This paper traces the evolution of the concept of capital in economic literature––from the ‘fund’ concept prevalent in pre-classical and classical writings to the stress on ‘physical capital’ in neoclassical literature and finally to ‘human capital’ in endogenous growth theory....

James M. Buchanan has argued that the primary role that the economist plays in society is a pedagogical one. The job of the economists is to teach students the principles of economics, most notably an understanding of spontaneous order and the role of the price system in generating that order...

The financial crisis of 2008 has challenged the reputation of the free-market economy in the public imagination in a way that it has not been challenged since the Great Depression. The intellectual consensus after World War II was that markets are unstable and exploitive and thus in need of...

Religion was one of the factors that was frequently identified by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economists as exerting an important influence on the pre-industrial European economies. These writers were especially interested in the economic effects of the Reformation on the economic...

The debate on public corporation between Italian economists in the Sixties of the 20th Century is characterized at least by four theorizations. The first is the macroeconomic one, in which public corporation is considered as an instrument of the policy of economic planning. The second is the...

The notion of interdependent preferences has a long history in economic thought. It can be found in the works of authors such as Hume, Rae, Genovesi, Smith, Marx and Mill among others. In the 20th century, the idea became more widespread mainly through the works of Veblen and Duesenberry....

The history of economic ideas (or doctrines) has a long tradition of popularization activists, usually, but not exclusively, defending some ideological precepts over others. This tradition is particularly clear in the 19th century and early 20th century with economists, such as Frédéric...

Over 100 years since Marx's value theory of labour was first published, the so-called ``transformation problem'' -- deriving prices from values and providing a theory of profits as arising from surplus value -- has inspired the imagination of economists of all shades of intellectual suasion....

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the impact the UV-curve had on economic theory and to provide an account of the subsequent radical changes in its place and role over the decades since its first appearance in 1958. The paper traces the historical development of the UV-curve...

Theories of social comparison have a long presence in the social sciences and have provided many useful insights. In economics, the idea of comparison, aspiration or relative income belongs to this theoretical framework. The first systematic usages of this idea can be found in the works of...