We identify three separate stages in the post-World War II history of applied microeconomic research: A generally non-mathematical period; a period of consensus (from the 1960s through the early 1990s) characterized by the use of mathematical models, optimization and equilibrium to generate and...

Few areas in economics are as controversial as economic forecasting. While the field has sparked great hopes for the prediction of economic trends and events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, economic forecasts have often proved inaccurate or unreliable, thus provoking severe criticism in...

This paper examines the evolving role played by the Coase theorem over the several editions of Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law. In doing so, the paper shows both the grounding of Posner’s efficiency norm in the theorem’s logic and his increasing emphasis on the theorem’s...