Publication Number: 2024-04 Publication Date: July 2024 The Coase theorem has been shrouded in ambiguity and confusion throughout its life, this despite the prominent role that it plays in economic and legal analysis. As this paper demonstrates, this is no less… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2024-03 Publication Date: April 2024 The outbreak of the Great War facilitated a shift in the dominant view of human nature within the Bloomsbury-Cambridge intelligentsia, steering it away from an optimistic view toward a pessimistic one. The… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2024-2 Publication Date: March 2024 We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2024-01 Publication Date: January 2024 The paper presents Kenneth Arrow’s interpretation of the competitive general equilibrium model, arguing he used it to articulate an ambitious critique of what he called the 'neoclassical theory.' Without… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-10 Publication Date: December 2023 In the 1950s, Jacques Rueff’s references to social order seem pretty clear: it is not a spontaneous phenomena. Although Rueff is generally seen as a liberal economist, this has prompted commentators to… read more about this publication »
Publication number 2023-09 Publication Date December 2023 This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two… read more about this publication »
Publication Number 2023-08 Publication Date: August 2023 This paper examines the evolving role played by the Coase theorem over the several editions of Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law. In doing so, the paper shows both the grounding of Posner’s… read more about this publication »
Publication Number 2023-07 Publication Date: November 2023 Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from… read more about this publication »
Publication Number 2023-06 Publication Date: November 2023 Wassily Leontief met with decades of success for the development of input-output analysis, and yet he remained a staunch critic of the economics profession throughout his life. To understand his success,… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-05 Publication Date: November 2023 John Maynard Keynes’s philosophical outlook evolved from the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 up until the publication of his A Treatise on Probability in 1921. The evolution of Keynes’s philosophical… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-04 Publication Date: June 2023 The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-09 Publication Date: Revised May 2023 Public expenditure theory is a late-comer to the field of public finance, despite laments over the lack of such a theory dating to the late 1800s. This paper documents and attempts to explain this… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-03 Publication Date: May 2023 This paper revisits the path by which Coase developed the result now known as the Coase theorem, including the famous meeting at the home of Aaron Director during which Coase ‘converted’ a group of Chicago… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-02 Publication Date: March 6, 2023 In the early 1950s, the drive to find a practical solution to European antagonisms led to the construction of the first Common Market at the European scale, between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy,… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2023-01 Publication Date: January 2023 In a letter to the editors of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Jean-Marc Ginoux and Franck Jovanovic claim that my work on Ragnar Frisch is “useless” and has “no merit” (p.8). I will gladly… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-15 Publication Date: December 28, 2022 Both Friedrich Hayek and Carl Schmitt are critical of the role of economic interest groups in modern democracies. This paper begins by comparing their descriptions of how such groups attempt to… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-14 Publication Date: December 2022 As economic planners sought to rebuild Europe in the unstable postwar period, economic expertise was called upon to help in the drawing of national budgets and to inform economic and planning policies. A… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-13 Publication Date: December 2022 In 1965, Henry Manne convinced the Association of American Law Schools and the American Economic Association to establish an ad hoc Joint Committee to explore the possibilities of collaborative efforts… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-12 Publication Date: December 2022 One Friday afternoon a dozen or so years ago I sat in on a freshman honors seminar led by one of my colleagues. This weekly seminar featured guest speakers from various walks of life, and that week’s… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-11 Publication Date: September 2022 In the aftermath of World War I, a financial war was fought on the battlegrounds of international organizations and financial diplomacy. While the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Organization… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-10 Publication Date: October 2022 The present paper is set out to examine the place of Geoff Harcourt’s 1965 “Two-sector model of the distribution of income and the level of employment in the short run ” in his research agenda, as… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-09 Publication Date: September 2022 In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done “work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation,” the… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2022-08 Publication Date: August 2022 The comparable worth principle – a call for a general readjustment of wages according to a measure of the worth of an occupation – gained a policy momentum in the United States in the early 1980s. A… read more about this publication »
Publication Number: 2202-07 Publication Date: May 17, 2022 The paper aims to show how the formal revolution in economics has influenced the developments of Rational Choice and Game Theory in Political Science. Our focus will be on American political scientist… read more about this publication »