Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Economics - Theory

The readings cover practical issues of national and international concern, such as income and wealth distribution, the measurement of social welfare, recent movements in...

• Provides sophisticated introductions to a vast array of topics.
• Focuses on a unique range of topics, including the history of economic thought, the history of the discipline of economics, and the historiography of economic thought.

This impressive collection features Richard Herrnstein's most important and original contributions to the social and behavioral sciences--his papers on choice behavior in animals and humans and on his discovery and elucidation of a general principle of choice called the matching law.

In recent years, the most popular theory of choice behavior has been rational choice theory. Developed and elaborated by economists over the past hundred years, it claims that individuals make choices in such a way as to maximize their well-being or utility under whatever constraints they face; that is,...

The world's multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises--a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others--now generate about half of the world's industrial output and half of the world's foreign trade; so any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated over the past decade will create serious tensions in international economic...

Since the introduction of the income tax in 1913, controversy has raged about how heavily to tax the rich. Opponents of high tax rates claim that heavy assessments have negative incentives on the productivity of some of our most talented citizens; supporters stress the importance of the rich shouldering their "fair share," and decry the loopholes that permit many to escape their obligations. Notably absent from this debate is hard evidence about the actual impact of taxes on the behavior of the affluent.

This book presents evidence by leading economists of the effects of taxes on the...

In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet--and of ideas of Enlightenment--that underlie much contemporary political thought.

Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the...

This book explores the growing tension between the requirements of employers for a flexible work force and the ability of parents and communities to nurture their children and provide for their health, welfare, and education. Global competition and the spread of information technology are forcing businesses to engage in rapid, worldwide production changes, customized marketing, and just-in-time delivery. They are reorganizing work around decentralized management, work differentiation, and short-term and part-time employment. Increasingly, workers must be able to move across firms and even...

A staunch neoclassical economist, Sherwin Rosen drew inspiration from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, particularly his theory of compensating wage differentials, which Rosen felt was central to all economic problems involving product differentiation and spatial considerations. The main theme of his collection is how markets handle diversity, including the determination of value in the presence of diversity, the allocation of idiosyncratic buyers to specialized sellers, and the effects of heterogeneity and sorting on inequality.

Rosen felt that good economics required...

In this book the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas collects his writings on economic growth, from his seminal On the Mechanics of Economic Development to his previously unpublished 1997 Kuznets Lectures.

The chapters progress from a general theory of how growth could be sustained and why growth rates might differ in different countries, to a model of exceptional growth in certain countries in the twentieth century, to an account of the take-off of growth in the Industrial Revolution, and finally to a prediction about patterns of growth in this new century. The...

This book assesses the changing nature of state intervention in the economies of the affluent democracies. Against a widespread understanding that contemporary developments, such as globalization and new technologies, are pressing for a rollback of state regulation in the economy, the book shows that these same forces are also creating new demands and opportunities for state intervention. Thus, state activism has shifted, rather than simply eroded.

State authorities have shifted from a market-steering orientation to a market-supporting one. Chief among the new state missions are:...

This compact and original exposition of optimal control theory and applications is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics. It presents a new elementary yet rigorous proof of the maximum principle and a new way of applying the principle that will enable students to solve any one-dimensional problem routinely. Its unified framework illuminates many famous economic examples and models.

This work also emphasizes the connection between optimal control theory and the classical themes of capital theory. It offers a fresh approach to fundamental questions such...

These three elegant essays develop principles central to the understanding of the diverse ways in which imperfect information affects the distribution of resources, incentives, and the evaluation of economic policy. The first concerns the special role that information plays in the allocation process when it is possible to improve accuracy through private investment. The common practice of hiring "experts" whose information is presumably much better than their clients' is analyzed. Issues of cooperative behavior when potential group members possess diverse pieces of information are...