499 Videos

The physicist Sorin Solomon begins to feel dizzy when the economist Leanne Ussher talks econ lingo. Yet he listens, because the two of them have found a productive area of collaboration: some economic phenomena, they find, can be explained without recourse to the quirks that feed into human decision making.

The Nobel Memorial Prize defines high achievement in economics, and it validates the discipline’s claim for scientific authority. And yet, historically, it can be understood as a reflection of domestic policy conflicts in Sweden.

We all know it: The financial sector is bloated and banks are too big to fail. But just how bloated is it, and how much should it be shrunk?

An individual fish reduces the danger to itself by swimming as close as possible to the center of the school. That is how schools hold together.

Without law and legal institutions, financial markets won’t work. That’s what economists discovered about 15 years ago, when former socialist countries turned towards capitalism.

Paul Samuelson was both a mathematical micro-economist, working from theorem to proof in the neoclassical tradition, and a committed Keynesian macroeconomist, convinced of the necessity of policy intervention to improve the performance of market economies. How did he square these two sides of himself? Wade Hands goes into the archives to find out.

What happens to Main Street when Wall Street fails? Japan expert David Weinstein squeezes a unique data set to answer this question.

When you flip a coin, you expect heads and tails to show up with a 50% chance each. But what if all you knew was that heads and tails each have a chance of at least 25%? That’s how Scott Condie captures Knightian uncertainty in asset markets.

Did you know that, around 1920, Cleveland, Ohio, had a technological cutting edge not unlike Silicon Valley today? You probably didn’t. Margaret Levenstein tells the story.

Economists aren’t born, they’re made. Irwin Collier digs into archives to find out how Paul Samuelson and his generation were made.

What challenges will China have to surmount in order to make its currency a true international currency?

If you want to understand how fund managers choose a portfolio, why not ask them?

Who is going to teach fields like economic methodology and the history of economic thought if these fields aren’t taught to current graduate students?

Delli Gatti starts where his dissertation advisor, Hyman Minsky, left off.

An Interview with the Author of “The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort”