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China released quarterly GDP figures this week. Wen Jiabao emphasized the parts of the release that pointed toward stabilization, and one can certainly find some logic to that view.

MWG introduces the theory of consumer behavior by presenting two distinct approaches to modeling consumer behavior, the preference-based approach (based upon unobservable preferences generating a utility function) and the choice-based approach (based upon observable choice behavior), and attempting to establish connections between the two.

What makes a good model?

In this post, I would like to explore the views of preferences and behavior outlined in MWG Ch.1, and specifically the view of rationality developed in this first chapter.

Everyone wants to ring-fence something, but they can’t agree on what: Vickers, Liikanen, Volcker.

Everyone wants to ring-fence something, but they can’t agree on what:

In this initial blog post we wish to situate microeconomics as a field of social enquiry.

Can economics be morally centered? And perhaps more importantly, should it be?

The blog is intended for any student taking an advanced microeconomics course, any faculty member teaching such material, or indeed anyone interested in microeconomics and its role in the discipline.

Excerpts from a draft introduction of Till Düppe’s and Roy Weintraub’s new book, under revision for Princeton University Press, presently carrying the working title “Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Transformation of Economic Theory

“The aim would not be to unravel a hidden coherent structure of the philosophical, theoretical, political dimensions of his work, but to give a sense of the contingencies that his work was subject to – both in terms of its origins and its receptions. Don’t make up an Arrow that he himself was not aware of.” -Till to me, email conversation on Kenneth Arrow, summer 2012

Last Thursday, the Fed announced its anticipated third round of balance-sheet expansion, at a fixed rate of about $40B per month “until [substantial] improvement [in unemployment] is achieved in a context of price stability”.

Excerpts from “Retrospect and Prospect,” the concluding remarks Bob Coats presented at (or maybe wrote after) the History of Economics conference held in 1972 at Bellagio to commemorate and reassess the 1870s “marginal revolution” (full proceedings here).

Robert Solow, “Notes on Coping.” In Szenberg ed. Eminent Economists: their Life Philosophy, 1992, p270

Yesterday, I had my first introductory economics seminar with my new students.