What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

‘Constitutions and Commitments” has inspired the economic literature on the importance of “Legal origins” (LaPorta et al., 1998, 2008), which vindicates the notion that post-Glorious Revolution English institutions were particularly conducive to economic growth. More recently economists...

After the subprime credit crisis of 2007, the world is no longer what we thought. An unprecedented crisis of confidence was combined with a credit crunch, and the G20 countries had to enact massive public spending programmes to save the economy and at least buffer the inevitable hard landing. In...

Review of the book titled 'Rethinking Housing Bubbles The Role of Household and Bank Balance Sheets in Modeling Economic Cycles' by Steven D. Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith. Published by Cambridge University Press in May 2014.

The ongoing sovereign debt crisis in Europe and U.S. is challenging the conventional wisdom and is creating fears of a double dip recession in 2012. Massive levels of debt and consumption beyond means and speedy financial innovation with lax regulation has put major economies in a deep hole....

This is a prepublication version of an article which appeared in the World Review of Political Economy. Please cite as Desai, R. and A. Freeman. 2001. ‘Value and Crisis Theory in the “Great Recession”’. World Review of Political Economy. Vol 2 No. 1, Spring 2011. Pp 35-47. This article...

Savings are allocated over the acquisition of assets like homes, shares and bonds and government debt paper. For a home acquisition an individual household uses own equity provided by the buyer and outside equity provided by banks. Such outside equity can help to increase the volume of new...

This paper explores the existence of rational bubbles in the pricing of an asset that pays no dividend. I find that when "the spirit of capitalism" is introduced into a growth model, rational bubbles do exist provided that the marginal benefit from holding wealth is nontrivial relative to the...

The last decade has been marked by cycles of excessive boom and bust in the housing market. However, not all countries have experienced high volatility in their house prices. Indeed, Germany has been unique in retaining flat price levels over the whole period and failing to respond to any of the...

This article analyses the redistributive efficiency of public spending and taxation in a panel of both advanced and developing economies during the last three decades (1984-2012). In order to explore how redistribution is achieved through fiscal policies, a two-stage approach is applied. First,...