Search

It is impossible in a few pages to even touch on the impact Gary Becker had on economics and public policy. Becker was a pioneer whose work spanned many fields, most of which he was responsible for creating. His imagination was limitless, and he applied economics to areas that few would have thought feasible, providing insight, innovation, and reason in every direction he went. Milton Friedman described him as the most important social scientist of the second half of the twentieth century, and the description is not an overstatement. Becker was more than an economist. He was a social thinker who could bring logic to any subject, no matter how unapproachable. It is for that reason that he had such an important impact on public policy. Becker’s seemingly heretical work often reversed stereotypic thoughts and provided approaches to public policy that were not only novel—they were correct. Based on economic theory and empirical analyses that backed it up, Becker provided prescriptions that were both practical and welfare enhancing. Above all, Becker was a scholar in the finest sense of the word, who believed in economics and its power to explain the world. The ultimate economic imperialist, Becker’s real-world orientation gave us new ways to think about economics and its application to policy. 1

This article traces the complex intellectual path of Olivier Blanchard, a personification of the controversial evolution of macroeconomic research over the last three decades. After contributing to consolidation of the core of mainstream macroeconomics, Blanchard recently suggested ‘rethinking’ some of its key aspects to take stock of the lessons of the 2008 Great Recession, which he witnessed as the International Monetary Fund’s Chief Economist. This welcome discussion, which according to Blanchard should open mainstream macroeconomics to heterodox thinking, has so far produced a certainly interesting albeit theoretically contradictory synthesis and limited policy consequences. The most paradigmatic aspect of this rethinking of macroeconomics is represented by the abandonment in teaching of aggregate supply and demand in favor of a revival of the IS–LM model complemented by the Phillips curve. While this change of perspective does allow for the instability of ‘natural’ equilibrium to be emphasized, a deeper reading may prove incompatible with the neoclassical foundations of the mainstream approach.

The Lewis (1954) model of economic development is one of the rare 60 year-old papers still featured on many graduate economics reading lists. However, like many classics, the original paper, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor,” is probably read less frequently than it is cited. There are numerous commentaries and glosses available that save readers the trouble of wrestling with the original—even though Lewis’s writing was lucid and engaging. In particular, many development textbooks offer verbal or graphic summaries of the Lewis model, but the summaries often lose the richness of the original. Lewis’s (1954) paper bundles together theories of growth, structural transformation, inequality and distribution, wage determination, and population. The proliferation of ideas in the Lewis paper was not an accident. Lewis (p. 139) telegraphed his intention in the first paragraph of the paper, where he wrote: “This essay is written in the classical tradition, making the classical assumption, and asking the classical question. The classics, from Smith to Marx, all assumed, or argued, that an unlimited supply of labour was available at subsistence wages. They then inquired how production grows through time. They found the answer in capital accumulation, which they explained in terms of their analysis of the distribution of income. Classical systems thus determined simultaneously income distribution and income growth, with the relative prices of commodities as a minor by-product.” This paper was not a modest undertaking, and Lewis himself clearly viewed it as a major contribution.

Raj Chetty is eminently deserving of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal at the age of 33. His research has transformed the field of public economics. His work is motivated by important public policy issues in the fields of taxation, social insurance, and public spending for education. He approaches his subjects with a creative redefinition of the problems that he studies, and his empirical methods often draw on experimental evidence or unprecedentedly large sets of integrated data. While his work is founded on basic microeconomics, he modifies this framework to take into account behavioral and institutional considerations. Chetty is a prolific scholar. It is difficult to summarize all of Chetty's research or even to capture the details of his most significant papers. I have therefore chosen a selection of Chetty's important papers dealing with taxation, social insurance, and education that contributed to his selection as the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

This article analyses Adam Smith's views on monopoly by focusing on Book IV and V of The Wealth of Nations. It argues that the majority of scholars have assessed Smith's analysis of monopoly starting from premises different from those, actually though implicitly, used by Smith. We show that Smith makes use of the word 'monopoly' to refer to a heterogeneous collection of market outcomes, besides that of a single seller market, and that Smith's account of monopolists' behaviour is richer than that provided by later theorists. We also show that Smith was aware of the growth-retarding effect of monopoly and urged State regulation. © 2014 Scottish Economic Society.

This paper provides a short history of family allowances and documents the fact that Keynes supported family allowances as early as the 1920s, continuing through the 1930s and early 1940s. Keynes saw this policy as a way to help households raise their children and also as a way to increase consumption without reducing business investment. The paper goes on to argue that a policy of family allowances is consistent with Keynesian economics. Finally, the paper uses the Luxembourg Income Study to estimate the impact of family allowances on child poverty in several developed nations and estimates the poverty-reducing impact of several possible family allowance programs for the US.

The paper deals with the discussion on the alternative ideas on money, created by Silvio Gesell, Frederic Soddy and Karl Ballod. Particularly, the ideas of full-reserve banking, privilege of seigniorage and the principle of demurrage are discussed in the context of possible implementation of these ideas in a future economy. Large part of the paper is library-based, considering and briefly explaining the previously mentioned ideas, and supplementing them with the opinions of the modern economists. The discussion of the possible evolutionary way to implement those ideas is based on the logical analysis and conclusions, derived from the discussions of the author with academicians and financiers. The results lead to the conclusion that these ideas, which may seem unrealistic according the existing paradigm of growth, may turn out to be useful to form the basis of a new monetary and financial system within the new economic paradigm. The paper is an insight into unorthodox proposals on money, which may be useful to specialists and students, investigating monetary and financial systems.

This paper looks at the work of Gary S. Becker, American economist, professor of sociology, friend, and colleague of Kevin M. Murphy. Murphy discusses the traditional approach of Becker's teaching and ideas as they were expressed through his wealth of content and style in course design; his discussions on the role of preferences, technology, and constraints as they influence household production; and his emphasis on the importance of markets and desire for more. Murphy recognizes Becker's teaching style as groundbreaking, unapologetic, and pure economics.

Based on the new way of studying the work of Adam Smith in greater depth, with greater attention being paid to the use and context of his language, this investigation examines the theory of competitive exchange described in The Wealth of Nations, with the aim of bringing new contributions to the field of decision-making beyond the utilitarian theoretical framework. We have found an exchange process with principles of behaviour that are very different to those described in the traditional literature, principally through the leading role of both the cognitive process of decision-making, and of institutions. This work concludes that natural price is a rule of equivalence that guarantees market consistency and that the cognitive process of its participants is described as a mechanism for forming expectations based on institutions outside the market. These conclusions allow us to redefine the hypotheses of Adam Smith’s system of price determination.

There are four main approaches to bilateral index number theory: the fixed basket, stochastic, test, and economic approaches. The paper reviews the contributions of Irving Fisher to these approaches to index number theory, which are still in use today. The paper also reviews Fisher’s contributions to multilateral index number theory. The main themes of the paper are developed in the context of a review of the early history of index number theory: a history that conveys a wealth of information and insight into the making and use of index numbers today.

John Maynard Keynes made a major contribution to the development of professional investment management. Based on detailed archival research at King's College, Cambridge, we describe Keynes' investment philosophy, his investment performance, and the evolution of his investment approach as the manager of a large educational endowment. His portfolios were actively managed and unconventional. He was an investment innovator both in making a substantial allocation to the then new institutional asset class of common stocks as well as in championing value investing.

A Monetary History of the United States 1867 to 1960 published in 1963 was written as part of an extensive NBER research project on Money and Business Cycles started in the 1950s. The project resulted in three more books and many important articles. A Monetary History was designed to provide historical evidence for the modern quantity theory of money. The principal lessons of the modern quantity theory of the long-run neutrality of money, the transitory effects of monetary policy on real economic activity, and the importance of stable money and of monetary rules have all been absorbed in modern macro models. A Monetary History , unlike the other books, has endured the test of time and has become a classic whose reputation has grown with age. It succeeded because it was based on narrative and not an explicit model. The narrative methodology pioneered by Friedman and Schwartz and the beautifully written story still captures the imaginations of new generations of economists.

Martin Feldstein interviewed Paul Volcker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 10, 2013, as part of a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research on “The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve: The Policy Record, Lessons Learned, and Prospects for the Future.” Volcker was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979 through 1987. Before that, he served stints as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979, as Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs in the US Department of the Treasury from 1969 to 1974, as Deputy Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs in the Treasury from 1963 to 1965, and as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1952 to 1957. He has led and served on a wide array of commissions, including chairing the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board from its inception in 2009 through 2011.

L’economiste italien Enrico Barone (1859-1924) est principalement connu pour ses contributions a la theorie de la productivite marginale et au debat sur la planification socialiste. Ce papier analyse les contributions de Barone a la theorie de la concurrence parfaite, contributions largement ignorees dans la litterature secondaire. Il inclut sa methodologie; la definition, les conditions et les consequences de la concurrence parfaite; son contexte institutionnel; et le processus d’ajustement. Il contient egalement certains graphiques de Barone qui illustrent le fonctionnement de la concurrence parfaite. Le papier demontre que Barone merite une place dans l’histoire de la theorie de la concurrence parfaite.

Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis played a major role in defining how economic theory was undertaken for many years after the Second World War. This paper fills out Samuelson's account of the book's origins and corrects some details, making clear his debt to E. B. Wilson and establishes that turning the thesis into a book was a long process. The contents of the book and its reception are then reviewed. ( JEL A22, B20, B31)

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, options began to be widely employed in the main financial centres in Europe and the USA for trading in spot and futures markets. From 1921 onward, Keynes embarked upon investment in these derivatives mainly—but not exclusively—in the commodity markets, showing a true fascination for this method of speculation. This type of financial investment he pursued mainly in the 1920s, with only a few operations undertaken during the 1930s. The option markets in which Keynes traded were metals—in particular copper, lead, spelter and, especially, tin. Besides metals, Keynes dealt in options also in other commodity markets, such as rubber and linseed oil, and sparingly in ordinary stocks and government securities. In this paper we offer a reconstruction of Keynes’s speculative activity in commodity options, drawing on the archival material kept in the Keynes Papers held at King’s College, Cambridge. This reconstruction is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely new to the literature and aims to provide an analysis of this particular aspect of Keynes’s investment behaviour, investigating his capacity to predict market trends and offering a preliminary assessment of his performance.

Jonathan Levin, the 2011 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, has established himself as a leader in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomic theory. Jon has made important contributions in many areas: the economics of contracts and organizations; market design; markets with asymmetric information; and estimation methods for dynamic games. Jon's combination of breadth and depth is remarkable, ranging from important papers in very distinct areas such as economic theory and econometric methods to applied work that seamlessly integrates theory with data. In what follows, we will attempt to do justice not only to Jon's academic work, but also try to sketch a broader portrait of Jon's other contributions to economics as a gifted teacher, dedicated advisor, and selfless provider of public goods.

Amy Finkelstein is the 2012 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The core concerns of Amy's research program have been insurance markets and health care. She has addressed whether asymmetric information leads to inefficiencies in insurance markets, how large social insurance programs affect healthcare markets, and the determinants of innovation incentives in health care. We describe a number of Amy's key research contributions, with particular emphasis on those identified by the Honors and Awards Committee of the American Economic Association in her Clark Medal citation, as well as her broader contributions to the field of economics.

At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled “A Theory of Production,” which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb–Douglas function as a mathematical representation of the relationship between capital, labor, and output. The paper's innovation, however, was not the function itself, which had originally been proposed by Knut Wicksell, but the use of the function as the basis of a statistical procedure for estimating the relationship between inputs and output. The paper's least squares regression of the log of the output-to-capital ratio in manufacturing on the log of the labor-to-capital ratio—the first Cobb–Douglas regression—was a realization of Douglas's innovative vision that a stable relationship between empirical measures of inputs and outputs could be discovered through statistical analysis, and that this stable relationship could cast light on important questions of economic theory and policy. This essay provides an account of the introduction of the Cobb–Douglas regression: its roots in Douglas's own work and in trends in economics in the 1920s, its initial application to time series data in the 1927 paper and Douglas's 1934 book The Theory of Wages, and the early reactions of economists to this new empirical tool.

In a 1966 article in the American Economic Review, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of “X-efficiency”: the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pressure, firms are unlikely to use their resources efficiently, and he suggested that X-efficiency is pervasive. Leibenstein, of course, was attacking a fundamental economic assumption: that firms minimize costs. The X-efficiency article created a firestorm of criticism. At the forefront of Leibenstein's powerful critics was George Stigler, who was very protective of classical price theory. In terms of rhetorical success, Stigler's combination of brilliance and bluster mostly carried the day. While Leibenstein's response to Stigler was well reasoned, it never resonated with many economists, and Leibenstein remains undeservedly underappreciated. Leibenstein's challenge is as relevant today as it ever was.

David Hume (1711–1776) is arguably the most esteemed philosopher to have written in the English language. During his lifetime, however, Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published as the Political Discourses (1752). Hume left his mark on the economic thought of the physiocrats, the classical economists, and the American Federalists. Adam Smith, who met Hume circa 1750, was his closest friend and interlocutor for some 25 years. Among modern economists, Hume's essays on money and trade have informed theorists of both Keynesian and Monetarist persuasions. In this essay, we begin by discussing Hume's monetary economics, and then spell out his theory of economic development, noting his qualified enthusiasm for the modern commercial system. We end with an assessment of his views on the scientific standing of economics, specifically his counterintuitive argument that economics could be epistemologically superior to physics.

Half a century ago, Economica published what its webpage claims is “the most heavily cited macroeconomics title of the 20th century”—the paper by A. W. H. “Bill” Phillips (1958) that introduced the Phillips curve. Based on admittedly circumstantial evidence, I will argue that Bill Phillips was not satisfied with the paper and had not intended to publish it in 1958. I believe that Phillips was persuaded to allow his paper to be published in 1958 by James Meade. After a brief overview of Phillips' early life and career, I attempt to show why Phillips was probably unhappy with the paper that introduced the curve that came to be identified with his name and how, nevertheless, it came to be published.

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to a paper by (eventual) Nobel Prize winners Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreau: “Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy,” published in the July 1954 issue of Econometrica. However it is less well-known that Lionel McKenzie published a paper in the previous issue of Econometrica, “On Equilibrium in Graham's Model of World Trade and Other Competitive Systems,” that discussed many of the same themes. Both papers established the existence of a competitive equilibrium for suitable general equilibrium models and employed fixed point theorem arguments. McKenzie had priority in publication in 1954 and received credit for simultaneous discovery in prominent sources around that time. But over the years, McKenzie's role in creating the proof of the existence of a general equilibrium seems to have faded from the collective consciousness of the economics profession. Newly available archival material permits a reexamination of the events surrounding the publication of both Econometrica papers in 1954. The story raises general issues concerning “simultaneous discovery,” “priority,” and “credit” in economic research and opens a window into some academic practices of that time.

Bela Balassa's Theory of Economic Integration, published fifty years ago, is a remarkable, yet little known book. This essay reviews developments in the economic literature and in the process of European integration since the book's publication, showing that it was incredibly prescient. It anticipated by more than twenty years the modern literature on economic integration that emphasizes scale economies, imperfect competition, and economic geography. It also predicted that monetary union cannot function properly without political unification, a condition well illustrated by the recent euro-debt crisis that is likely to be a watershed in the history of European integration. (JEL B31, F15, F36, G01)

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the developing world that integrates large-scale field experiments with economic theory to yield important insights for development policy and our understanding of behavior and institutions in developing countries. I'll divide my discussion of Esther's work into four categories: educational production, the economic lives of the poor, women as decisionmakers, and a broad category of market and policy failures. I will then offer some thoughts on Esther's role as a scholar–activist.

Trust and trustworthiness are key elements, both at the micro and macro level, in sustaining the working of modern economies and their institutions. However, despite its centrality, trust continues to be considered as a "conceptual bumblebee", it works in practice but not in theory. In particular, its behavioural rationale still represents a puzzle for traditional rational choice theory and game theory. In this paper "trust responsiveness", an alternative explanatory principle that can account for trustful and trustworthy behaviour, is proposed. Such principle assumes that people can be motivated to behave trustworthily by trustful actions. The paper discusses the philosophical roots, the historical development, as well as the relational nature of this principle as well as its theoretical implications.

The paper aims at showing that revisiting Keynes's early writings on international economic relations and some less well-known episodes of his economic diplomacy, with special attention being paid to the methodological issues involved, may disclose useful insights in understanding the features of his desired new global order. We contrast the three main pillars of Keynes's vision as detected in this revisitation (coordinated multilateral responses to global imbalances, a rational international monetary regime, and enhanced policy space) with the major shortcomings of the current non-system, and show the continuing relevance not only of Keynes's specific proposals for global reform, but also, and most importantly, the legacy of his way of reasoning about international economic relations.

Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whose work reflects a broad and thoroughly integrated vision. In carefully and creatively implementing that vision, he has led a remarkable resurgence of interest in tax policy research over the last decade. Emmanuel's work can be divided into five areas: the theory of optimal taxes and transfers; the measurement of income and wealth distributions; the measurement of behavioral responses to personal taxation; the taxation of corporate dividends; and retirement saving. A great deal of his work is closely interrelated across these topics, which makes the whole considerably greater than the sum of the parts. In effect, he has bridged the chasm between theory and practical policymaking by attacking the policy design problem from both sides at once. This article provides a survey of Emmanuel's work.

Contemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institutional arrangements for governing common-pool resources (CPRs ) and public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of “the market” and “the state.” Scholars are slowly shifting from positing simple systems to using more complex frameworks, theories, and models to understand the diversity of puzzles and problems facing humans interacting in contemporary societies. The humans we study have complex motivational structures and establish diverse private-for-profit, governmental, and com munity institutional arrangements that operate at multiple scales to generate productive and inno vative as well as destructive and perverse outcomes ( Douglass C. North 1990, 2005 ). In this article, I will describe the intellectual journey that I have taken the last half century from when I began graduate studies in the late 1950s. The early efforts to understand the poly centric water industry in California were formative for me. In addition to working with Vincent Ostrom and Charles M. Tiebout as they formulated the concept of polycentric systems for gov erning metropolitan areas, I studied the efforts of a large group of private and public water producers facing the problem of an overdrafted groundwater basin on the coast and watching saltwater intrusion threaten the possibility of long term use. Then, in the 1970s, I participated with colleagues in the study of polycentric police industries serving US metropolitan areas to find that the dominant theory underlying massive reform proposals was incorrect. Metropolitan areas served by a combination of large and small producers could achieve economies of scale in the production of some police services and avoid diseconomies of scale in the production of others. These early empirical studies led over time to the development of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. A common framework consistent with game theory enabled us to undertake a variety of empirical studies including a meta-analysis of a large number of existing case studies on common-pool resource systems around the world. Carefully designed experimental studies in the lab have enabled us to test precise combinations of structural vari ables to find that isolated, anonymous individuals overharvest from common-pool resources. Simply allowing communication, or “cheap talk,” enables participants to reduce overharvest ing and increase joint payoffs contrary to game theoretical predictions. Large studies of irrigation systems in Nepal and forests around the world challenge the presumption that governments always do a better job than users in organizing and protecting important resources.

Edmund S. Phelps has been McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University in New York City, New York, since 1982 and director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University's Earth Institute since 2001. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” We interviewed Professor Phelps at his hotel in San Francisco, on January 3, 2009, while attending the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations.

Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerging financial markets. In his magisterial survey of foreign trade doctrine titled Studies in the Theory of International Trade (1936), Jacob Viner pointed out that enlightened authors of that time were often nonbullionist mercantilists: they favored export promotion and import reduction not on the grounds that it would lead to an accumulation of gold, but on the grounds that it would increase trade and employment. My focus here is on how some key economists of this time period—William Petty, John Law, and Richard Cantillon—adumbrated disputes between supply-side and demand-side macroeconomics that have continued to the present day.

John Commons influence in American labor economics was eclipsed after World War II by a resurgent neoclassical labor economics that gradually relegated Commons institutional orientation to the periphery of economic discourse. A common opinion is that the work of institutional economists in the Commons tradition was largely descriptive and lacked theoretical content. Commons, however, regarded his Institutional Economics as a work of economic theory. This paper contains a description of the theoretical core of Institutional Economics and an evaluation of it from the perspective of its potential usefulness in the teaching of modern labor economics. Part I describes the theoretical perspective of neoclassical economic theory in order to clarify the institutional perspective by contrast. Part II describes Commons’ alternative perspective. Part III presents the conclusions derived from this comparison of the two alternative perspectives. John R. Commons, labor economics, history of thought

One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that “the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the currency.” The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which became an international bestseller when it was published in 1919. Economic historian Frank W. Fetter and others have expressed doubt that Keynes was really quoting Lenin because they found no such statement in Lenin's collected published writings. Fetter suggested that Keynes based his remark on stories about what the Soviets were supposed to be saying that he heard at the Paris peace conference of 1919. It is now possible to show that Keynes based his remark on a report of an interview with Lenin published by London and New York newspapers in April 1919. Keynes' discussion of inflation in the Economic Consequences can then be read as an extended commentary on the remarks attributed to Lenin in the interview. While the report of the interview was not reprinted after 1919, it will be also shown here that Lenin responded to Keynes in a speech that was reprinted in his Collected Works.

Prepublication version of ‘Simultaneous Valuation vs. the Exploitation Theory of Profit: A summing up’, forthcoming in Capital and Class #94, Spring 2008 This paper examines the claims made by Simon Mohun and Roberto Veneziani in their Capital and Class #92 article entitled ‘The incoherence of the TSSI: a reply to Kliman and Freeman’. We show that they have effectively conceded that simultaneist interpretations of Marx’s theory contradict his conclusion that exploitation (workers’ surplus labor) is the exclusive source of profit in capitalism. We demonstrate the errors of logic in their claim that the TSS interpretation is incoherent. The debate thus confirms that the TSS interpretation – contrary to simultaneist interpretations – reproduce all Marx’s principal disputed conclusions and therefore constitutes a superior interpretation of his theory of value.

Susan Carleton Athey is the 2007 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, which is “awarded biennially to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” I have had the immense pleasure of being Susan's teacher, her advisor, her coauthor, and her friend. Yet I never cease to be amazed at her abilities and her accomplishments on so many dimensions. The AEA specifically cited her work in four distinct areas: monotone information models; industrial organization and particularly auctions; macroeconomics; and econometrics. Yet there is even more breadth to Susan's research contributions than this suggests, as I will show.

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he had become America's answer to Britain's Sir Robert Peel: a public figure of tremendous influence, who, having changed his mind on the issue, became the standard-bearer for free trade in both the intellectual and political arenas. Half a century and more in the past, when Wells's name was better remembered in American economic and political history, several stories were told of the causes of his conversion: some attributed it ultimately to the force of ideas, some to interests. My purpose is to demonstrate that the unacknowledged but most important cause was Wells's relationship with Edward Atkinson, and Wells and Atkinson's mutual wish to grant effective protection, or net protection, to cotton manufacturers. The story of Wells's conversion that unfolds in the demonstration is not one that disentangles and assigns weights to the contributions of theory and interests. It shows instead how each determined the other.

Meir Kohn's Exchange and Value claims that economics can be characterised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterise the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as "law and economics". We compare and contrasts the perspectives proposed by two prominent scholars - James Buchanan and Richard Posner - and argue that they respectively represent the exchange and the value paradigm in law and economics. More precisely, we show that Buchanan sticks to a definition of economics based on the exchange paradigm, and this leads him to define law and economics in a rather specific, different, narrower than Posner's way to define law and economics - a definition that corresponds to a conception of economics based on the value paradigm.

This is an interview with one of Australia’s most prolific publishers in the economics discipline. Clem Tisdell can be regarded as a pioneer of ecological, natural resource and environmental economics. The conversation takes us through the variety of his interests over the years, which he usefully categorises into six interrelated strands of research. We chart his career from humble beginnings through appointments at the Australian National University, the University of Newcastle and finally the University of Queensland.

In this contribution, we provide an interpretation of Friedrich von Wieser’s contribution to economics that pays tribute to the originality of his work and particularly to his view of how institutions interfere with individual behavior. This interaction takes place within a disequilibrium framework where social influences such as power or social class, and psychological factors such as force of habit or herd behavior, are the product of human action but also constitute constraints on further action. Section II stresses the institutionalist background of Wieser’s economics. We concentrate on Wieser’s general method—which we assimilate to an example of Joseph Agassi’s (1975) institutional individualism—and his analysis of the emergence and evolution of institutions via the dynamics of leaders and masses. In section III, we reinforce and illustrate the institutionalist stamp of Wieser’s economics by focusing on his work on monetary economics (Wieser 1904, 1909a, 1909b, 1927b) and his analysis of the emergence of money, based on our reading of Wieser’s Social Economics ([1927a] 1967) and The Law of Power ([1926] 1983).

This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar.

Une des idees centrales de l’Economie sociale de Max Weber concerne l’evolution des organisations institutionnelles. Dans la premiere partie de l’article, je montre que Weber peut etre interprete comme un economiste institutionnel. Dans la seconde partie, je reconstruis l’aspect le plus important de l’institutionnalisme de Max Weber, a savoir les interrelations entre les idees, les interets, les institutions et les ordres sociaux. Dans la troisieme partie, je demontre comment Weber applique cette approche institutionnaliste en examinant son explication economique des entraves au developpement en Chine. En suivant les concepts de Weber, j’effectue finalement quelques propositions destinees a enrichir la recherche economique contemporaine.

I Introduction IRVING FISHER'S Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Yale University in 1891, is remarkable in at least two distinct ways. The thesis contains a fully articulated general equilibrium model presented with the broad scope and formal mathematical clarity that we associate with Walras and his successors. But what is even more astonishing is the presentation, in the thesis, of Fisher's hydraulic apparatus for calculating equilibrium prices and the resulting distribution of society's endowments among the agents in the economy. Fisher's development of the general equilibrium model was done without any knowledge of the simultaneous achievement of Walras. In the introduction to his thesis, Fisher states that [t]he equations in Chapter IV, Sec. 10, were found by me two years ago, when I had read no mathematical economist except Jevons. They were an appropriate extension of Jevons' determination of the exchange of two commodities between two trading bodies to the exchange of any number of commodities between any number of traders.... These equations are essentially those of Walras. Even though Fisher's construction of what we now call the Walrasian model of equilibrium was a fully original achievement, he did have contemporaries: the central ideas of equilibrium theory were independently discovered at several locations in the final decade of the last century. But the second theme of Fisher's thesis was entirely novel in conception and execution. No other economist of his time suggested the possibility of exploring the implications of equilibrium analysis by constructing specific numerical models, with a moderately large number of commodities and consumers, and finding those prices that would simultaneously equate supply and demand in all markets. The profession would have to wait until rudimentary computers were available in the 1930s before Leontief turned his hand to a simplified version of this computation. Fisher's hydraulic machine is complex and ingenious. It correctly solves for equilibrium prices in a model of exchange in which each consumer has additive, monotonic, and concave utility functions, and a specified money income; the market supplies of each good are exogenously given. Both additivity and fixed money incomes make the model of exchange to which his mechanism is applied less than completely general. But we know of no argument for the existence of equilibrium prices in this restricted model that does not require the full use of Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Of course fixed point theorems were not available to Fisher and in that section of his thesis in which first-order conditions are presented for a general model of exchange, Fisher argues for consistency by counting equations and unknowns. It is hard to discover the source of Fisher's interest in computation. He was a student of J. Willard Gibbs, and perhaps the theme of concrete models in mechanics was carried over to economics. But it is also possible that his hydraulic apparatus is simply an instance of an American passion for complex machinery that gets things done. Fisher, himself, had a passion for innovation. In the course of a long career, he invented an elaborate tent for the treatment of tuberculosis (described in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1903), developed a mechanical diet indicator that permited easy calculation of the daily consumption of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, copywrited (1943) an icosahedral world globe with triangular facets that when unfolded was allegedly an improvement on the Mercator projection, and patented an "index visible filing system" (1913) sold to Kardex Rand, later Remmington Rand, in 1925 for $660,000. II Fisher's Cisterns LET US BEGIN by describing the special model of exchange that is solved by the Fisher machine. There are, say, m consumers, indexed by i = 1, ..., m and n goods, indexed by j = 1, . …

This paper discusses monetarist objections to the IS-LM model. We explore the views of two principal spokesmen for monetarism: Milton Friedman and the team of Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer. Friedman did not explicitly state the reasons he generally chose not to use the IS-LM model in rejecting Keynesian views on the demand function for money, the role of autonomous expenditures in cyclical fluctuations, the potency of fiscal policy as against monetary policy, etc. He presented statistical findings, historical evidence, and econometric results to support his alternative analysis of macroeconomics, but his critics were unconvinced. In 1970, in an effort to use his critics' common language, he set up a model with explicit terms for IS-LM to encompass both the quantity theory and the income-expenditure theory. Friedman attributed the failure of this effort to the fact that he was a Marshallian, his opponents Walrasians. Brunner and Meltzer's objections to IS-LM were explicit. They found it too spare, so they elaborated it by adding a credit market, disaggregating the asset market by specifying three assets: base money, government debt, and real capital. They set up a model with financial institutions and utilized it to study the effects of a variety of policies. In brief, summarizing the views of both Friedman and Brunner and Meltzer, monetarists dislike the IS-LM framework because it limits monetary influence too narrowly, essentially to the interest elasticity of money demand, and defines investment in an excessively narrow fashion, and even that is not explicit.

This paper compares the essential theoretical works of Joseph Schumpeter and Richard Goodwin. Though it also describes some biographical details of their overlapping lifetimes, the main focus is on the relation between their theoretical contributions. It is concluded that their role as theoretical mavericks challenging mainstream economics mirrors the methodological approach of evolutionary economics: progress needs the singular and unconventional challenge of innovators. Their long-lasting influence still is exerted by the scholars they influenced during their last period of activity. As well as showing several similarities the paper also discusses the essential differences between Schumpeter’s and Goodwin’s theoretical positions – in particular with respect to the works of Marx and Keynes.

This paper deals with methodological principles of Schumpeter’s academic writings. Those principles led Schumpeter to create diverse works and were reflected systematically in some of his writings, where Schumpeter emerged as a theorist of science. Besides working on specific topics, Schumpeter dealt systematically with methodological issues in different works. Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, in particular, must be regarded as the one study among his diverse works, which is considered not only his latest but also his most relevant analysis concerning social sciences and the role of economics in relation to sociology, history and other academic branches. The substantial preface of the History of Economic Analysis can be regarded as a manual on how to refer to different academic branches and integrate them into a coherent universal social science, which is far removed from being an autistic, narrow economic science of some modern representation. Although Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis has been extensively printed in several editions, the idea is that the preface especially reveals somewhat neglected thoughts in Schumpeterian discourse. While Schumpeter is mostly regarded as a pioneer of evolutionary economics, this paper argues that Schumpeter could also, perhaps primarily, be interpreted as a well-reasoning institutionalist aiming at a universal social science. From today’s point of view, Schumpeter is a truly interdisciplinary theorist.

The journal of the Econometric Society, Econometrica, was established in 1933 and edited by Ragnar Frisch for the first 22 years. As a new journal Econometrica had three key characteristics. First, it was devoted to a research program stated in few but significant words in the constitution of the Econometric Society and for many years printed in every issue of the journal. Second, it was the first international journal in economics. Third, it was the journal of association (Econometric Society) with members committed to a serious interest in econometrics. The paper gives a brief account of the circumstances around the establishment of the journal and of the relationship between Frisch and Alfred Cowles 3rd who in various capacities played a major role in launching the journal and keeping it going. It furthermore conveys observations and comments related to the editing of the first seven volumes of Econometrica, i.e. 1933-39. The main aim of the paper is to shed light on how the editor and a small core group of econometrician attempted to promote econometrics via Econometrica. The paper is overwhelmingly based on unpublished material from Frisch’s editorial files. Editorial principles, controversies, and style are illuminated through excerpts from the editorial correspondence. The paper was presented at ESEM-67, University of Gothenburg, 26-30 August, 2013.

This paper overviews the entire landscape of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has not emerged out of cryptocurrency competition, but rather became a dominant currency as the first broad market based cryptocurrency. But there are more than a hundred of cryptocurrencies in the market, and some are catching up to Bitcoin. This is a healthy sign of currency competition a la Hayek. Through this competition new technological and security innovations may emerge. In this paper, we point out potential problems with Bitcoin and propose some ideas for an alternative cryptocurrency.

Scitovsky is known as a forerunner of behavioural economics simply because he drew heavily on psychology and claimed that people’s choices may be ‘joyless’ (Scitovsky, The joyless economy, 1976). However, a careful reformulation of his analysis shows that he anticipated a number of insights (also with respect to Kahneman’s ‘two-systems of thought’) which suggest new lines of inquiry from an original and different perspective. These insights of Scitovsky regard the following aspects: Uncertainty as a condition where the outcomes of choosing a particular option (novelty) is partially unknown; the case of individual ‘consumption skill’ (inclusive of emotions) that finds this uncertainty desirable when it is challenging; the case of increasing such skill so as to change preferences and make choices more efficient; the case of failing to increase such skill so as to make addictive harmful products an alternative and more tempting option.

Schumpeter’s remarks on Ricardo’s criticisms of Smith’s system of thought (1954, p.472) can be further articulated by noting that while Ricardo’s most explicit and fundamental criticisms reach a climax in his chapter On Value, a number of explicit criticisms are concerned with apparently more specific or practical issues. One of these issues can be found in Chapter XXII, Bounties on Exportation, and Prohibitions of Importation of his Principles. This chapter provides a criticism of Chapter V, Of Bounties, Book IV of the Wealth of Nations and is intended to prove that “perhaps in no part of Adam Smith’s justly celebrated work, are his conclusions more liable to objection, than in the chapter on bounties” (1821, p.304). The historical relevance of Ricardo’s criticisms on this issue is confirmed in two opposite directions. One goes back to the years between the fist edition of the Wealth and that of Ricardo’s Principles. The other brings us forward to the years of Sraffa’s publication of Ricardo’s works and to the following revival of interest on Ricardo’s thought, either as such or as an alternative to Smith’s. Thus the issue has eventually fallen into the hands, or between the lines, of a growing number of authors who have dealt with Ricardo’s or Smith’s systems of thought in recent years. Among these recent authors are Peach (1993, 2008, 2009), S. Hollander (1973, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1987 [1992], 1992), O’Brien (1981 [2004]), O’Donnell (1990), West (1982), Gibbard (1994), Samuelson (1977, 1992), Elmslie (2004), Hueckel (2000a, 2000b, 2009) and others. The scope of this paper is narrower than that of the whole literature developed in the two periods above. It will not be confined, however, to the details of Ricardo’s criticisms of Smith’s argument but will reach for the analytical foundations both of these criticisms and of that argument. At this deeper level, the paper will be structured so as to provide, wherever possible, Smith’s virtual self-defence against Ricardo’s criticisms. Thus it will proceed by assessing, fist, whether or to what extent Smith and Ricardo are on this particular issue consistent “with themselves”, i.e. with the foundations (or other parts) of their different works; and, secondly, whether Ricardo’s criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of at least some of the foundations (or other parts) of his predecessor’s work. Smith’s virtual self-defence will be carried out by focusing on some diverging foundations of his system vis-à-vis Ricardo’s and, more particularly, on the temporary vs. permanent, money vs. real and market vs. natural price of labour (work to be done) as distinct from the temporary vs. permanent, money vs. real and market vs. natural price of commodities as products of labour (work done

This paper discusses the potential and limitations of Bitcoin as a digital currency. Bitcoin as a digital asset has been extensively discussed from the viewpoints of engineering and security design. But there are few economic analyses of Bitcoin as a currency. Bitcoin was designed as a payments vehicle and as a store of value (or speculation). It has no use bar as money or currency. Despite recent enthusiasm for Bitcoin, it seems very unlikely that currencies provided by central banks are at risk of being replaced, primarily because of the market price instability of Bitcoin (i.e. the exchange rate against the major currencies). We diagnose the instability of market price of Bitcoin as being a symptom of the lack of flexibility in the Bitcoin supply schedule ‐ a predetermined algorithm in which the proof of work is the major driving force. This paper explores the problem of instability from the viewpoint of economics and suggests a new monetary policy rule (i.e. monetary policy without a central bank) for stabilizing the values of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.