Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

Economic networks (EN) refer to a diverse set of interconnected economic agents such as: business networks (BN), inter-organisational networks (ION), supply chain networks (SCN), credit networks (CN), ownership networks, innovation networks, investment networks, or any other economic activity...

In studying the development of western freedoms, perhaps no subject is more worthy of discussion than classical liberalism, which the late historian Ralph Raico wrote was “the signature political philosophy of Western Civilization.” Raico defined classical liberalism as “the ideology...

When Sweden left the gold standard on September 27, 1931, the Swedish government declared that the aim of monetary policy should be to stabilize the domestic purchasing power of the Swedish currency, the krona. With this step, price level targeting officially became for the first time the goal...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

Der Preis der Schwedischen Reichsbank für Wirtschaftswissenschaften im Gedenken an Alfred Nobel geht an Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond und Philip Dybvig. Nach Ansicht der Königlich Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften haben die Preisträger "unser Verständnis der Rolle der Banken in der...

Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall shared a concern over excessive inequality of wealth and income, along with an attachment to individual choice, free markets and a minimal economic role of government. In this paper, I address the question of the size distribution of income, or...

This text challenges assumptions about the foundations of the Leon Walras' marginalist theory in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. The problematic is approached through a comparative study between Bentham's and Walras' ideas on three focus areas: 1. their views of society and the social...

Was the Keynesian message alive during the second half of the XXth Century, or was it betrayed by his followers? This article in the fields of the history of economic thought and methodology contrasts the Scientific Research Programmes (SRPs), a Lakatosian concept, of Keynes in The General...

We control the surplus process of a non-life insurance company by dynamic proportional reinsurance. The objective is to maximize expected (utility of the) surplus under the worst-case claim development. In the large claim case with a worst-case upper limit on claim numbers and claim sizes, we...