Archive

How must the European institutional structure be modified to fortify the euro zone?

In Friday’s FT, former Morgan Stanley trader Douglas Keenan traces banks’ LIBOR manipulations back to 1991, when he observed, from the futures desk, LIBOR fixings come in at levels different from where he new the market to be.

If the meetings of European historians of economics are urbane and cosmopolitan, the meetings of American historians are, by contrast, frank and toilful.

The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) recently published the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, in which the authors propose a measure of wealth based on the stock of capital present in a country, as opposed to the flow measure of GDP.

Has the servant’s servant become the master’s master?

A few weeks ago, I attended the H2S 4th workshop on “Cross disciplinary ventures in postwar American Social Sciences,” (research program outline here).

Last weekend, I was in Tübingen - very close to my home town: the same smell, the same surreal Swabian idyll that makes you think of Hölderlin and Hesse rather than DSGE.

A few days ago, I began researching on the history of a subfield of economics which was born in the sixties, then thrived and institutionalized itself in the early seventies.

[We are inaugurating something new in this blog: a jointly written post!]

How representation of data can contribute to, or dispel the false certainty of statistical and econometric technique.

“We choose this stochastic structure for computational reasons. This reduces the dimension of the variables. With (such and such) alternative, the computational burden would have dramatically increased.”

A poem seems to be an almost perfect metaphor for the modern corporate world.

The University of Chicago is well-known for as the place where a famous group of economists, including Milton Friedman, Georges Stigler, Gary Becker, among others, developed a method for analyzing economic facts based on Marshallian price theory, a vision of the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates called monetarism, and an approach to individual liberties and the role of the state known as (neo)liberalism.

I always think of Adam Smith when I hear the term ‘division of labour’ - but I’m being cured of this by reading a bit more about Britains late 18th century in Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men.

At the heart of the Eurocrisis lies a vicious circle where once there was a virtuous one.