In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty uses the market value of tradeable assets to measure both productive capital and wealth. As a measure of wealth this is problematic because it ignores the value of human capital and transfer wealth, which have grown enormously over the last 300...

With minimal sleight of hand, it is possible to transform the recent growth experience of the People's Republic of China from the extraordinary into the mundane. Systematic understatement of inflation by enterprises accounts for 2.5% growth per annum in the non-agricultural economy during the...

Changes in both the macroeconomy and in macroeconomics suggest that the IS-LM-AS model is no longer the best baseline model of short-run fluctuations for teaching and policy analysis. This paper presents an alternative model that replaces the assumption that the central bank targets the money...

It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, 'on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument'. The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford, Cochrane, Sims and others, is an example of a fatally flawed research...

The welfare economic method for analyzing the case for government intervention is often criticized for ignoring the political determination of policies. While many economists accept the thrust of this critique, exactly when and how political determination interferes with a welfare economic...

Since Wakefield et al. (1998), the public was exposed to mixed information surrounding the claim that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. A persistent trend to delay the vaccination during 1998-2011 in the US was driven by children of college-educated mothers, suggesting that these...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...