'Market failure' is a term widely used by politicians, journalists and university and A-level economics teacher and students. However, those who use the term often lack any sense of proportion about the ability of government to correct market failures. This arises partly from the lack of general...

Bitter Wine was the 23rd episode of the premiere season of the Emmy-nominated Western, Have Gun - Will Travel. Gun-for-hire Paladin settles an externality issue between a small scale vintner and neighboring oilman a la Coase, but two years before Coase's seminal paper. This 1958 episode acutely...

Opportunity cost is considered to be a fundamental concept in economics. But the definition of the term continues to be controversial. I describe how the term is widely used in two distinct ways, both in the academic and non-academic literatures. I propose a practical way for educators to...

The education and application of skills in it is an essential prerequisite for the growth and development of each national economy in the future. Investing in education and skills development are essential incentive for raising the growth and competitiveness of each country and its participation...

This article describes a model that can be used to introduce basic economic concepts to children at the K-8 grade levels and lay a foundation for the later study of markets and prices. The model focuses on non-market environments, such as homes and schools, where people first experience economic...

Die Bedeutung von Emotionen und Affekten bei ökonomischen Entscheidungen wird seit mehreren Jahren in der ökonomischen Literatur diskutiert (z. B. Rabin, 1998). Eine Erklärung der empirischen Evidenz in diesem Bereich, die über eine bloß phänomenologische Ebene hinausgeht, verlangt eine...

In a less widely known contribution, Béla Martos (1966, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) introduced a generalized notion of concavity that is closely related to what is nowadays known as r-concavity in the operations research literature, and that is identical to what is nowadays known as...

Large deviations for fat tailed distributions, i.e. those that decay slower than exponential, are not only relatively likely, but they also occur in a rather peculiar way where a finite fraction of the whole sample deviation is concentrated on a single variable. The regime of large deviations is...

In this study we use the 2010-2013 Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze the allocation and location of financial assets in categorizing the tax-efficiency of investment portfolios by race/ethnicity. We find that Blacks and Hispanics tend to be more tax-efficient since they invest largely...

For many years corporate lenders have been a crucial force in the boardroom, providing a check on management and contributing to firm governance. However, lenders’ influence has receded in recent years for a large and important class of corporate borrowers. The culprit is a familiar one in a...