Blogs

INET co-founder George Soros has been awarded the Adam Smith Award by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), an association of business economists. Read more

MWG introduces the theory of consumer behavior by presenting two distinct approaches to modeling consumer behavior, the preference-based approach (based upon unobservable preferences generating a utility function) and the choice-based approach (based upon observable choice behavior), and attempting to establish connections between the two. Read more

What makes a good model?

This question is at the heart of Andy Haldane’s recent article for VoxEU titled “What have the economists ever done for us?” (posted below). Read more

Barry Eichengreen says yes. In his op-ed yesterday for the Financial Times, Eichengreen writes that a lack of US growth may lead to a fall in the dollar's popularity, and the result could be a global liquidity shortage.

He warns that, “It may seem a strange time to worry about a shortage of global liquidity. But precisely this risk looms and, if nothing is done, it will threaten 21st-century globalisation.” Read more

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Everyone wants to ring-fence something, but they can’t agree on what:  Vickers, Liikanen, Volcker.

In all proposals, the idea is to have bank capital separately allocated for some activity, and to prevent that capital from being exposed to any other activity.  Some people want to lock the wild animals in a cage to keep them away from us; some people want to lock the tame animals in a cage to keep them safe from the dangerous world outside. Read more

(This article, originally written by Beatrice Weder di Mauro, was translated from German. You can find the article as it appeared in Handeslblatt, a leading German business paper, here) Read more

WASHINGTON (September 28, 2012) -- Professor Luis Garicano of the London School of Economics, speaking today about the proposals of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Council on the Euro Zone Crisis (ICEC) at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, expressed his shock at the "betrayal" by Germany, the Netherlands and Finland of the agreements in the June 29 euro summit, and at the recent statements against a banking union and against legacy-cost burden sharing by the Bundesbank´s President Jens Weidman. Read more

Microeconomics: A Non-definition Read more

This blog is a modest contribution to New Economic Thinking. We hope through it to contribute in a small way to changing graduate education in economics and the subject itself. The blog presents critical commentary on the standard textbook, “Microeconomic Theory” (by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael Whinston and Jerry Green) or MWG, which is used in Ph.D. programs in economics around the world and widely viewed as an academic standard. Our goal is to selectively comment on the material presented in MWG, which forms the core of what is often thought to be the most technical and difficult material in the standard first year Ph.D. Read more