This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

Our forthcoming book, Welfare Theory, Public Action and Ethical Values challenges the belief that, until modern welfare economics introduced issues such as justice, freedom and equality, economists adopted what Amartya Sen called “welfarism.” This is the belief that the welfare of society...

In this essay, I use a general argument about the evidential role of data in ongoing inquiry to show that it is fruitful for economic historians and historians of economics to collaborate more frequently. The shared aim of this collaboration should be to learn from past economic experience in...

Modern finance has a conceptually unified theoretical core that includes the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), the relationship between risk and return based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Modigliani-Miller theorems (M&M) and the Black-Scholes-Merton approach to option pricing....

Karel Engliš's teleology emphasizes realistic assumption of virtually acting man. Virtually acting man theoretical assumption is however quite contrary to the mathematical and statistical methods widely used in modern microeconomic analysis. In this paper, I argue that the evidence of...

The purpose of this chapter is an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of North's approach to understanding economic history. Underlying this evolution has been an increasing recognition of the role that transaction costs play in explaining the economic performance of different societies through...