Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

The story of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours has often been described as one of success. The man was a well-known statesman, economist and entrepreneur in late eighteenth-century France and his main legacy, the famous and still thriving Du Pont company, suggests a brilliant trajectory. The aim...

The ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory has generated a wealth of deliberative experiments. The purpose of deliberation as a research technique (as opposed to policymaking or public consultation) is distinctive: to uncover the public’s informed, considered, and collective view on a...

One of the motivations frequently cited by Sen and Nussbaum for moving away from a utility metric towards a capabilities framework is a concern about adaptive preferences or conditioned expectations. If utility is related to the satisfaction of aspirations or expectations, and if these are...

his paper analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen from the perspective of human rights. It assesses the ways in which Sen’s research agenda has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics, and examines how his...

This paper re-examines Hayek’s insights into the problem of knowledge in markets, and argues that his analysis remains pertinent but has serious flaws. His central thesis—that the market price system is essential for communicating information and coordinating transactions wherever knowledge...

This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models identify which assumptions are crucial in obtaining...

This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models both enforce internal consistency and allow one to...

When economists have to choose between competing theories, they evaluate not only the theories’ empirical relevance, but also qualities like their simplicity, tractability, parsimony and unifying power. These are called the epistemic virtues of a theory. The present paper proposes a formal...

Despite their potentially strong impact on poverty, agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly. Using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in Mozambique, we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks....