197 Results for “mehrling”

Bloomberg

How do economists make their models work? By assuming that investors have rational expectations and that every market participant is alike. However, things quickly get messy once economists start to acknowledge that people are different, interact with each other, and change heuristic forecasting strategies based on recent performance.

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.

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.

My first TV chat show performance:

So, how hard is it to write the history of exceptional figures? Shall we buy film cameras?

One of the fundamental ideas of modern economics — that people have rational expectations, an unbiased, statistically correct view of the future — is, in reality, a simple hypothesis.

Climate change policy is caught in a stalemate between those who fear the environmental consequences of not doing enough and those who fear the economic consequences of overreacting. But controversy over the extent and sources of climate change need not stand in the way of a positive economic policy response.

The Economist pays tribute to Hyman Minsky, whose ideas on financial instability have not been given the attention and prominence they deserve

The British Corn Returns data provided the empirical basis for the fierce debate around the introduction and repeal of the 19th century British Corn Laws. Contemporary readers, like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, followed them as closely as stock market prices of today. Much of 19th century political economy rested on contemporaries’ interpretations of this data.

Institute for New Economic Thinking grantees Christian Belabed and Thomas Theobald and their co-authors have revived this old theory as a hypothesis to explain the apparent statistical link between rising income inequality and current account deficits.

Corrado DiGuilmi and Laura Carvalho, grantees of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, have individually been exploring two possible alternative analytical entry points: mean field methods from physics and stock flow consistent modeling from accounting. The idea behind their grant is to work together to combine these two approaches, the first bottom-up and the second top-down.

Yesterday, Harvard students of Ec 10 staged a walkout to draw attention to the bias they detect in the course.

Explore your curiosity in economics in an open and critical community.

Most of us probably think of management consultancy as a technocratic function, helping companies fix internal problems in order to become more productive. But Institute for New Economic Thinking grantee Kimberley Chong thinks about it in a different way, by viewing management consultancy through the lens of cultural anthropology.