History

Last Spring Larry Summers wounded Thomas Piketty in a friendly embrace.

The question of underdevelopment and development policies in postwar Europe will be the theme of a workshop organized by Michele Alacevich, Sandrine Kott, and Mark Mazower, at Columbia University, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Friday, October 10, 2014. The program is available here. Below are some of Alacevich’s insights on the issue leading up the event:

Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.

Employment as University Professor is by comparison with the grind of the professional world a peaceful, perhaps even relaxing, assignment.

Government safety nets give protected institutions an implicit subsidy and intensify incentives for value-maximizing boards and managers to risk the ruin of their firms. Standard accounting statements do not record the value of this subsidy and forcing subsidized institutions to show more accounting capital will do little to curb their enhanced appetite for tail risk.

The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.

Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?

Ever since 2008, increasing numbers of economists, students, and even market professionals have protested the way economics is currently taught and practiced.

The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.

Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

This year, the History of Economics Society (HES) meeting was organized at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The meeting was, on the whole, a nice affair, there were plenty of interesting sessions, I reconvened with old friends and was able to present there my latest work and receive constructive comments.

Inspired by the Coasean “market vs firm” dichotomy, we offer a new definition of efficiency by applying the notions of network cost and network efficiency as developed in complex network theory.

It is impossible to tell the history of American antitrust law and economics during the so-called formative era (1890- 1915) without a preliminary understanding of the economic rationale underlying that major phase of American constitutional law commonly called laissez faire constitutionalism, or Lochner era.

India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.

Can Economists Be Adequate Without Studying History?