In recent decades the new institutional economics has redrawn attention to the significance of state sponsored and regulated institutions, organisations, laws, rules, customs and culturally conditioned behaviour for the promotion of long term economic development (Menard and Shirley, 2005)....

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms thatmerely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of tradetheory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical modeldue to Melitz (2003) has...

U.K. guidelines on the introduction of new regulations require that politicians and civil servants should “think small first” when deciding whether and how to introduce new regulations that affect business. Similar guidelines are currently being adopted across the EU. This paper presents the...

This article examines the hypothesis that in the “Third Reich”, bureaucratic agencies engaged in economic policies competed with each other. First, a model of competition is constructed whose predictions are then compared with actual political processes in Nazi Germany. This shows that the...

The task of economic planning in the new nation of Nigeria in theearly 1960s tested the limits of economic technologies: its recipesfor development, its possibilities of measurement, and fromdifferences in political economy. These dimensions of the problembeset not only the Nigerian politicians...

Immer wieder wird in der wirtschaftspolitischen Debatte behauptet, dass überhöhte Arbeitskosten die entscheidendeWurzel der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland seien. Eine neuere Untersuchung des Institutsder deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) scheint dessen frühere Ergebnisse zu bestätigen, wonach...