Murray Rothbard's posthumous Economic Thought Before Adam Smith is notable for its vilification of 'the quiet Scottish professor.' While there is little disagreement that Smith was, at best, an ambivalent champion of free markets, Rothbard's indictment of him as a proto-Marxist is less than...

This paper provides a non-technical and illustrated introduction to the econometric contributions of the 2003 Nobel Prize winners, Robert Engle and Clive Granger, with special emphasis on their implications for heterodox economists.

Economists have two standard explanations for the absence of substantial nominal wage pressures in the current macroeconomic climate. The first, and more traditional, view asserts that the NAIRU has drifted downward over the last decade, while the second posits the establishment of a "new...

Economists have become interested in the behavior of random processes with positive feedback but have sometimes found it difficult to introduce students to this research. Simulation of the law of large numbers with increasing amounts of feedback provides a convenient framework for such...

This article explores a possible connection between two behavioural anomalies in economics, the observed responsiveness of individual decision makers to sunk costs, and the apparent failure of backward induction to predict outcomes in experimental bargaining games. In particular, we show that...

The theory of compensating differentials has proven difficult to test with observational data: the consequences of selection, unobserved firm and worker characteristics, and the broader macroeconomic environment complicate most analyses. Instead, we construct experimental, real-effort labor...

Using a variant of the Michl-Baldani (2000) model of technical change as a strategic choice, this paper describes alternative foundations for the achievement of "positive class consciousness." The first is based on the Folk Theorem(s) of repeated games, while the second views the robust...

Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential...