In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is really an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but...

Might the dollar eventually follow the precedent of the pound and cede its status as leading international reserve currency? Unlike ten years ago, there now exists a credible competitor: the euro. This paper econometrically estimates determinants of the shares of major currencies in the reserve...

This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

This paper defines and analyzes a "sparse max" operator, which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator. The agent builds (as economists do) a simplified model of the world which is sparse, considering only the variables of first-order importance. His...

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures...

We test empirically for evidence that government tariff-setting behavior depends on the degree of discretion with which policy-makers are endowed. We do this by studying government tariff choices under two distinct environments. One environment is that of tariffs set under the Escape Clause...

We present a model of endogenous firm growth with R&D investment and stochastic innovation as the engines of growth. The model for firm growth is a partial equilibrium model drawing on the quality ladder models in the macro growth literature, but also on the literature on patent races and the...

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is...

This study explores the role of investor sentiment in a broad set of anomalies in cross-sectional stock returns. We consider a setting where the presence of market-wide sentiment is combined with the argument that overpricing should be more prevalent than underpricing, due to short-sale...

The large asset price jumps that took place during 2008 and 2009 disrupted volatility derivatives markets and caused the single-name variance swap market to dry up completely. This paper defines and analyzes a simple variance swap, a relative of the variance swap that in several respects has...