The number of central banks in the world is approaching 180, a tenfold increase since the beginning of the twentieth century. What lies behind the spread of this economic institution? What underlying process has brought central banks to hold such a key role in economic life today? This book...

This article argues for the need to integrate beliefs the individual and collective levels in economic theory, something which is referred to as a "cognitive turning point". In the first section of the article, we show that instrumental rationality does not offer an adequate framework for...

This book surveys how economists engage with knowledge and beliefs in various fields of economic analysis, such as general equilibrium theory, decision theory, game theory, experimental economics, evolutionary theory of the firm, financial markets and the history of economic thought.

By illuminating the philosophical roots of the various notions of knowledge employed by economists, this Handbook helps to disentangle conceptual and typological issues surrounding the debate on knowledge amongst economists. Wide-ranging in scope, it explores fundamental aspects of the...

Due to the recent stock market crises, many economists have been keeping aloof from the « core» of financial theory, whose main contention is that stock market prices are at any moment the best possible estimate of the « true» value of the issuing firms. Most of those economists have brought...