The classical Wage Fund (Capital or Credit) framework is integrated with the simplest text-book version of the Ricardian model of comparative advantage, generating a model that replicates important features of the neo-classical production theory involving capital and labour without neo-classical...

The state of contemporary economics had been a subject of discussion even before the most recent global financial crisis. The one-sidedness of the discipline has frequently been lamented and calls are often made for its pluralisation. Nevertheless, there is neither a consensus over the form of...

Financial professionals play a key role in financial markets and the financial industry as a whole. Researchers in experimental economics and finance have therefore started to employ financial professionals as experimental participants. We examine this recent development in the field by...

If we take it that, at least in the social sciences, "realistic" implies "finite", then countless economic models involving infinitary assumptions must obviously be classified as unrealistic - for example, models with infinitely divisible goods, a continuum of traders, consumers optimizing over...

Situational analysis (also known as situational logic) was popularized by Karl Popper as an appropriate method for the interpretation of history and as a basis for a scientific social science. It seeks an objective posit ive explanation of behavior through imputing a dominant goal or motive to...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...

A transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub on his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub's early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

On December 5th and 6th 2014, the Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted the Causality in the Social Sciences Conference. The conference brought together several distinguished speakers from philosophy, economics, finance, accounting and marketing with the bold mission of debating scientific...