This article examines six widely-held doctrines concerning economic theory and economic policy that have been refuted, or at least rendered highly problematic by the global financial crisis, namely: (i) the efficient markets hypothesis; (ii) the Great Moderation; (iii) central bank independence;...

This paper presents a unified treatment of the production and financial decisions available to a firm facing frictionless financial markets and a stochastic production technology under minimal assumptions on the firm's stochastic technology and objective function. The specific focus is on...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Great Risk Shift’, that is, the process by which the burden of risk has been shifted away from governments and employers and on to workers and households. The...

The debate about the dynamics and potential policy responses to asset inflation has intensified in recent years. Some analysts, notably Borio and Lowe, have called for 'subtle' changes to existing monetary targeting frameworks to try to deal with the problems of asset inflation and have...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. The fact that individuals and families are vulnerable to a wide range of social, economic and other risks, and that collective action is needed to help reduce and manage these risks, has long been important in social...

Questions relating to the allocation and management of risk have played a central role in the development of the National Water Initiative, particularly as it has applied to the Murray-Darling Basin. The central issues of efficiency and equity in allocations are best understood by considering...

Dual approaches have proved their value in many areas of economic analysis. Until recently, however, they have been virtually ignored in the analysis of choice under uncertainty.In this paper, we present a dual formulation of choice under uncertainty based on a few simple assumptions about...

We focus on syntactic aspects of di¤erential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships,...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...

Among economists, discussion of problems involving uncertainty is po­ larised between advocates of formal decision theories, who claim that un­ certainty can be tamed by careful consideration of information and elicita­ tion of preferences, and critics who argue that uncertainty is...