What produces a happy society and a happy life? Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve suggest that through the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question empirically. Explaining how wellbeing can be measured, what causes it, and how it…
Category: economics
Book Review: Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession by Ann Mari May
In Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession, Ann Mari May explores the historical roots of gendered inequalities within economics. This is an excellent feminist reading of institutionalised discrimination with…
Learning from each other: symbiosis between academics and practitioners in spectrum auction design
In the last three decades, spectrum auctions around the world have demonstrated the successful application of theory to practical regulatory processes to award licences to mobile phone companies to utilise valuable airwaves. In his new open-access book…
Book Review: Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t by Marc F. Bellemare
In Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t, Marc F. Bellemare offers a new guide to research economists to help equip them with the practical tools for ‘doing economics’. This book will be an excellent starting point f…
The environmental burden of the international job market for economists
Each year, the ‘international job market for economists’ involves over 1,000 junior candidates and several hundred recruiters from all over the world meeting for short pre-screening interviews at annual congresses in Europe and in the US, thus generati…
Policy relevant, multidisciplinary, disruptive: What kind of research do economists want?
Based on a global survey of almost 10,000 academic economists, Peter Andre and Armin Falk explore what economists perceive to be worthwhile research in their discipline. Finding many economists think that economic research should become more policy rel…
The REF’s singular focus on excellence limits academic diversity
Research assessment exercises, such as the REF ostensibly serve to evaluate research, but they also shape and manage it. Based on a study of REF submissions in the fields of economics, history, business and politics, Engelbert Stockhammer, argues that …
Book Review: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics by Charles Camic
In Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, Charles Camic challenges the longstanding portayal of economic theorist Thorstein Veblen as a maverick outsider. Tracing the development of Veblen’s intellectual practices and affiliations, Camic instead finds an academic who was distinctly an insider, yet who turned his orthodox training against prevailing opinion. Offering an excellent account of … Continued
Charting the long-term impact of economic ideas – The rise and fall of growth narratives
The ways in which academics and researchers develop narratives to operationalize key concepts in their field can have significant impacts. Taking the example of economic research, Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov explore the formation and diffusion of economic growth narratives and discuss what this reveals about the role of ideas in shaping socio-economic change. Narratives … Continued
Book Review: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
In Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, Nobel-Prize winning economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo carefully lay out evidence to provide a grounded approach to tackling today’s most pressing global problems. With a focus on alleviating inequality and poverty, Banerjee and Duflo’s book clears a path for more interdisciplinary work centred on improving citizens’ … Continued