As an experiment in reconnecting academia to the broader democracy, this work is designed to invigorate public policy debate by rededicating academic work to the pursuit of solutions to society's great problems.
This Festschrift is published in honour of Annalisa Rosselli, a political economist and historian of economic thought, whose academic activity has promoted unconventional ways of thinking throughout her career. A renowned list of scholars articulate and respond to this vision through a series of essays, leading to an advocacy of pluralism and critical thinking in political economy. The book is split into five parts, opening with a section on new topics for the history of economic thought including new perspectives in gender studies and an illustration of the fecundity of the link with economic history. This is followed by sections that address relevant perspectives on the Classical approach to distribution and accumulation, Ricardo, interpretation of Sraffa and the legacy of Keynes. This book will appeal to students interested in reforming economics, as well as academics and economists interested in political economy and the history of economic thought.
Now in its second edition, John Harvey’s rigorous textbook provides an accessible and engaging introduction to various competing schools of thought in economics. This revised and extended edition will continue to open readers’ minds, leading them towards new and productive directions. Chapters study numerous schools of thought including Neoclassical, Marxist, Austrian, Post Keynesian, Institutionalist, New Institutionalist, Feminist and Ecological. Unique features and criticisms of each approach are highlighted through discussions of methodology, world views, popular themes, and current activities.
This book covers the main topics that students need to learn in a course on Industrial Organization. It reviews the classic models and important empirical evidence related to the field. However, it will differ from prior textbooks in two ways. First, this book incorporates contributions from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, providing the reader with a richer understanding of consumer preferences and the motivation for many of the business practices we see today. The book discusses how firms exploit consumers who are prone to making mistakes and who suffer from cognitive dissonance, attention lapses, and bounded rationality, for example and will help explain why firms invest in persuasive advertising, offer 30-day free trials, offer money-back guarantees, and engage in other observed phenomena that cannot be explained by the traditional approaches to industrial organization. A second difference is that this book achieves a balance between textbooks that emphasize formal modeling and those that emphasize the history of the field, empirical evidence, case studies, and policy analysis. This text puts more emphasis on the micro-foundations (i.e., consumer and producer theory), classic game theoretic models, and recent contributions from behavioral economics that are pertinent to industrial organization. Each topic will begin with a discussion of relevant theory and models and will also include a discussion of concrete examples, empirical evidence, and evidence from case studies. This will provide students with a deeper understanding of firm and consumer behavior, of the factors that influence market structure and economic performance, and of policy issues involving imperfectly competitive markets. The book is intended to be a textbook for graduate students, MBAs and upper-level undergraduates and will use examples, graphical analysis, algebra, and simple calculus to explain important ideas and theories in industrial organization.
This book presents a range of papers by philosophers and economists who consider the definition and value of liberty; freedom in rights and equality of opportunity. Until recently freedom has played no explicit role in the conceptual framework of economists, however freedom seems to be at the heart of economics. The book provides a substantial contribution to the fruitful dialogue between the philosophy and economics in this area. Each chapter is integrated being followed by comments which explore the underlying debates. Contributors are French economists, philosophers and political scientists, as well as authors from Belgium and the Netherlands.
This book brings together a series of contributions by international legal scholars that explore a range of subjects and themes in the field of international economic law and global economic governance through a variety of methodological and theoretical lenses. It introduces the reader to a number of different ways of constructing and approaching the study of international economic law. The book deals with a series of different theoretical agendas and perspectives ranging from the more traditional (empirical legal studies) to the more alternative (language theory) and it expands the scope of substantive discussion and thematic coverage beyond the usual suspects of international trade, international investment and international finance. While the volume still gives due recognition to the traditional theoretical project of international economic law, it invites the reader to extend the scope of disciplinary imagination to other, less commonly acknowledged questions of global economic governance such as food security, monetary unions, and international economic coercion. In addition to historically-focused and critical perspectives, the volume also includes a number of programmatic and forward-looking explorations, which makes it appealing to a broad audience with a variety of contrasting interests. Therefore, the volume is of particular interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of international law, international relations, international political economy, and international history.
This volume critically re-examines the profession's understanding of asset bubbles in light of the global financial crisis of 2007-09. It is well known that bubbles have occurred in the past, with the October 1929 crash as the most demonstrative example. However, the remarkably well-behaved performance of the US economy from 1945 to 2006, and, in particular during the Great Moderation period of 1984 to 2006, assured the economics profession and monetary policymakers that asset bubbles could be effectively managed with little or no real economic impact. The recent financial crisis has now triggered a debate about the emergence of a sequence of repeated bubbles in the Nasdaq market, housing market, credit market, and commodity markets. The realities of the crisis have intensified theoretical modeling, empirical methodologies, and debate on policy issues surrounding asset price bubbles and their potentially adverse economic impact if poorly managed. Taking a novel approach, the editors of this book present five classic papers that represent accepted thinking about asset bubbles prior to the financial crisis. They also include original papers challenging orthodox thinking and presenting new insights. A summary essay highlights the lessons learned and experiences gained since the crisis.
This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy brings together a select group of young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an effort to begin a re-conceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary historical approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state finance, tariffs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, economic cultures, and the history of economic doctrines more narrowly construed. The first decade of the twenty-first century, bookended by 9/11 and a global financial crisis, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both 'the political' and 'the economic' to historiographical debates. It is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, distribution, and exchange. The artefacts of pre-modern and modern political economy, from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings grappled with and overcame material hardship, organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered. The present volume, assembling some of the brightest lights in the field, eloquently testifies to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy and of power in an economic age.
This book examines and compares the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, with the 'new' institutionalism developed from neoclassical and Austrian sources.
This book presents essential insights on environmental policy derived from behavioral economics. The authors demonstrate the potential of behavioral economics to drive environmental protection and to generate concrete proposals for the efficient design of policy instruments. Moreover, detailed recommendations on how to use “nudges” and related instruments to move industry and society toward a sustainable course are presented. This book addresses the needs of environmental economists, behavioral economists and environmental policymakers, as well as all readers interested in the intersection between behavioral economics and environmental policy.