of payments problems and policies for dealing with them. At the same time, Part I establishes a framework against which specific aspects and technical problems of payments imbalance are examined in more detail in the 14 shorter "Papers on Special Issues" which make up Part II. According to Machlup, the underlying purpose of the symposium is to provide a set of basic criteria by which countries can assess their responsibilities for action with regards to balance-of-payments difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume contains the proceedings of a Conference on Models of Income Deterruination held in February 1962 at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The papers were prepared by economists and statisticians interested in the theory of income determination, its measurement, and in using income data to construct and test macroeconomic models. It is Volume 28 of the Studies in Income and Wealth by the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book contains 44 papers, about two-thirds of which first appeared in print since the beginning of 1961. About half of the papers deal with policy questions. Six papers use graphical analysis, five use some form of mathematical analysis (other than notation), and five use some form of regression analysis. The objective of the collection is stated to be "to introduce undergraduates ... to the type of work which is done by macroeconomists." This reviewer will therefore consider the collection from a pedagogical point of view, rather than in terms of the merits of the papers, most of which are recognized as standard references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "Mathematical Methods in Investment and Finance," edited by G.P. Szego and Karl Shell.

Papers presented before a seminar on the international (multinational) corporation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the spring of 1969, later edited by Charles P. Kindleberger, are now available in The International Corporation. The book is divided into five main parts: the theory of the international corporation; finance and technology; law and politics; three industry studies; and three country studies. There are, in addition, an introduction by Kindleberger and a final paper (Part VI) by Raymond Vernon, "Future of the Multinational Enterprise." Robert Aliber's "A Theory of Direct Foreign Investment," "The Efficiency and Welfare Implications of the International Corporation" by Harry Johnson, and a paper "Multinational Corporations and International Oligopoly: The Non-American Challenge" by Stephen Hymer and Robert Rowthorn make up the first part. Aliber argues that the pattern of direct foreign investment can best be explained as a currency-area phenomenon, that market estimates of exchange risk are biased, and that this bias determines whether a country is likely to be a host or source country for foreign investment. Cross investments in the same industry are explained by historic changes in exchange risk. Aliber's thesis differs from other explanations of such investment which usually emphasize technological or organizational advantage, firm size, or market protection. In Johnson's view, for example, direct foreign investment--particularly recent investment by large American firms--is based on exploitation of technological monopoly. Johnson mentions terms-of-trade and terms-of-borrowing (i.e., first-best) arguments for intervention to restrict direct foreign investment, but concentrates on the more common second-best reasons. He concludes that the application of even second-best criteria is likely, for practical reasons, to have third-best welfare consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Stabilization Policies in Interdependent Economies," edited by Emil Claassen and Pascal Salin.

The book under review is a selection of readings in public expenditure analysis. Balbir Sahni has assembled what he regards as the "recent classics" in the literature on public spending. Following a brief introductory essay are eleven "chapters" consisting both of papers and excepts from books published since the early 1950's. Sahni divides his selection into two parts, the first consisting of readings on the normative aspects of public expenditure problems and the second of positive studies in expenditure analysis. The normative section includes (among other things) the first chapter from Musgrave's book describing his tripartite division of the fiscal authority, four Samuelson papers on the theory of public expenditure, and the important papers by Head ("Public Goods and Public Policy") and Tiebout ("A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures"). The major selections of positive studies are from Peacock's and Wiseman's book dealing with Wagner's Law and the displacement effect, a paper by Thorn ("The Evolution of Public Finances During Economic Development"), and excerpt from Pryor's volume, Public Expenditures in Communist and Capitalist Nations. Sahni concludes his collection with a selected bibliography of 247 works (listed alphabetically by the name of the author) on public expenditure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the books "Issues in Banking and Monetary Analysis," edited by Giulio Pontecorvo, Robert P. Shay and Albert G. Hart, and "Money and Economic Activity: Readings in Money and Banking," third edition, edited by Lawrence S. Ritter.

The paper is obviously a rich lode for specialists in many of the functional fields, and Stigler shows the way with another paper, "Information in the Labor Market" (1962), that directly applies his search analysis to data on job offers to students coming out of the Graduate Business School of the University of Chicago. Somewhat surprisingly, he has not included his own explorations in financial markets, i.e., his Journal of Business article (1964) on the SEC Special Study and his subsequent exchange with Friend and Herman. (Perhaps it is just as well. That was not his finest hour.) But there is little doubt that the payload in finance would be a good one indeed. One thinks of whole strings of subjects that should yield up ore when worked with these tools--the role of security-market specialists, the markets of closely related products such as foreign exchange or debt instruments of different maturity, multiproduct markets such as are faced by commercial banks. And indeed the process has begun. But it has barely begun, and a widespread reading of this major article by Stigler would surely stir others to join the working party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a book on economic development written by practitioners. It is the result of specific experiences encountered by a group of economists working for the Harvard Development Advisory Service in the process of making policy recommendations to various governments. The contributions to this volume deal with specific-country issues drawn from only four countries' Argentina, Colombia, Pakistan, and Liberia. The volume is divided into the following six parts: (1) planning, macro models, and development strategy; (2) stabilization and short-term policy; (3) fiscal policy; (4) agricultural development; (5) education, manpower, labor, and wages; and finally (6) evaluation. The bulk of the papers are included in the first two parts (seven papers), with the last four parts containing only one contribution each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gramlich's paper attempts to isolate the economic effects of discretionary policy by weighting various components of the full-employment budget, using multipliers derived from a variety of well-known econometric models. The estimated effects of the full-employment budget in any one year varied by embarrassingly large amounts depending on which model was chosen, but when first differences of the impacts were calculated, the results of the different models were remarkably similar. Gramlich's paper is interesting but it sheds little light on the issues raised in the first part of the volume since the impact of government asset transactions is not considered. In the light of the recent work by Christ which illustrates the importance of the way in which income transactions of government are financed, this is an important weakness in Gramlich's approach.
In summary the conference was generally useful, but its area of concentration was determined largely by political concern over the concept of the budget deficit. This meant that many important issues were largely ignored and its title, "Budget Concepts for Economic Analysis," is somewhat misleading. The important issue of whether we should have a true capital budget was mentioned only briefly in the discussion period, and there was no discussion of ways to formulate budget concepts so that economists would be in a better position to analyze such questions as the effect of government either on particular industries, on the pattern of factor demands, or on the growth of full-employment GNP. The Budget Bureau's publication of Special Analyses, Budget of the United States, which accompanies the basic budget document each year, has been an invaluable improvement in this regard but there is still much to be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Issues in Defense Economics," edited by Ronald N. McKean.

This book is a collection of papers given at the 1968 symposium of the Tax Institute of America. The papers fall under four broad headings: Economic Aspects of Taxes on Compensation, How Taxes Affect Benefit Plans for Employees, How Taxes Affect Benefit Plans for Executives, and critiques of the 1965 Cabinet Committee Report on Public Policy and Private Pension Funds, the latter set of papers being devoted primarily to the desirability of vesting, funding, and reinsurance of pension funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in The Theory of Capital Markets, edited by Michael C. Jensen, is such a classic. Contributed to by an impressive group of some of the nation's most respected theoreticians in finance and economics, it is the only major collection of readings devoted to the specific subject of capital market equilibrium under uncertainty. Essentially taking the capital asset pricing model from its theoretical foundations through a variety of exhaustive empirical tests, applications, and extensions, the book's primary focus is on describing mainstream developments to date. There are a total of nine essays organized into four parts: an Introduction, The Empirical Findings, Extensions of The Theory, and Applications of The Theory. To Jensen's credit, this collection is of uniformly exceptional quality and highly compatible focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This second volume of the National Bureau's studies of interest rates contains four new studies concerned with the structure of interest rates and four reprints (or adaptations) of previously published work. The reprinted papers include Cagan's well-known study of changes in the cyclical behavior of interest rates and a companion piece by Diller on the seasonal variation of interest rates. The two remaining previously published papers are Kessel's seminal study of "liquidity premiums" in the term structure and Diller's important essay which analyzes market expectations. Since these essays have already received considerable comment and discussion, I will concentrate on the new studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "The Technology Factor in International Trade," edited by Raymond Vernon.

Few events in financial history have attracted more comment than the return of sterling in April 1925 to its 1914 gold parity. In the early twenties, the return was widely regarded as the key to the re-establishment of the prewar gold standard and of "normalcy" in international economic relations. Later, the authorities responsible for the return became the scapegoats for politicians and journalists who were seeking to pinpoint the blame for Britain's heavy unemployment. The searing conflicts-between Britain's external and domestic economic needs--that arose from official efforts to maintain the $4.86 parity left an indelible imprint on subsequent economic thought and strongly influenced the writing of the IMF Articles of Agreement, especially the provision for changing exchange rates to correct fundamental disequilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this volume were offered in the spring of 1968 at an annual conference sponsored by the Institute of Public Utilities of Michigan State University. The Conference was designed to explore some new thinking on the rate of return and to relate it to methods that regulators could use, or ought to use, in establishing the earnings of regulated companies. The Preface by Trebing and Howard usefully traces the literature and the state of the art of regulation. They point out that very little was done in the academic realm on the question of rate of return until quite recently. In more-recent years, Trebing and Howard note, corporation finance has begun incorporating a number of theoretical constructs that permit analysis of what rate of return is or ought to be. This new corporate finance is what the 1968 Conference hoped to help introduce into the practice of regulation, by attempting to get people who are thinking along these new analytical lines to focus their attention on the special problems of regulated industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book is a four-man debate on the properties of a pure, Haig-Simons income tax and on the reform of the U.S. income-tax law. The major contents of the book are reprints from the Harvard Law Review of a paper by Bittker, comments on the paper by Galvin, Musgrave, and Pechman, and a reply by Bittker. The remainder of the book is a previously unpublished twelve-page round of additional comments, including a last word by Bittker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that skill differences are reflected in wages and represent the product of past investment in human resources dominates the first set of papers. Leontief's attempt to resolve his celebrated paradox and salvage the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem by considering the skill content of U.S. exports and import substitutes is pursued by Keesing, who finds an inverse relationship between the average skill levels represented in the manufactured exports and imports of a number of countries. Thus, with skills the human embodiment of capital, skill-intensive exports or imports are capital-intensive. Keesing, however, is unable to provide direct evidence of relative skill endowments in his sample of countries. And the acceptability of his critical assumption that interindustry labor requirements by skill categories do not differ significantly among countries depends on whether there exists compensatory international variations in average skill levels within his categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Regional Accounts for Policy Decisions," edited by Werner Z. Hirsch.

The article reviews the book "California Banking in a Growing Economy: 1946-1975," edited by Hyman P. Minsky.

This book brings together the thoughts of a first-class international-trade theorist on various topics in international economic theory. Most of the papers collected are pioneering and imaginative, and have generated considerable interest and follow-up work in the profession. Rereading these papers has refreshed my admiration of Mundell's creativity and imagination and of his mastery of basic economic logic. He supplements his lucid verbal exposition with ingenious diagrams and skillful use of mathematical symbols and equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the books "Property Taxation, U.S.A.," edited by Richard W. Lindholm and "The Property Tax: Problems and Potentials. A Symposium," from the Princeton: Tax Institute of America.

The article reviews the book "The Theory and Empirical Analysis of Production, Studies in Income and Wealth," vol. 31, edited by Murray Brown.

The article reviews the book "Determinants of Investment Behavior: A Conference of the Universities National Bureau Committee for Economic Research," by Robert Ferber.

This volume reports the proceedings of a 1970 Bureau conference on the business cycle today. The first half of the book is on the business cycle today, or perhaps more appropriately, business cycle studies today. One piece, by Ilse Mintz, develops and tests the concept of a "growth" cycle, by which she means a cycle in the rate of growth of a variable instead of in its level. The second paper, by Solomon Fabricant, looks at the "recession" of 1969-70 with an eye to determining whether it was in fact a recession. Under the classical level standard, it was close; under the growth standard, it probably was a recession. The final paper, by Geoffrey Moore, examines the behavior of prices, again relying heavily on the growth cycle standard. This half of the book concludes with discussion of these papers by Samuelson, Eckstein, Wallich, and Hickman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume is a collection of nine original papers presented at a seminar entitled "Utility Regulation During Inflation" held at Occidental College in September, 1970. The papers, all of which are essentially nonquantitative, come in about equal number from academic and business sources. The central theme of the book is that current regulatory practices based on the assumption of price stability must be modified to accommodate persistent inflation if certain deleterious consequences (usually a decline in utility earnings) are to be avoided. This note is sounded most vigorously by the editors themselves in collaboration with Edward Myers in the initial paper. Arguing that rapidly rising labor and material costs, increased emphasis on the quality of the environment, and high interest costs are putting undue pressure on utility earnings, the authors urge the adoption of accelerated or possibly even automatic rate relief; this would enable utilities to pass on all inflation-induced cost increases directly to the consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "The International Market for Foreign Exchange," edited by Robert Z. Aliber.

This book is a collection of papers presented at meetings held in December, 1966 to discuss the changing role of money and finance in the East European countries as they enacted economic reforms, to decentralize economic decisions, extended the enterprise economy, and rationalized the centralized management of their economies. It covers a wide territory: Four of the seven articles discuss monetary changes in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, while the three remaining articles take a broad view of monetary problems in Eastern European countries. The introduction to these papers by editor Grossman is more than an introduction; it is a summary of the main theme of the book and is also an apology for publishing a set of papers in this form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present volume is the latest in the well-known Studies of Government Finance series published by the Brookings Institution. It comprises seven papers of which five are based on doctoral dissertations submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although the volume covers a wide, and seemingly unrelated, set of topics, it is nevertheless unified by its concern with stabilization policy and by its highly quantitative orientation. In the words of the editors, "... the need for reliable quantitative estimates of the relationships that determine how fiscal policy will affect the economy has become more and more obvious in recent years. The papers in this volume are designed to fill some of this need". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Changing Patterns in Foreign Trade and Payments: An Introduction to a Current Issue of Public Inquiry," edited by Bela Balassa.

These are two quite distinct books aimed at different audiences. The Kuh and Schmalensee volume presents an original macroeconometric model which is primarily designed as a teaching device suitable for intermediate and advanced macroeconomics courses. The compendium edited by Powell and Williams presents a selection of the macroeconometric and monetary sector model papers which were given at the Second Australian Conference of Econometricians at Monash University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "National Housing Models," by R. Bruce Ricks.

Housing and Monetary Policy is a compendium of papers presented at the Boston Fed's monetary conference, October, 1970. Its format and quality are very similar to the AFA and the AEA Proceedings. The "sessions" are four: fiscal policy and housing, presented by Gardner Ackley, with James Duesenberry, David Ott, and Arnold Harberger as discussants; Regulation Q, with papers by Allan Meltzer, Robert Lindsay, and A. Marshall Puckett, with no discussion; government-sponsored intermediaries, by Harry Schwartz and Warren Smith, discussed by Henry Kaufman and Samuel Chase; and changing the asset-liability structure of savings and loan associations, by Irwin Friend, and by Paul Anderson and Robert Eisenmenger, discussed by Eli Shapiro. This book presents many sides of some of the primary fiscal, monetary, financial, and institutional issues of housing finance today. It suffers somewhat from the lack of continuity and integration of the issues: the issues appear and re-appear almost at random throughout the book. (An introductory summary of the conference, not included, would help.) The saving grace, however, is its overall brevity, consisting of just 139 small pages, so an astute reader can compare, e.g., the fiscal-monetary mix recommendations of Ackley and Anderson-Eisenmenger, or other pairs of positions, quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book consists of 17 essays, the first seven of which are concerned primarily with the effects of alternative growth rates of the money stock within a single economy, the remaining ten with that and related questions within a world economy linked by fixed exchange rates. Five of the first seven essays are adapted, virtually unchanged except for new titles, from four articles previously published in the Journal of Political Economy: "The Public Debt, Corporate Income Taxes, and the Rate of Interest" (Dec. 1960); "inflation and Real Interest" (June 1963); "A Fallacy in the Interpretation of Macroeconomic Equilibrium" (Feb. 1965); and "Growth, Stability, and Inflationary Finance" (April 1965). In contrast, of the ten essays dealing with the world economy, only two have appeared previously. As suggested by the title, the analysis in this book is entirely qualitative. The models used--and there are almost as many of them as there are essays--are often described both algebraically and graphically. Despite that, their presentation leaves much to be desired. Models are presented mainly by listing equilibrium conditions so that in most chapters, the reader will be left uncertain about what structural relationships underlie those conditions. In one place, at least, the implicit reasoning leads Mundell astray. This book consists of 17 essays, the first seven of which are concerned primarily with the effects of alternative growth rates of the money stock within a single economy, the remaining ten with that and related questions within a world economy linked by fixed exchange rates. Five of the first seven essays are adapted, virtually unchanged except for new titles, from four articles previously published in the Journal of Political Economy: "The Public Debt, Corporate Income Taxes, and the Rate of Interest" (Dec. 1960); "inflation and Real Interest" (June 1963); "A Fallacy in the Interpretation of Macroeconomic Equilibrium" (Feb. 1965); and "Growth, Stability, a... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "The Analysis of Public Output," edited by Julius Margolis.

The article reviews the book "Targets and Indicators of Monetary Policy," edited by Karl Brunner.

This volume reports the proceedings of the first of a proposed series of conferences on monetary problems. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is to be complimented for assembling a first-rate group of participants and for publishing the proceedings, in fine form, less than six months after the event. The conference was structured with an introductory panel discussion on "The Role of Money in National Economic Policy," followed by seven papers, generally with discussants' comments. The result is a timely summary of the current theoretical and practical issues relating to the implementation of monetary policy, marred only by the general absence of new and innovative techniques for analyzing these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]