What is perhaps most curious about 'Say's law' is the continuing disagreement on its substance and to whom it should be credited. John Maynard Keynes summarized the law as 'supply creates its own demand' but it is now generally agreed that Keynes did not get it quite right. The author has been...

Early critics of John Stuart Mill attacked him for creating a monomaniacal economic man concerned only with the accumulation of money. In fact, Mill's construct possessed a considerably richer psychology including desires for leisure, luxury, and sexual relations. This psychology played a...

Poor law reform in the early 1830s provides a key example of the deep conflicts between classical liberal principles of self-reliance and the realities of dependency. Eminent economists, such as Nassau Senior and Thomas Malthus, argued that the dependency of women and children calls forth and...

This article gives a history of American institutionalism, and a brief comparison with the more recent "new" institutional economics. Institutionalism was a significant element in American economics between the Wars, but declined rapidly thereafter. The article outlines the movement's initial...

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's "fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic forces driving the creation of media...

John Maynard Keynes made a major contribution to the development of professional investment management. Based on detailed archival research at King's College, Cambridge, we describe Keynes' investment philosophy, his investment performance, and the evolution of his investment approach as the...

Jonathan Levin, the 2011 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, has established himself as a leader in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomic theory. Jon has made important contributions in many areas: the economics of contracts and...

At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled "A Theory of Production," which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb-Douglas function as a mathematical representation of the relationship between capital,...

Raj Chetty is eminently deserving of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal at the age of 33. His research has transformed the field of public economics. His work is motivated by important public policy issues in the fields of taxation, social insurance, and public spending for education. He...

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economic activity just as rich countries contain...