This essay looks at the foundation and development of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, through the perspective of the recent debate over central bank independence in the design of optimal monetary policy. It shows that the creators of the Federal Reserve were acutely aware that...

Using data on 30 post-socialist countries this paper provides evidence that individuals with some association with the Communist Party before 1991 are more likely to bribe twenty years after the collapse of socialism and that inherited norms of bribery from Communist Party members explains this...

This paper aims to illuminate the debate on pluralist economics curricula by examining ways in which such curricula are evaluated. The paper argues for pluralism as a general approach and as pedagogy. It argues that there is a plurality of pluralist curricula. It further argues that pluralist...

Policy initiatives in the UK targeting manufacturing industries have for a number of years been driven by a perceived importance of this sector to the economy. In order to target such policies, it is important to establish the true size of this sector and to accurately quantify its decline....

This paper contributes to the growing multi-disciplinary body of literature on subjective wellbeing by investigating the temporal stability and impacts of cultural values on job satisfaction over time. It is generally believed that cultural values evolve fairly slowly, leading to the expectation...

The emergence, in recent years, of large financing deficits in the portfolio values of UK DB pension funds, along with changes in the way such funds are valued by actuaries, has led fund managers to increase the weighting of fixed income securities, including corporate bonds, relative to...

This chapter considers macroeconomic aspects of violence. It moves beyond the usual focus on war to argue the economic importance of all forms and aspects of armed and unarmed violence. Violence refers to acts of self-harm, interpersonal violence, and collective violence. Self-harm includes...

Egypt plays a pivotal role in the security of the Middle East as the doorway to Europe and its military expenditure reflects its involvement in the machinations of such an unstable region, showing considerable variation over the last forty years. These characteristics make it a particularly...

A large literature has used tests for Granger (1969) non-causality, GNC, to examine the interaction of military spending with the economy. Such tests answer a specific though quite limited question: can one reject the null hypothesis that one variable does not help predict another? If this null...

This paper investigates the business cycle fluctuations of the tradeable and nontradeable sectors of the US economy. Then, it evaluates whether a “New Open Economy” model having prices sticky in the producer’s currency can reproduce the observed fluctuations qualitatively. The answer is...