The ideas of modern macroeconomics provided the intellectual justification of the economic policies of the last 10 to 15 years. It is these ideas which the financial crisis falsified. The dominant paradigm in macroeconomic theory over the past 30 years has been that of rational agents who form...

This paper highlights the difficulties that policy-makers face when trying to predict economic activity.

Economics as a discipline has considerable strengths. But the number of economics students has fallen substantially over a number of years. How can the tide be turned and the product made more attractive? Economics textbooks have become too dogmatic, as if many problems have been solved and...

There are two key stylised facts about the extinction patterns of firms. First, the probability of extinction is highest at the start of the firm"s existence, but soon becomes more or less invariant to the age of the firm. Second, the relationship between the size and frequency of firm...

"In 1949, Hayek attributed the dominant position of planning in the West to the role of intellectuals, by which he meant 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas' such as journalists and commentators. Later in the twentieth century, we saw a similar phenomenon: particular social ideas,...

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We observe a marked increase in the spatial homogeneity of the popularity of first names across the United States in recent decades. We explain this by calibrating a modified standard model of neutral cultural evolution to the record of first name popularities for the United States as a whole...