No trade theorems represent a class of results showing that, under certain conditions, trade in asset markets between rational agents cannot be explained on the basis of differences in information alone. They pose a challenge to provide a theoretical justification of the high trade volumes...

Peter Diamond has made fundamental contributions to economic theory over a wide range of areas including search theory and its implications for unemployment (for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize), optimal taxation, which he pioneered with James Mirrlees, incomplete markets and their...

This article examines the strategies, successes and failures of economic development in Latin America since 1870. We divide the analysis into four key development phases: primary export-led growth (1870–1929), import substitution industrialisation (1945–82), debt crisis (1980s) and...

The economics of health behaviours concerns decisions about smoking, diet and exercise, drinking alcohol, and other consumer choices with important health consequences. The neoclassical model of the consumer and its extensions provide the theoretical framework for most economic research on...

What precisely is a Single Market, how it has been designed in the case of the European Union (e.g. in the treaty) and how it has developed over 5 decades, are the three questions answered in this contribution. It is first shown that the design of a Single Market matters: it is not just about...

This compact literature survey covers the economic impact of the old EEC customs union and, more extensively, of the Single Market as it has emerged since the mid-1980s. The emphasis is on micro-economic studies of the effects on trade in goods (initially trade creation and diversion) and...

A recent line of research in economics and psychology hypothesizes that differences in national average intelligence, proxied by IQ tests, are important drivers of national economic outcomes. Cross-country regressions, while showing a robust IQ-growth relationship, cannot fully test this...

Observational learning occurs when privately informed individuals sequentially choose among finitely many actions after seeing predecessors’ choices. We summarise the general theory of this paradigm: belief convergence forces action convergence; specifically, copycat ‘herds’...

The European Union’s (EU) role in international trade has evolved from a defensive position during the 1960s and 1970s, to being a firm supporter of a rule-based multilateral trading system as a member of the Quad (US, EU, Japan and Canada) in the 1980s and to a role in which it aspires to...

Dale T. Mortensen (born 1939) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2010 jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Christopher A. Pissarides for his work on the analysis of markets with search frictions. Together, they developed the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides Model (DMP model): an equilibrium...