Economics: Research Guide

Debates about the nature and economic role of money are mostly informed by evidence from the 20th century, but money has existed for millennia. We argue that there are many lessons to be learned from monetary history that are relevant for current topics of policy relevance. The past acts as a source of evidence on how money works across different situations, helping to tease out features of money that do not depend on one time and place. A close reading of history also offers testing grounds for models of economic behavior and can thereby guide theories on how money is transmitted to the real economy.

In his seminal work on the political economy of dictatorship, Ronald Wintrobe (1998) posited the existence of a "dictator's dilemma, " in which repression leaves an autocrat less secure by reducing information about discontent. We explore the nature and resolution of this dilemma with a formalization that builds on recent work in the political economy of nondemocracy. When the regime is sufficiently repressive, and the dictator's popularity correspondingly unclear to opposition as well as autocrat, the ruler faces two unattractive options: he can mobilize the repressive apparatus, even though there may be no threat to his rule, or he can refrain from mobilizing, even though the threat may be..

Review of “A Herstory of Economics” by Edith Kuiper.

Review of “La science est un jeu: La théorie des jeux dans la France des années 1950” by Tarik Tazdaït.

In 2020 and 2021, the world witnessed policies that caused enormous net damage to most countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the new WELLBY currency in gauging the costs and benefits of COVID policies and review the contributions of Australian economists to the scholarly and public debates about these policies. Our analysis documents the value of what was destroyed, the weak resistance mounted by the Australian economics profession during this period, and the role played by many Australian economists as apologists for what we view as Australia's most catastrophic peacetime economic policy failure. We close with ideas for working towards a better future.

The trinity of liberty, the rule of law, and private property are inter- connected principles that form the foundation of a free and just society. Each element depends on the others to ensure the protection of individual rights and the proper functioning of legal and political institutions.

This paper examines the challenges of achieving and sustaining full employment in a global economy, as discussed by Michał Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes. Its aim is to analyse the common perspectives and differences between Kalecki and Keynes on this issue. The paper first examines the basic views of Kalecki and Keynes on long-term employment issues. This contains comparing their respective considerations of political economy constraints to full employment. Then Kalecki’s and Keynes’s views on the constraints in open economies and the economic policy strategies they proposed are assessed. The paper points out Kalecki’s advocacy for public deficit spending and income redistribution f..

James Buchanan advocated that societies should be based on a social contract. He rejected anarchy, seeing it as a “Hobbesian jungle” that calls for government intervention to maintain social order. He also opposed to theories of spontaneous order. These views led to debates about the compatibility of Buchanan’s works with classical liberalism, and even with democracy. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the development of Buchanan's views on anarchy from a historical viewpoint. We argue that Buchanan's earlier works contain a theory of spontaneous cooperation, and that Buchanan held to this theory until the 1970s. Then, the deteriorating conditions of American societ..

Climate change has sparked a vivid discussion on its socio-economic risks, capturing the attention of academic circles and policymakers. While it is widely argued that a low-carbon transition should be socially just, the precise criteria that policies must adhere to, in order to be universally accepted as `just', remain insufficiently defined. We draw on relevant theories of distributive justice to provide a formal definition of a just transition. According to our definition, just transition policies should minimise costs for the most vulnerable groups and also take into account the uneven responsibility for causing damages.

The standard revealed-preference approach to welfare economics encounters fundamental difficulties when the act of choosing directly affects welfare through emotions such as guilt, pride, and anxiety. We address this problem by developing an approach that redefines consumption bundles in terms of the sensations they produce, and measures welfare by blending choice-based methods with self-reported well-being techniques. In applications to classic social preferences paradigms, our approach shows that standard revealed-preference methods, including those that exploit choices over menus, mismeasure welfare because preferences depend on choice sets, while self-reported happiness and satisfaction ..

How do individuals behave in a society that rewards "merit", despite not being all on the same starting line? Does inequality in head starts make meritocracy undesirable?Attempting to answer these questions, this paper develops a model of career concerns in which agents publicly choose among several activities in which to exert e˙ort, and di˙er along a privately observable characteristic ("head start") that a˙ects their performance. The agents’ audience values talent, effort and head start. We highlight two contrasting effects: a displacement effect by which the "poor" (head start-wise) try to avoid a lower talent image and thus avoid the activity chosen by the "rich", and a distinction..

This paper shows the power of applying Shannon’s (1948) information theory perspective to inequality measurement by considering the thought experiment of drawing a dollar at random from an income distribution and asking who the dollar came from. The surprise at being told who the dollar came from, and the task of designing a set of questions with yes/no answers which will get us to the person, are two sides of the same coin but with interesting interpretations. The Theil index of inequality, which Theil (1967) himself derived with reference to information theory and entropy but did not then explore further, is shown to have interpretations beyond its simple Daltonian properties such a..

What gives complexity economics its identity is the relationships and hierarchy among its ontological, epistemological, methodological, and conceptual aspects. This paper explores each one of these aspects and their interplays, to precise the contours of the complexity approach. This paper aims to stress the coherent articulation and architecture of these four dimensions. In particular, ontology matters, it comes first as an indispensable pre-scientific analysis that conditions the adoption of an adequate criterion of scientific explanation with methodological consequences in terms of relevant tools and key concepts. Reflections on the concept of emergence are particularly symptomatic of the..

The essay begins with Hayek's grappling with the equilibrium framework as the starting point for the analysis of cyclical fluctuations and the fundamental methodological challenge raised by Lowe's attack against the construction of business-cycle theory within the system of general economic equilibrium. It then shows that Hayek elaborated his Austrian theory of the business cycle on the innovative combination of five building blocks: (1) Wicksell's theory of the cumulative process where price changes are caused by the discrepancy between the market rate and the natural (equilibrium) rate of interest; (2) Mises's theory of money and credit in which banks artificially lowering the money (marke..

Sen (1973 and 1997) presents the Gini coefficient of income inequality in a population as follows. "In any pair-wise comparison the man with the lower income can be thought to be suffering from some depression on finding his income to be lower. Let this depression be proportional to the difference in income. The sum total of all such depressions in all possible pair-wise comparisons takes us to the Gini coefficient." (This citation is from Sen 1973, p. 8.) Sen's verbal account is accompanied by a formula (Sen 1997, p. 31, eq. 2.8.1), which is replicated in the text of this note as equation (1). The formula yields a coefficient bounded from above by a number smaller than 1. This creates a dif..

This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again – social scientists of different backgrounds recognized that morality and politico-economic outcomes influence each other in rich bi-directional ways. Because psychologists and economists possess distinct and complementary skill sets, part of this movement consists of productive ‘economic imperialism’ – economists leveraging their empirical toolkit to test and substantiate theories from moral psychology at scale or in the wild. To..

What does a deep structural causal explanation for uneven development deliver ? To answer this question, we must ask: How are relatively deeper scientific explanations to be distinguished from superficial or shallower ones? Furthermore, what roles can counterfactual analysis play in social sciences and policy making which can help overcome uneven and unequal development? For a competent, morally motivated scientific policy maker in Development Economics, it is important to avoid inflicting harm and promote the common good. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the idea of depth can play a role in finding the more "approximately true" explanation through causal comparisons and counterfa..

This paper examines to what degree organizations use strategies that focus on maximizing shareholder value (Theory E) or if they use strategies emphasizing the development of organizational capability (Theory O). Applying a cognitive perspective in strategic choice, our main goal was to investigate to what extent cognitive biases influenced strategic choices. A survey was developed that measured different aspects of the cognitive perspective in strategic choice. It was distributed to managers of several medium-sized organizations in Scandinavia (n = 119). The results indicated that managers used mixed strategies (Theory E and O) contrary to recommendations. Results also revealed that illusio..

This article, while confirming the great interest of spinozist approaches to the state and the currency of A. Orléan and F. Lordon, discusses their analysis which seems to ignore The Reason. Two texts are discussed: the description on the EHESS website of F. Lordon's seminar "structuralism of passions", the article "Genesis of the State and Genesis of the Currency " of A. Orléan and F. Lordon. This article is based on article (B-2) "Fundamental Premises for any SHS" and above all on article (A-3) criticising Spinoza's Reason and introducing multiple reasons in his works. In the two texts discussed, Reason is never mentioned: on the one hand there are feelings and on the other hand human in..

Dans un ouvrage de 20061 et dans une thèse soutenue en 20192 dans lesquels sont opposés libéralisme et capitalisme, Valérie Charolles propose trois évolutions pour sortir du capitalisme en revenant au libéralisme des origines, celui d'Adam Smith3. Parmi ces trois évolutions, cet article ne discute et ne complète que la proposition qui touche directement l'entreprise et l'association des actionnaires, celle relative à « l'actif salarial », en prenant en compte nos articles dont transition necessaire pour sortir du capitalisme et Socialistes et évolution juridique au 19. siècle-deux occasions manquées à rattraper. La proposition discutée de V. Charolles peut être résumée ain..

Notre article interroge l'ouvrage majeur de Charles Gide (1931) Principes d'économie politique, en posant simplement deux questions : Qui paye et qui s'approprie les moyens de production. Ces deux questions, les réponses apportées (lorsque nous analysons les ouvrages à propos de l'activité économique capitaliste actuelle, dont cet ouvrage de Ch. Gide) et les réponses proposées (lorsque nous analysons les ouvrages proposant des évolutions ou lorsque nous en proposons) sont en filigrane de cet article et de tous les autres mentionnés. Ces deux questions, ainsi que les réponses apportées ou proposées, sont synthétisées dans notre article Qui paye et qui s'approprie les moyens de ..

The study of gender was far from mainstream in economics when Claudia Goldin began her research on women and work in the 1980s. Barbara Petrongolo discusses the impact of the 2023 economics Nobel laureate in shaping today's research frontier on gender inequalities - from public policy to the stereotypes and social norms that have such a powerful influence on women's participation in the labour market.

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university’s first hundred years, 1892-1992. Many people associate Chicago’s views with Milton Friedman’s advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was much more than that, including the work of J. Laurence Laughlin on bimetallism, Jacob Viner on the balance of payments, Lloyd Metzler on transfers, Harry Johnson on trade and currencies, Lloyd Mints on exchange rate regimes, Robert Mundell on optimal currency areas, and Arnold Harberger on shadow exchange rates, among other. The analysis shows that, although different scholars emphasized differ..

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a small group of middle class women organized itself with the aim of promoting some social changes that they considered important for their sex, with special emphasis to questions relating to women’s work. They founded a journal that was written and edited by women – the English Women’s Journal – and demanded improvements in women’s education and the opening of more professions for the women of their class. This paper analysis the use they made of Political Economy in support of their cause. It is argued that this science was used both in their diagnosis of the problems engendered by the restricted access women ..

Review of “Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism” by Glory M. Liu.

Interdisciplinary research is defined as a trait of those research activities that integrate different disciplinary traditions with the aim of reaching novel forms of knowledge that are beyond the reach of a singular discipline. From this theory, a plurality of methods has been developed to measure IDR of a body of research. These methods lead to mutually contradicting results. In this review, the most relevant measures of interdisciplinary research are compared under a unified framework articulated in three steps: identification of an available stylisation of bibliometric facts, elicitation of a formula, and definition of an estimator for the collective unit of analysis. In particular, it i..

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the formal establishment of the History of Economics Society (HES), we have analyzed the published HES presidential addresses in order to describe what views of the history of economic thought (HET) were provided, what strengths were identified, and what possibilities for growth or limitations in its future development. We propose a rereading of the published HES presidential addresses as food for thought of scope, method, and future development of HET.

The History of Economics Society was founded at a time when the History of Economic Thought was being eliminated from the Economics post-graduate curriculum in many universities, and was one of the key institutions around which the sub-discipline successfully re-organised itself and continued to develop. Laidler (2003), a paper presented at the Society’s 2002 conference, argued that Economics itself, especially Macroeconomics, was suffering serious damage from this expulsion. It has continued to do so since, and the simple passage of time has now made it appropriate for Historians of Economic Thought to study this question.

Largely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as Professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main coordinates of Keller’s sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin’s mechanism of variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner’s general scheme. Although Keller gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements of the typically Progressive Era preoccupat..

The essay reflects the experience of the author in participating in HES activities over 37 of its 50 years. The main focus is on scholars who emigrated to the USA in the period of totalitarian regimes in Europe and the influence they exerted in the USA. It is emphasized that many émigrés developed “aerial roots” (Streeten), i.e., they became citizens of the world and thereby carriers of the process of internationalization after World War II. This cosmopolitan spirit also permeated the HES from the beginning when many émigré scholars were still active. It also contributed to the formation of an international network of scholars and societies in the history of economic thought which is..