Articles

More on substance, coherence, and relevance in the Eurozone debate.

It is high time to look more closely at the labor cost competitiveness myth.

For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong – aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?

In 2003, McCullough and Vinod wrote, “Research that cannot be replicated is not science, and cannot be trusted either as part of the profession’s accumulated body of knowledge or as a basis for policy.”(1)

“Governments propose, markets dispose,” as Charles Kindleberger liked to say.

In 1953, Oskar Morgenstern proposed to reform the eligibility criterion for fellows of the Econometric Society, in an attempt to foster empirical work.

Public funding behind the technology is the secret ingredient.

A student of microeconomics learns that any competitive equilibrium leads to a Pareto efficient outcome (First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics). What do we mean by the efficiency or inefficiency of markets?

A student of microeconomics learns that any desirable efficient market allocation can be sustained by a competitive equilibrium (the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics), given appropriate lump-sum wealth redistributions. This is typically understood as a means to correct unfair market outcomes. What are the real world implications of the second theorem? How well does it address distributional concerns?

The latest austerity deal is terrible for Greece and Europe.