471 Videos
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How Government Helps, and Wall Street Hurts, the Innovative Enterprise
Aug 21, 2011
Innovation drives economic growth and welfare, and the industrial corporation drives innovation, says William Lazonick. But just how do corporations innovate?
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The Coase Theorem As Fiction
Aug 17, 2011
When externalities are present and transaction costs are absent, private parties will strike welfare-enhancing deals regardless of who owns what. In a frictionless world, bargaining leads to efficiency. That is the essence of the Coase Theorem, and it is fiction, according to Steven Medema.
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Financial Fragility in a Network of Trade Credit
Aug 16, 2011
The physicist Sorin Solomon begins to feel dizzy when the economist Leanne Ussher talks econ lingo. Yet he listens, because the two of them have found a productive area of collaboration: some economic phenomena, they find, can be explained without recourse to the quirks that feed into human decision making.
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Why Is There a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics?
Aug 16, 2011
The Nobel Memorial Prize defines high achievement in economics, and it validates the discipline’s claim for scientific authority. And yet, historically, it can be understood as a reflection of domestic policy conflicts in Sweden.
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Banks: How Big Is too Big?
Aug 15, 2011
We all know it: The financial sector is bloated and banks are too big to fail. But just how bloated is it, and how much should it be shrunk?
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How to Avoid Herding in Research
Aug 15, 2011
An individual fish reduces the danger to itself by swimming as close as possible to the center of the school. That is how schools hold together.
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What Finance (and Economics) Can Learn from Law
Aug 14, 2011
Without law and legal institutions, financial markets won’t work. That’s what economists discovered about 15 years ago, when former socialist countries turned towards capitalism.
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Paul Samuelson and the Neoclassical Synthesis
Jul 24, 2011
Paul Samuelson was both a mathematical micro-economist, working from theorem to proof in the neoclassical tradition, and a committed Keynesian macroeconomist, convinced of the necessity of policy intervention to improve the performance of market economies. How did he square these two sides of himself? Wade Hands goes into the archives to find out.
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When Banks Fail, the Case of Japan
Jul 24, 2011
What happens to Main Street when Wall Street fails? Japan expert David Weinstein squeezes a unique data set to answer this question.
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Modeling Asset Markets when Knowledge is Ambiguous
Jul 19, 2011
When you flip a coin, you expect heads and tails to show up with a 50% chance each. But what if all you knew was that heads and tails each have a chance of at least 25%? That’s how Scott Condie captures Knightian uncertainty in asset markets.
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Financing Innovation or Speculation, the Case of Cleveland
Jul 18, 2011
Did you know that, around 1920, Cleveland, Ohio, had a technological cutting edge not unlike Silicon Valley today? You probably didn’t. Margaret Levenstein tells the story.
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How Economists Used to Be Made
Jul 17, 2011
Economists aren’t born, they’re made. Irwin Collier digs into archives to find out how Paul Samuelson and his generation were made.
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Why Economics Needs History
Jul 10, 2011
What challenges will China have to surmount in order to make its currency a true international currency?
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How Investors Use Stories to Tame Uncertainty
Jul 4, 2011
If you want to understand how fund managers choose a portfolio, why not ask them?
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Why Economics Needs the History of Thought
Jun 29, 2011
Who is going to teach fields like economic methodology and the history of economic thought if these fields aren’t taught to current graduate students?