This volume contains the papers and supplementary papers given at the 33rd Ottobeuren Seminar on Economics. The authors deal with current issues pertaining to education and economics, such as for example the determination and the assessment of the return on education, the influence of education...

The emergence of novelty is a driving agent for economic change. New technologies, new products and services, new institutional arrangements, to mention a few examples, are the backbone of development and growth. Important though it is, the emergence of novelty is not well understood. What seems...

Technology and technological change play a central role in economics, whether in the theory of resource allocation or in the theory of growth and development. Yet the nature of technology is largely ignored in economic theory, it being considered sufficient to treat technology as a constraint on...

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification - unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of different...

This paper introduces a new theoretic entity, a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. Abstractions used in the evaluation stage of decision making typically involve nominalist heuristics that are incompatible with expected utility theory which excludes...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Conventional wisdom suggests that nominal, demand-side shocks have only temporary effects on real macroeconomic magnitudes and that the duration of their effects depends on the degree of nominal inertia. It is also argued that, in the absence of unit roots, temporary supply-side shocks also have...

This chapter reviews recent research adopting methods from statistical physics in theoretical or empirical work in economics and nance. The bulk of what has recently become known as 'econophysics' in broader circles draws its motivation from observed scaling laws in nancial markets and the...