This paper details the origin and development of the dependent economy model. The model is also known as the ‘Australian model’ and the ‘Salter-Swan-Corden-Dornbusch model’, but neither title adequately conveys the scope and sequence of contributions that were instrumental to its...

Contracts for future delivery of commodities spread from Mesopotamia to Hellenistic Egypt and the Roman world. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, contracts for future delivery continued to be used in the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and they survived in canon law in western...

A negative real interest rate has guaranteed macroeconomic equilibrium during every emergency in the United States since the early 19th century, except the Great Depression in the 1930s when deflation interfered with the interest rate mechanism. During the Great Depression, the interest rate...

The evolution by sexual selection of the male propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption contributed to the emergence of modern rates of economic growth. We develop a model in which males engage in conspicuous consumption to send an honest signal of their quality to females. Males who...

The 2012-13 Budget, which provides for an increase in taxes of $ 39 billion and a reduction in expenditures of $ 7 billion, is strongly contractionary, reducing aggregate demand by about 2 per cent. The government deserves praise for starting the process of fiscal consolidation in a possible...

As human traits and preferences were shaped by natural selection, there is substantial potential for the use of evolutionary biology in economic analysis. In this paper, we review the extent to which evolutionary theory has been incorporated into economic research. We examine work in four areas:...