Laws

Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.

This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.

The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.

Innovation, the commercialization of invention, is both desirable and necessary for growth and higher living standards in modern economies. Innovation’s contribution to the economy is being measured increasingly more precisely, and its contribution has been assessed aseconomically important and growing.

Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Can China lead the way on innovation?