This paper considers the signalling aspect of monetary policy. We introduce a heuristic framework for the study of signal uncertainty, and use this to analyse the signal uncertainty implicit in the communications of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Our findings suggest that...

With the increasing attention to how monetary policy is communicated has come a focus on the scope for diverse messages to arise from the committee making the decisions. While the existing literature sees the source of such diversity in relation to a 'correct' decision based on one 'true' model,...

At first sight one might be tempted to regard Mirowski’s latest book primarily as a move away from the conceptual and metaphorical history of economics that one finds in More Heat than Light (Mirowski 1989, 'MHTL'), towards a historiography inspired by recent studies in the sociology of...

Reflexivity has been argued to be self-defeating and potentially devastating for the sociology of scientific knowledge. We first survey various meanings associated with the concept of reflexivity and then provide an interpretation of Velazquez's Las Meninas to generate a three-part taxonomy of...

This paper investigates the emergence of the concept of transaction costs in modern economics and explores three controversial issues of the 1970s which keep economists busy to this day: transaction costs require a rethinking of the economic notion of efficiency, suggest switching to a...

Robert Skidelsky, author of a key biography of Keynes, notes in this biography that Keynes’s relationship to modernism is crucial to the understanding of his work, yet difficult to grasp historiographically. This may be true if one seeks to uncover influences from modernism as as a...

The concept of bounded rationality has been at the forefront of a recent empiricist program in economics which under the heading of ‘behavioral economics ‘ seeks to broaden the rational choice paradigm in the direction of psychology, to the neglect of a similar broadening in the direction of...

This paper analyses the signal uncertainty implicit in the communications of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Unlike previous studies, which seek to construct a qualitative uncertainty index that heavily relies on subjective interpretations of key expressions, we limit...

Evolutionary economics is an increasingly influential but vaguely defined field of economic research. This article discusses different ways of defining evolutionary economics: at its object level, at the level of core concepts and, distinguishing between meaning determinist and meaning finitist...