Musgravean public economics, as the dominant public policy framework of the post-World War II era, argued that the government can and should supplement the price mechanism in order to create a social order within which a democratic society can flourish. Starting with the late 1970s, this project...

Theory suggests that the cross-border bank lending flow from rich countries to poor countries is facilitated when lending-related legal and social norms are shared and valued equally by both lenders and borrowers. According to this reasoning the fast adoption of Western-style democracy and...

Abstract: Homer clearly expressed the economic problem of choosing the best option among several alternatives given a certain set of restrictions. In the Odyssey he specifically wrote about the minimum cost choice. This kind of problem, as is well known, is at the heart of the neoclassical...

There is a schism within economics between the neoclassical and behavioral schools. A primary cause of the behavioral ascent is the experimental evidence of deviations between actual behavior and the neoclassical prediction of behavior. While behavioral scholars have documented these...

The argument put forward in this paper is that distinguishing between the social and the unpaid sphere has become much more critical as far as societal analysis is concerned than the increasingly blurred distinction between labor and leisure. It proposes a new household model in this respect to...

University departments of economics have to move from monism to pluralism in the sense of encouraging competing theoretical perspectives. The tension between monism and pluralism is not limited to economics paradigms but also concerns theory of science and ideological orientation. It is argued...

Until about 1870 economics was referred to as 'political economics' and it is here argued that it was a mistake to abandon this terminology. Mainstream neoclassical economics is specific in scientific and conceptual terms but also in ideological terms. Similarly, other theoretical perspectives...

This keynote reflects on the phased-out original neoclassical research program and the dominance of originally heterodox issues and questions, all beyond the ‘optimality and equilibrium of the market economy’, in modern cutting-edge economic research. This provides opportunities for...

This paper calls for a new approach to economic theorising in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. We examine two key theories which suggest that markets are stable self-correcting efficient systems. These theories, namely General Equilibrium Theory and the Efficient...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...