The article investigates Wicksell's change of mind about the machinery question between 1890 and 1900/1901. Wicksell at first sided with the so-called “compensation theory” that workers are not harmed by the introduction of machinery. In his lecture notes of April 1900, made available here...

Studies on the history of economic thought of American institutionalism usually focus on the founding fathers, or pre-1930s institutionalism. The decline in importance of this school of thought during the 1930s resulted in few post-World War II studies on the history of institutionalism....

This paper explores some ontological and epistemological conditions of the emergence of the Veblenian system of political economy. For that, we refer to Foucault's archaeology of political economy, since it offers insights into some of the relations that help us to understand the underlying...

I show that it is optimal to separate non-benevolent regulators when regulated projects are large. Separation prevents regulators from coordinating to appropriate all of the agent's informational rent when they know the type of the latter; therefore, there is a trade-off between saving on...

The failure of public policies is ubiquitous. This paper ascribes this failure to the complex system nature of public policies. A key characteristic of complex systems is that they cannot be closely controlled or predicted. Yet the traditional approach to public policy is fundamentally based on...