Hasil untuk "Economics"

Gunther Glenk, S. Reichelstein

A. DiMasia, Henry G. Grabowskib, Ronald W. Hansenc

Alessandro Acquisti, Curtis R. Taylor, Liad Wagman

R. Shiller

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned toward narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing. Stories motivate and connect activities to deeply felt values and needs. Narratives “go viral” and spread far, even worldwide, with economic impact. The 1920–1921 Depression, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the so-called Great Recession of 2007–2009, and the contentious political-economic situation of today are considered as the results of the popular narratives of their respective times. Though these narratives are deeply human phenomena that are difficult to study in a scientific manner, quantitative analysis may help us gain a better understanding of these epidemics in the future. (JEL D72, E32, G01, N10)

A. Brodeur, David Gray, A. Islam et al.

Abstract The goal of this piece is to survey the developing and rapidly growing literature on the economic consequences of COVID‐19 and the governmental responses, and to synthetize the insights emerging from a very large number of studies. This survey: (i) provides an overview of the data sets and the techniques employed to measure social distancing and COVID‐19 cases and deaths; (ii) reviews the literature on the determinants of compliance with and the effectiveness of social distancing; (iii) mentions the macroeconomic and financial impacts including the modelling of plausible mechanisms; (iv) summarizes the literature on the socioeconomic consequences of COVID‐19, focusing on those aspects related to labor, health, gender, discrimination, and the environment; and (v) summarizes the literature on public policy responses.

Gerald W. Brock

© Association of Christian Economists he New Institutional Economics provides a framework for understanding the interaction of government structures, firm organization, and individual decisions, emphasizing transaction costs as a central component of economic activity. This article briefly reviews the Old Institutional Economics and its decline and then describes the New Institutional Economics which incorporate some of the earlier institutional concerns into a framework more closely connected to mainstream economics. It concludes with some implications for Christian economists.

Tim Jackson, P. Senker

R. Baldwin, B. W. D. Mauro

W. Nordhaus

William D. Nordhaus delivered his Prize Lecture on 8 December 2018 at the Aula Magna, Stockholm University.

Charles I. Jones, Christopher Tonetti

Data is nonrival: a person’s location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by many firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns. As a result, there may be social gains to data being used broadly across firms, even in the presence of privacy considerations. Fearing creative destruction, firms may choose to hoard their data, leading to the inefficient use of nonrival data. Giving data property rights to consumers can generate allocations that are close to optimal. Consumers balance their concerns for privacy against the economic gains that come from selling data broadly. (JEL C80, D11, D21, D83, E22, K11, O34)

H. Hotelling

M. Friedman

Martin L. Weitzman, Lawrence H. Summers

F. E.

Paul R. Milgrom, John E. Roberts

O. Williamson

S. Rosen

A. C. Pigou

E. Weintraub

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science By E. Roy Weintraub. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 313. $18.95 (paperback). It is a contemporary truism that if you hope to make a contribution to the field of economics, or even to study it, you had better first get a solid background in mathematics. It should also be evident that this has not always been the case, as anyone who has read Adam Smith or Karl Marx, or for that matter Frank Knight, J. M. Keynes, or F. A. Hayek, well knows. Sometime in the twentieth century economics changed, and changed profoundly. In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science, Roy Weintraub attempts to make some sense of the transformation. I was not prepared to enjoy this book. I knew Weintraub to be a lively writer, but his topic was daunting. I was half expecting a forthrightly pedantic and in the end (at least, given my own tastes) ploddingly dull monograph that followed the usual formulaic listing of "seminal contributions" on the road to full mathematization. In glum anticipation I imagined the questions to be covered: Shall we start with Cournot? With Bentham and the felicific calculus? Was Walras, as Schumpeter wrote, the greatest economist who ever lived, at least that is until his twentieth century successors, Arrow and Debreu and McKenzie, surpassed him? There would of course be the obligatory chapter on Samuelson's Foundations, another on the introduction in economics of fixed point theorems, still another on the fine points of proof strategies. At least for me, reading such a book would be a real challenge. It would be a duty, and a grim one. To my great good fortune, Roy Weintraub's How Economics Became a Mathematical Science is neither pedantic nor dull. It is, in fact, an altogether extraordinary book. Organized not in terms of a grand narrative, it is instead a series of snapshots. The snapshots are not necessarily of seminal moments, but of representative ones, and they are well chosen. Like all good history, the stories Weintraub recounts are multilayered, complex, even messy, a word he uses (p. 207). It would be unfair to expect that such a collection of vignettes should hang together. Incredibly, though, they do. As a final bonus, there are real surprises to be found in nearly every chapter. This, then, is an enjoyable book to read. But it is also an important one. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that How Economics Became a Mathematical Science itself promises to change the way that people view the relationship between mathematics and economics. Weintraub says as much at the start of one of his chapters: "Modern controversies over formalism in economics rest on misunderstandings about the history of mathematics, the history of economics, and the history of the relationship between mathematics and economics" (p. 72). I usually hate such bald statements. It turns out, though, that he's right. Weintraub starts from a startlingly simple premise-both economics and mathematics have changed over the course of the past 100 plus years, so it makes sense to look at them both. Looking at how they have changed, and their interaction, might reveal some things that would be lost if one followed the all-too-usual Whig history route, the latter a form of backward induction in which one uses the present state of economics as a guide for picking out which episodes in the past are worthy of attention. The surprises begin in the first chapter. When most economists think of mathematics, they think of a stable discipline consisting of a set of related subject areas (algebra, geometry, calculus, topology) that yield tools for economists to use in constructing models of varying levels of generality. The tools are out there, as it were, sitting in books on the shelf, only to be learned and applied.' This "bookshelf view of mathematical knowledge" is challenged in the very first chapter, one that carries the intriguing title, "Bum the Mathematics (Tripos). …

J. List, A. Shaikh, Yang Xu