Archive

The Institute will host the Winter School on Law and Finance at Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris on January 6-9, 2014.

This research project investigates the reasons behind the US financial crisis by applying the tools of the history of economic thought to the postwar evolution of US antitrust law and economic

This research project contends that Piero Sraffa tried to develop an economic theory that could stand up as an alternative to the orthodox theory of value and provide a foundation for the Keynesian and post-Keynesian alternatives.

This research project follows freed slaves from when they first applied for their land under the Southern Homestead Act until 1900 to learn how access to free land influenced their economic progress.

This research project replicates a large number of studies by teaching replication to students, with the results included in a wiki project about the replicability of research.

This research project creates a systematic and publically available database of macroeconomic and structural conditions in all IMF loan agreements signed after 1987.

This research project constructs new measures of slavery as a state-sanctioned property rights institution and documents how slavery impacted economic development in US history.

This research project deepens the understanding of the history of economics as a discipline by making economic texts of historical importance available to students and scholars and by translating the important historical works of economics into English.

This research project reinterprets the events causing the British Industrial Revolution by showing that the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 was significant in causing the divergence of political institutions which led to the divergence of economic institutions and policy.

This research project examines the value of political connections between corporate groups in Italy and the National Fascist Party (PNF) during the years of Mussolini’s rise to power (1921-1929).

What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?

I’ve already blogged on how undergraduate education evolved at MIT in the postwar era here and here, but since Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman make the case that, to bring introductory economics closer to the real world, macro should be taught before micro as Samuelson did in the first 13 editions of his Economics textbook, it may be worth returning to it.

What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?

In the past decade, the volume of literature in the history of economics has been of 500 articles and just under 50 books a year. The graph below traces the count in two year intervals (articles left axis, books right axis). The absolute volume is stable but given the growth of economic literature in the period, stable might be rebranded as static.

The Bank of England took the first step in putting the brakes on the surging property market as it scrapped the United Kingdom’s flagship initiative that encourages mortgage lending, introduced earlier this year by Treasury minster George Osborne.