Business Cycles and Equilibrium

Throughout his career Fisher Black has described a view of business fluctuations based on the idea that a well-developed economy will be continually in equilibrium. In the essays that constitute this book he explores this idea thoroughly and reaches some surprising conclusions. Provocative and clearly written, Business Cycles and Equilibrium will be of value to students of macroeconomics as well as those of finance and the international economy.

Fischer Black is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern finance theory. He is most famous for cofounding the legendary Black-Scholes equation, although he contributed much more to finance in the areas of portfolio insurance, commodity futures pricing, bond swaps, interest rate futures, and global asset allocation models. Black worked at the University of Chicago and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as Goldman Sachs. He received his PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University. Black died in 1995, two years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton for their work on option pricing. Since the Nobel Prize is not given posthumously, Black was given a prominent mention for the key role he played in developing the equation.