History
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Years granted:
2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
The Divergence of England
This research project reinterprets the events causing the British Industrial Revolution by showing that the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 was significant in causing the divergence of political institutions which led to the divergence of economic institutions and policy.
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Years granted:
2014
The Value of Political Connections in Fascist Italy — Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks
This research project examines the value of political connections between corporate groups in Italy and the National Fascist Party (PNF) during the years of Mussolini’s rise to power (1921-1929).
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Finance to Support Growth
Dec 12, 2013
What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?
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In which MIT decided to teach micro first so as to make economics more relevant
Dec 4, 2013
I’ve already blogged on how undergraduate education evolved at MIT in the postwar era here and here, but since Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman make the case that, to bring introductory economics closer to the real world, macro should be taught before micro as Samuelson did in the first 13 editions of his Economics textbook, it may be worth returning to it.
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The Moral Limits of Markets
Dec 3, 2013
What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?
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Mature history of economics
Dec 1, 2013
In the past decade, the volume of literature in the history of economics has been of 500 articles and just under 50 books a year. The graph below traces the count in two year intervals (articles left axis, books right axis). The absolute volume is stable but given the growth of economic literature in the period, stable might be rebranded as static.
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Mazzucato and Kaletsky Debate U.K. Mortgage Plan on BBC
Nov 27, 2013
The Bank of England took the first step in putting the brakes on the surging property market as it scrapped the United Kingdom’s flagship initiative that encourages mortgage lending, introduced earlier this year by Treasury minster George Osborne.
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In the thick of it (labels and research)
Nov 24, 2013
Historians like labels. X history. History of y. The labels carve out subjects, set boundaries in time and space, at times even suggest methodological commitments.
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Do social movements create new ideas?
Nov 12, 2013
The short answer is yes. For the long answer I will make you sit through seven paragraphs.
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Harry Dexter White and the History of Bretton Woods
Nov 9, 2013
Why does Benn Steil’s history of Bretton Woods distort the ideas of Harry Dexter White?
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Economic Policy Must Address Excessive Private Sector Leverage
Nov 6, 2013
Adair Lord Turner, former Chairman of Great Britain’s Financial Services Authority and current Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, will argue in a keynote address to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday that central banks must be equipped in future to address the dangers of excessive private sector leverage, using both pre-emptive interest rate policy and macro-prudential policy tools.
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America’s Debt-Ceiling Debacle
Oct 22, 2013
When Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis threatened the euro’s survival, U.S. officials called their European counterparts to express bewilderment at their inability to resolve the issue.
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Economic theory declassified?
Oct 19, 2013
So, most Nobel Prize exegetes went a long way, this week, toward explaining that asset pricing is not primarily born out of theoretical reflection but out of prize-deserving empirical work.
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What You Can Do to Protect Yourself Against a Totally Unnecessary U.S. Government Default
Oct 14, 2013
If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?
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The Political Economy of the Nobel Prize, 45th edition
Oct 12, 2013
This morning, when I woke up a few hours before the Nobel announcement, I felt seriously dissatisfied. I had meant to write a post on Thomson Reuters’s prediction that Card, Angrist and Krueger may win the Nobel for their work on empirical microeconomics.