Propongo una reforma radical y ramificada del plan de estudios. Aún se debería enseñar el modelo básico de comportamiento del agente de la economía tradicional, pues no es totalmente irrelevante para el mundo real. Pero solo debería ser una de las numerosas formas de comportamiento de los...

There is considerable scope for further privatisation, with the particular aim of sharply reducing public sector claims on national output. However, survey evidence indicates considerable opposition to further privatisations, particularly those taking the form of creating dividend-paying joint...

Economics as a discipline has considerable strengths. But the number of economics students has fallen substantially over a number of years. How can the tide be turned and the product made more attractive? Economics textbooks have become too dogmatic, as if many problems have been solved and...

"In 1949, Hayek attributed the dominant position of planning in the West to the role of intellectuals, by which he meant 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas' such as journalists and commentators. Later in the twentieth century, we saw a similar phenomenon: particular social ideas,...

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The aim of this paper is to show that random matrix theory (RMT) can be a useful addition to the economist?s tool-kit in the analysis of macro-economic time series data. A great deal of applied economic work relies upon empirical estimates of the correlation matrix. However due to the finite...

The major study by Bordo and Helbing (2003) analyses the business cycle in Western economies 1881-2001. They examine four distinct periods in economic history, and conclude that there is a secular trend towards greater synchronisation for much of the 20th century. Their analysis, in common with...

The Internet is known to have had a powerful impact on on-line retailer strategies in markets characterised by long-tail distribution of sales. Such retailers can exploit the long tail of the market, since they are effectively without physical limit on the number of choices on offer. Here we...

The American economy can be thought of as a highly connected random network in terms of both its technological and informational connections. The cumulative size of economic recessions, the fall in output from peak to trough, is analysed for the US economy 1900-2002. A least squares fit of an...

Both theoretical and applied economics have a great deal to say about many aspects of the firm, but the literature on the extinctions, or demises, of firms is very sparse. We use a publicly available data base covering some 6 million firms in the US and show that the underlying statistical...