Economic Logic

Prices are a wonderful mechanism to allocate scarse resources, especially as it is a really cheap mechanism compared to command and control....

There are sometimes papers you just cannot put down only because they are so well crafted, even though your are not really interested in the...

Does it matter in which currency goods are denominated in international trade? If prices are fully flexible, it should not matter. If nomina...

Notice how journals seem to proliferate like bunnies? And that more and more journals implement a desk reject policy? Why would editors not ...

How does advertising contribute to social welfare? It raises the awareness about products, and thus should increase utility of people. But t...

Should science obey to democratic principles? This is a question that I recently saw discussed on Scienceblogs , and that is also mentioned ...

There is a large literature on the willingness to pay for non-market goods, such as security, bio-diversity or pollution. The typical way to...

A lot of empirical research on growth and development has been done with cross-country regressions. This has been in particular favored by t...

When it comes to unemployment insurance, it is well recognized that it suffers from moral hazard, as insured unemployeds may not do enough t...

Imagine that local food crops have very strong and predictable seasonal fluctuations. The obvious way to smooth consumption and avoid famine...

Given a distribution of skills and interest in public service in the labor force, would it be best if the public-minded workers go into gove...

Libertarians, at least the most extreme ones, dream of a world without a government. The only example of such a society nowadays is Somalia,...

It is generally accepted that women are less competitive than man, and this could be one explanation for the lack of females at the top of t...

Suppose the following experiment. A town has some open space and can choose to develop it following the pattern of the existing town or attr...

Whenever a major bump on the road to economic prosperity is hit, say a Great Depression or a Great Recession, governments resort to protecti...