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...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...