Roger Backhouse is a key figure in the field of economic methodology. Explorations in Economic Methodology both clarifies and responds to the issues raised by the literature and argues that methodology is an essential activity. Offering a constructive, but critical, response to the recent literature, this collection provides important new insights for students and researchers in economic methodology and the philosophy of science.
Interpreting Macroeconomics explores a variety of different approaches to macroeconomic thought. The book considers a number of historiographical and methodological positions, as well as analyzing various important episodes in the development of macroeconomics, before during and after the Keynesian revolution. Roger Backhouse shows that the full richness of these developments can only by brought out by approaches which blend both relativism and absolutism, and historical and rational reconstructions. Examples discussed include Hobson, Keynes and Friedman.
A valuable collection of papers illustrating Akerlof's 'modern', Nobel Prize-winning methodology at work. This ovlume covers the economics of information, the theory of unemployment, the demand for money, psychology and economics, and the nature of discrimination.
International exploration and production is challenging and exciting. Negotiating with governments and understanding the dynamics of their fiscal systems and/or production sharing contracts can mean the difference between success and failure. Long-time industry consultant, negotiator and lecturer, Daniel Johnston, provides an extremely clear and practical perspective on: • international exploration economics and risk analysis, • petroleum fiscal system analysis and design, • contract negotiations, • economic, financial and accounting aspects of production sharing contracts, and royalty/tax systems. International Exploration Economics, Risk, and Contract Analysis is an anthology of articles from Johnston's column in the Petroleum Accounting and Financial Management Journal (PAFMJ) Institute of Petroleum Accounting, University of North Texas. While some chapters date back a number of years, the key chapters and concepts have been dramatically updated with detailed examples.
Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume’s six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro institutions of markets and states but also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies, often in an uneasy relationship.
Looks at ways to increase the scope and power of institutional economics. Different approaches to economic methodology are considered and the broader notions of rationality offered by institutional economics are discussed.
Monte Carlo methods are among the most used and useful computational tools available today, providing efficient and practical algorithims to solve a wide range of scientific and engineering problems. Applications covered in this book include optimization, finance, statistical mechanics, birth and death processes, and gambling systems. Explorations in Monte Carlo Methods provides a hands-on approach to learning this subject. Each new idea is carefully motivated by a realistic problem, thus leading from questions to theory via examples and numerical simulations. Programming exercises are integrated throughout the text as the primary vehicle for learning the material. Each chapter ends with a large collection of problems illustrating and directing the material. This book is suitable as a textbook for students of engineering and the sciences, as well as mathematics.
Economic methodology has traditionally been associated with logical positivism in the vein of Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn. However, the emergence and proliferation of new research programs in economics have stimulated many novel developments in economic methodology. This impressive Companion critically examines these advances in methodological thinking, particularly those that are associated with the new research programs which challenge standard economic methodology. Bringing together a collection of leading contributors to this new methodological thinking, the authors explain how it differs from the past and point towards further concerns and future issues. The recent research programs explored include behavioral and experimental economics, neuroeconomics, new welfare theory, happiness and subjective well-being research, geographical economics, complexity and computational economics, agent-based modeling, evolutionary thinking, macroeconomics and Keynesianism after the crisis, and new thinking about the status of the economics profession and the role of the media in economics. This important compendium will prove invaluable for researchers and postgraduate students of economic methodology and the philosophy of economics. Practitioners in the vanguard of new economic thinking will also find plenty of useful information in this path-breaking book.
This book is the first attempt to bridge the current divide between studies addressing "economic nationalism" as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic 'nation-building', and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic "nationness"—from national economic symbols and memories, to the "banal" world of product communication. The editors seeks to highlight the importance of economic issues for the study of nations and nationalism, and its findings point to the need to give economic phenomena a more prominent place in the field of nationalism studies. The authors of the essays come from disciplines as diverse as economic and cultural history, political science, business studies, as well as sociology and anthropology. Their chapters address the nationalism-economy nexus in a variety of realms, including trade, foreign investment, and national control over resources, as well as consumption, migration, and welfare state policies. Some of the case studies have a historical focus on nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while others are concerned with contemporary developments. Several contributions provide in-depth analyses of single cases while others employ a comparative method. The geographical focus of the contributions vary widely, although, on balance, the majority of our authors deal with European countries.
