This paper addresses the discussion between economic power and the power of politics with particular focus on financial markets. After general reflections about the economic basis of power, the paper discusses in a general equilibrium framework how financial innovations can lead to risk creation...

A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of preexisting knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new...

This paper advances two propositions, one concerning content, the other concerning research strategy. (1) The advent of wide-spread internet publishing reduces the stifling impact of the refereeing process on the papers accepted and submitted to journals. Economics scholars are less bound to...

Due to its formality and highly analytic thinking, economics is often attributed a leading role among the social sciences and a prominent position as contributor to economic or social issues in the real world. Fact is, however, that the empirical proof for such a claim is either missing or...

Survival in academia depends on publications in refereed journals. Authors only get their papers accepted if they intellectually prostitute themselves by slavishly following the demands made by anonymous referees without property rights on the journals they advise. Intellectual prostitution is...

Due to its formality and highly analytic thinking, economics is often attributed a leading role among the social sciences and a prominent position as contributor to economic or social issues in the real world. Fact is, however, that the empirical proof for such a claim is either missing or...

This paper considers the European countries' output of eminent economists, i.e. the 160 most often cited academics in the period 1993-96. The influence of the size of the population and GNP is analyzed, and a ranking of the top-20 scholars is provided. The United Kingdom outperforms: it is...