This CASEbrief summarises findings from CASEpaper 40, Constraint and opportunity: Identifying voluntary non-employment by Tania Burchardt and Julian Le Grand

Harstad and Selten’s article in this forum performs a valuable service by highlighting the dominance of optimization-based models over boundedly rational models in modern microeconomics, and questioning whether optimization-based models are a better way forward than boundedly rational...

The paper aims to show the overall coherence of the system of thought Commons employed to build his institutional economics. For that and in order not to stay enclosed within the American context Commons’ ideas have been considered to be dependent upon, we read him through the methodological...

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims at elucidating what can be called the nature of money. To define it, we first distinguish between the generic properties of every money and its different and non specifically monetary uses. Then currency is grasped through its three...

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims at elucidating what can be called the nature of money. To define it, we first distinguish between the generic properties of every money and its different and non specifically monetary uses. Then currency is grasped through its three...

Are institutionalism and structuralism compatible or do they confront each other? This article suggests an answer to this question, starting from an analysis of the structuration of these two paradigmatic fields of social sciences. It observes the existence in economies of both structuralist...

This paper provides a bird-eye overview of the history of spatial economic theory. It is organized around three main ideas (and authors): (i) land use and urban economics (Thünen), (ii) the nature of competition across space (Hotelling), and (iii) new economic geography and the emergence of...

Utilitarian foundations for limited government are shaky insofar as they assume rational and consistent individuals. Recently economists' assumption of rational actors has come under sustained attack. Behavioural economics has suggested that people are plagued by irrational biases and...

This paper conjectures that economics has changed profoundly since the 1970s and that these changes involve a new understanding of the relationship between theoretical and applied work. Drawing on an analysis of John Bates Clark medal winners, it is suggested that the discipline became more...

The expected utility hypothesis is one of the building blocks of classical economic theory and founded on Savage's Sure-Thing Principle. It has been put forward, e.g. by situations such as the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, that real-life situations can violate Savage's Sure-Thing Principle and...