Criticism of the fundamental classical postulates is the main focus of attention of the institutional theory. In their works, a number of representatives of the institutionalism have expresses their strong disagreement with the hedonistic principles of profit and loss as being the primary...

The institutional theory is, to a great extent, filled with criticism of the main classical postulates. Many institutionalists question in their works the hedonistic principle of profit and loss as a main motivating factor for human behavior. The main classical concepts result from relatively...

Recent historiography on the interest of Italian economists in American economic thought is becoming rich and valuable. Thanks to these sources, we know that this interest arose because several Italian economists were attracted by the realism featured in North American economic investigation, by...

In the development of the general equilibrium theories, Hicks and Allais played an essential role. We are studying here the contributions which were theirs respectively in Value and Capital (1939) and in the Traité d?économie pure (1943). The accent is put on three points: the theory of...

We compile a ranking of the research output of all Nobel Laureates in economics using the Handelsblatt methodology and compare the outcome to the Handelsblatt ranking of economists in the Germanspeaking area. Our analysis focuses on whether the overall rating scores of the Nobel Laureates are...

This paper provides a quantitative perspective on Gene Fama's influence on the scholarly community. He has more than 140,000 Google cites while the median number of citations for the Fellows of the American Finance Association is 32,792. Gene Fama has published highly-cited papers in six...

May the history of economic thought be a useful device for addressing a sustainable path towards economic and financial recovery from the Great Financial Depression and the nowadays Sovereign Debt Crises? According to Cicero the answer should be predictable: ‘‘Historia, magistra vitae’’,...

In this essay, I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, <em>Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius</em>. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how...

The essay examines various aspects of the teaching of public finance in the Italian universities during the period of thirty years 1915-1945: the academic staff; the chair competitions; the main textbooks; the main theoretical contributions of public finance scholars.

Recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the self-interested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but Utopian world in which conflicts abound but a handshake is a handshake. But a handshake is not always a...