Archive

Many companies around the world have discovered they can benefit financially from integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets in their daily operations and strategy.

This paper asks, how empirical evidence does or does not influence economic thinking and theory. In particular, which role do calibration, statistical inference, and structural change play?

This paper, which is prepared for the Inagural Conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in King’s College, Cambridge, 8-11 April 2010, questions the preeminence of theory over empirics in economics and argues that empirical econometrics needs to be given a more important and independent role in economic analysis, not only to have some confidence in the soundness of our empirical inferences, but to uncover empirical regularities that can serve as a basis for new economic thinking.

Many people regard the recent financial crisis as a painful addition to an already massive body of evidence that demonstrates the inadequacy of today’s economic models of “rational” markets.

The current economic and financial crisis, and it is both, has already imposed great costs on the global economy. Nor is there any guarantee that we have seen the worst and that recovery is now assured.

Economic theory has modeled itself on theoretical physics. It has sought to establish timelessly valid laws that govern economic behavior and can be used reversibly both to explain and to predict events.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking convened many of the world’s most distinguished economists, academics and thought leaders at its inaugural Conference at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

An autobiographical paper by William J. Baumol, in which he recounts his academic life and career.  The paper is a contribution to a series of recollections and reflections on the professional experiences of distinguished economists which the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review (now PSL Quarterly Review) started in 1979.