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...

This paper addresses various attempts by so-called new Keynesians, writing mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, to strengthen the analytical basis, in particular the microeconomic foundations, of these assertions. What, exactly, have then the new Keynesians accomplished, and how should their...

Although there are several variants of innovation economics at play in the current antitrust literature, the federal judiciary and enforcement agencies as well as a number of Chicago Schoolers have recognized the importance of policy they all associate with the economist Joseph Schumpeter,...

Scholars of John Maynard Keynes' life and contributions to economics have tended to approach his involvement in the early 20th century eugenics movement by either:(1) historicizing it as a regrettable political curiosity with only minor connections to his larger system of economic thought or,(2)...

The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded...

A history of "supply-side economics" and the Laffer Curve published by Art Laffer's economic consulting firm in 2003. It was reviewed and edited by Laffer himself, who later reprinted it in a book published by the Laffer Center: "The Pillars of Reaganomics" (San Francisco, 2014). It is,...

In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith created an agenda for the study of the economy that is reflected in the structure of modern economics. This paper describes Smith's contributions to four central areas of economic theory: The theory of price formation, the relationship between market...

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

This working paper - like its companion, Caldwell and Klausinger 2021 - grew out of the authors' joint work on Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 (Caldwell and Klausinger 2022) and it contains material supplementing it. This paper draws to a large extent on Friedrich Hayek's own investigations into the...

This paper re-examines the origins of Paul A. Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), a book that helped define the way economic theory was undertaken for many years after its publication. Material taken from Samuelson's own papers and other archives is used to elaborate and correct...