The comment by John Barron constitutes a very interesting extension of earlier work rather than a correction of it. He introduces the additional dimension of searching firms to find vacancies. The earlier work had concentrated on the searching of vacancies to find job offers. Clearly both are relevant and, not surprisingly, he finds that when different assumptions are made, different conclusions follow. He introduces the concept of mean (firm) search time T to find a particular firm with a vacancy in a given set of firms. Assuming random search, this time depends on the number of firms in the set. Thus, he finds that when a labor market is divided into N equal compartments, mean search time in each compartment is reduced by a factor of (1/N). The earlier work to which he refers implicitly assumed that the vacancies in a compartment could be located fairly readily. The hiring firms could be easily located but time consuming search was required to determine the particular vacancies which would produce job placements for particular workers. Thus, the relevant search time measure is the mean (vacancy) search time to locate a placement from the set of vacancies in the

This report examines a class of mean-risk dominance models for investment and capital budgeting situations in which risk is associated with returns that fall below a specified target return. The model is offered as a partial reconciliation among viewpoints that have been associated with a large number of different models for choice in risky decision situations, including various parametric models, expected utility models, and stochastic dominance models. It is argued that the specific type of model examined has promising computational possibilities, and that it has a fair degree of compatibility with expected utility, stochastic dominance, and with the primary concerns expressed by decision makers in investment situations.

Monetary economics conveys the impression of great disagreement within the economics profession, and indeed the professional debates have often been heated. But behind the debates over policy there is a great deal of consensus on the importance of monetary variables for the working of national economies and on the mechanisms through which they exert their influence. title of this session reminds us that twenty-five years ago this was not so. When Howard Ellis wrote The Rediscovery of Money, the postwar revival had just begun. There was general skepticism about the ability of monetary policy to influence the economy, and the Oxford surveys were widely cited as the empirical basis for disbelief in the effect of monetary policy on investment. Despite the emergence in the intervening years of wide agreement about the importance of monetary policy, the empirical basis for many of our beliefs, and a fortiori for distinguishing among our differences, has remained weak. In casually accepting our present assignment, failed to appreciate just how complex the question posed in the title is. This is true even when the subject is confined, as here, to the monetary economics of the business cycle, leaving aside both microeconomic and steady-state growth considerations. What does it mean to say have learned something? And to whom does the we refer?