Intro -- _Hlk489962505 -- _Hlk505371102 -- _Hlk505347516 -- The author -- Foreword -- 1 Introduction -- This book -- Microeconomics and macroeconomics -- Sources -- References -- 2 Market structures and incentives -- Meat and potato pies and the Nobel Prize in economics -- Incentives, scarce...

Economists and economics have been harshly criticised recently. This book accepts many of the criticisms of conventional theory but argues that the fundamental insights of economics are capable of reinterpretation and reinvention to deal with a host of contemporary concerns - social networks,...

Bordo and Helbing (2003) examine the business cycle in Western economies over the 1881-2001 period. They examine four distinct periods in economic history and conclude that there is a secular trend towards greater synchronisation for much of the 20th century, and that it takes place across these...

The aim of this paper is to show that random matrix theory (RMT) can be a useful addition to the economist?s tool-kit in the analysis of macro-economic time series data. A great deal of applied economic work relies upon empirical estimates of the correlation matrix. However due to the finite...

Using the statistical technique of fuzzy clustering, regimes of inflation and unemployment are explored for the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany between 1871 and 2009. We identify for each country three distinct regimes in inflation/unemployment space. There is considerable...

In situations of what we now describe as radical uncertainty, the core model of agent behaviour, of rational autonomous agents with stable preferences, is not useful. Instead, a different principle, in which the decisions of an agent are based directly on the decisions and strategies of other...

Econophysics has already made a number of important empirical contributions to our understanding of the social and economic world. These fall mainly into the areas of finance and industrial economics, where in each case there is a large amount of reasonably well-defined data. More recently,...

Several recent comparative studies have shown a labour productivity gap in respect of UK retailing when compared with other countries, notably France and the USA. This article seeks to identify, through an overview of existing data and related research, the extent to which retail productivity in...