An authorized interpretation is made of the book "The Mystery of Capital" (Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West, and fails Everywhere Else) by Hernando de Soto, president of the Peru based Institute for Freedom and Democracy (IFD), regarded by the British magazine The Economist as a second, by...

Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...

We contribute to the debate on research performance by comparing the distribution of research inputs and outputs across Australian universities during 1992-2003. We have calculated annual Gini coefficients for various performance measures and Lorenz curves for the final year of the study....

There is a growing policy focus in Australian higher education on quantitative research performance assessment. However, most of the analysis has addressed aggregate performance at the institutional level, an approach inconsistent with recent policy emphasis on diversity among universities, and...

This essay examines how the field of economics works, understood to be the space of symbolic production of economic knowledge and its distribution networks. It therefore analyzes the relationship between the producing agents and the institutions involved. The economy is a scientific field with...

This essay makes reference to the Scholastic doctrine of moral probabilism and explores the possible links between this theological perspective and the modern concept of probability. It shows that these concepts are more related than is suggested by common etymological approaches. Moral...

The author asks whether it is useful to view universities in a utility-maximizing framework and shows that university organizing virtually guarantees that the utility-maximizing model is the incorrect approach. He then discusses resource allocation issues at Cornell and reflects upon how...

My main goal in this essay is to say something about leftover open questions in macroeconomics, as well as new phenomena that need to be accommodated in early 21st century macroeconomics, and the sorts of ideas that might make progress possible. The essay first considers foundational questions...