503 Videos

In 2006, the Fed asked its macroeconometric model what would happen if house prices dropped by 20%. The model projected the past into the future and said: “Not much.” Well, the financial crisis proved it wrong.

Banks take on excessive risk since they know, in case of failure, the taxpayer will step in to rescue them. That is a form of free insurance, and Ed Kane wants to end it.

Innovation drives economic growth and welfare, and the industrial corporation drives innovation, says William Lazonick. But just how do corporations innovate?

When externalities are present and transaction costs are absent, private parties will strike welfare-enhancing deals regardless of who owns what. In a frictionless world, bargaining leads to efficiency. That is the essence of the Coase Theorem, and it is fiction, according to Steven Medema.

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?