This article traces inequality and numeracy development in the regions of Chile during the 19th and early 20th century. Inequality, measured with anthropometric methods, was associated with a lower speed of human capital formation. Not all talents received the necessary education to make full...

This article traces inequality and numeracy development in the regions of Chile during the 19th and early 20th century. Inequality, measured with anthropometric methods, was associated with a lower speed of human capital formation. Not all talents received the necessary education to make full...

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is an influential book more than seventy years after its publication. This paper examines his arguments and finds that they come up short in many ways and suggests that we have taken “another road to serfdom”. Hayek’s mind was completely closed to...

This paper is based on the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls who suggested that a just society is one which would be created behind a “veil of ignorance”, that is to say, without knowing where one would end up in the society’s distribution of talent and other attributes valued in...

Emotions were central to the development of economics, especially in utility theory in classical economics. While neoclassical utility theory basically abolished emotions, behavioural economics more recently reintroduced emotions in utility theory. Beyond utility theory, economic theorists use...

This paper contrasts the modern use of the assumption that rationality guides individual economic behaviour, as reflected in simple models of utility and profit maximization, to literature between 1890 and 1930 which sharply challenged the use of such an assumption, as well as to later...

This paper attempts to build up a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model of production and trade where capital is introduced outside the production process as a financial capital or credit as per the classical Ricardian wage fund framework. Stock of credit or financial capital as past savings, finances...

This paper explores the role of wage fund as the basic source of credit, capital or finance in a dynamic Ricardian model, which consists of three classes of agents: the workers, the capitalist, and the producers of goods. We introduce and develop an elaborate dynamic wage fund model in the...

This paper explores the implications on trade and wage inequality of introducing financial capital or credit in the standard Ricardian model of production, where a given amount of start-up credit is used to employ sector specific skilled and unskilled workers following the Wage Fund approach of...

This paper explores the role of wage fund as the basic source of credit, capital or finance in a dynamic Ricardian model, which consists of three classes of agents: the workers, the capitalist, and the producers of goods. We introduce and develop an elaborate dynamic wage fund model in the...