Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson win 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics

The Nobel Prize committee summarizes their contributions as follows: Some countries become trapped in a situation with extractive institutions and low economic growth. The introduction of inclusive institutions would create long-term benefits for everyone, but extractive institutions provide short-term gains for the people in power. As long as the political system guarantees they will remain…

Who was Harold Hotelling?

Who was Harold Hotelling and what did he contribute to the field of economics? A paper by Gaspard et al. (2024) in the Journal of Economics Literature provides some background on his life, his research and pros and cons of his research contributions. Today I summarize some of his key contributions to the field of…

Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Yesterday it was announced that Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics (formerly the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). She is the 3rd woman to have won the economics Nobel. The Nobel press release summarizes her research as follows: Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour…

American Economic Journal: Best Paper Awards

The American Economic Journal (AEJ) recently came out with its awards for best papers of the year. These are listed below along with their abstracts. AEJ: Applied Economics: “The Evolution of Work in the United States,” by Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum 12(2), (pp. 1-34) April 2020 AEJ: Economic Policy: “Technology,…

What makes a great economist?

From John Maynard Keynes’ Essays in Biography: The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An…

Capitalism only works with trust

Capitalism is imperfect. Yet is it the best system developed to allocate scarce resources across society. However, capitalism only works if people are moral beings. For instance, if you sell a treatment and promised benefits are never realized or–even worse–the treatment is harmful, this is a problem. Typical capitalistic responses to this issue are that:…

2018 Economics Nobel goes to Nordhaus and Romer

 The Nobel Prize in Economics (formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer.  For Romer, the Nobel Prize committee cited his work on endogenous growth theory, that models “how economic decisions and market conditions determine the creation of new technologies. Paul Romer solved…

Is Economics bogus science?

John Ioannidis has an interesting article in the L.A. Times titled “Economics isn’t a bogus science — we just don’t use it correctly.” Some excerpts are below: Most published studies use limited data. By a conservative estimate, the average study has 18% power to detect a modest association if one exists. Due to this low…

Is Economics a Science?

That is the question addressed by in a paper by Colin Camerer and co-authors in Science. The authors repeated 18 economics experiments conducted in a laboratory setting. These articles were published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics between 2011 and 2014. As The Economist reports, they…