The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due to reactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter of course that economics should become a natural...

We examine the various senses in which economist use the term "rationality" and then outline some of the commonly drawn implications and auxiliary assumptions. Finally, we confront the implications with the empirical evidence, drawing on the insights from the exciting new field of behavioral...

The classical Wage Fund (Capital or Credit) framework is integrated with the simplest text-book version of the Ricardian model of comparative advantage, generating a model that replicates important features of the neo-classical production theory involving capital and labour without neo-classical...

The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of actual labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for researchers and confuses both the public and policy makers. A new definition of unemployment is proposed. It considers those part-time workers who would like to work...

"Longtermism" is the view that the impacts of our actions on the very long-term future deserve prominent consideration in decision-making. We discuss the primary barrier that prevents academic economists from contributing to longtermist research: an overly rigid preference for methodological...

We study the post-war effects of the bombing of German cities during WWII on urban growth and use the synthetic control method (SCM) to construct comparison units for affected West-German cities. The reason to use SCM is that cities might experience structural changes that have nothing to do...

We develop an efficient and easy-to-use computational method for solving a wide class of general equilibrium heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks, together with an open source suite of codes that implement our algorithms in an easy-to-use toolbox. Our method extends standard...

The level of disposable income inequality in Israel has increased noticeably since the mid-1980s and today it is above most developed countries. In contrast, market income inequality, which hit a record level in 2002, has reversed its course since then and has shown a sharp decline in subsequent...

This paper examines the usefulness of Kalai (2020)'s measure of the viability of Nash equilibrium. We experimentally study a class of participation games, which differ in the number of players, the success threshold, and the payoff to not participating. We find that Kalai's measure captures well...