Portal:Economics

Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems. (Full article...)

Decision theory or the theory of rational choice is a branch of probability, economics, and analytic philosophy that uses expected utility and probability to model how individuals would behave rationally under uncertainty. It differs from the cognitive and behavioral sciences in that it is mainly prescriptive and concerned with identifying optimal decisions for a rational agent, rather than describing how people actually make decisions. Despite this, the field is important to the study of real human behavior by social scientists, as it lays the foundations to mathematically model and analyze individuals in fields such as sociology, economics, criminology, cognitive science, moral philosophy and political science. (Full article...)

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (/ˈθɔːrstaɪn ˈvɛblən/; July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.

In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Veblen laid the foundation for the perspective of institutional economics. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy. (Full article...)

Amartya Kumar Sen (Bengali: [ˈɔmortːo ˈʃen]; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. He has also made major scholarly contributions to social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries.

Sen is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. He previously served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he received India's highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to welfare economics. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare. (Full article...)

Gary Stanley Becker (/ˈbɛkər/; December 2, 1930 – May 3, 2014) was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.

Becker was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Becker their favorite living economist over the age of 60, followed by Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. Economist Justin Wolfers called him "the most important social scientist in the past 50 years." (Full article...)

Mathematical economics is the application of mathematical methods to represent theories and analyze problems in economics. Often, these applied methods are beyond simple geometry, and may include differential and integral calculus, difference and differential equations, matrix algebra, mathematical programming, or other computational methods. Proponents of this approach claim that it allows the formulation of theoretical relationships with rigor, generality, and simplicity.

Mathematics allows economists to form meaningful, testable propositions about wide-ranging and complex subjects which could less easily be expressed informally. Further, the language of mathematics allows economists to make specific, positive claims about controversial or contentious subjects that would be impossible without mathematics. Much of economic theory is currently presented in terms of mathematical economic models, a set of stylized and simplified mathematical relationships asserted to clarify assumptions and implications. (Full article...)

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (/ˈstɪɡlɪts/; born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, political activist, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls "free-market fundamentalists"), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001 and received the university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. He was the founding chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals and commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system. He served as the chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by the French President Sarkozy, which issued its report in 2010, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn't add up, and currently serves as co-chair of its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz was the president of the International Economic Association (IEA). He presided over the organization of the IEA triennial world congress held near the Dead Sea in Jordan in June 2014. (Full article...)

Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought and economic theory that advocates for workers' control of the means of production, a free market made up of individual artisans, sole proprietorships and workers' cooperatives, and occupation and use property rights. As proponents of the labour theory of value and labour theory of property, mutualists oppose all forms of economic rent, profit and non-nominal interest, which they see as relying on the exploitation of labour. Mutualists seek to construct an economy without capital accumulation or concentration of land ownership. They also encourage the establishment of workers' self-management, which they propose could be supported through the issuance of mutual credit by mutual banks, with the aim of creating a federal society.

Mutualism has its roots in the utopian socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. It first developed a practical expression in Josiah Warren's community experiments in the United States, which he established according to the principles of equitable commerce based on a system of labor notes. Mutualism was first formulated into a comprehensive economic theory by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who proposed the abolition of unequal exchange and the establishment of a new economic system based on reciprocity. In order to establish such a system, he proposed the creation of a "People's Bank" that could issue mutual credit to workers and eventually replace the state; although his own attempts to establish such a system were foiled by the 1851 French coup d'état. (Full article...)

Wilhelm Röpke (German: [ˈʁœpkə]; 10 October 1899 – 12 February 1966) was a German economist and social critic, one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. A professor of economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Röpke theorised and collaborated to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program referred to as ordoliberalism, a more conservative variant of German liberalism.

With Alfred Müller-Armack and Alexander Rüstow (sociological neoliberalism) and Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm (ordoliberalism) he elucidated the ideas, which then were introduced formally by Germany's post-World War II Minister for Economics Ludwig Erhard, operating under Konrad Adenauer's Chancellorship. Röpke and his colleagues' economic influence therefore is considered largely responsible for enabling Germany's post-World War II "economic miracle". Röpke was also a historian and was nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. (Full article...)

In the history of economic thought, ancient economic thought refers to the ideas from people before the Middle Ages.

Economics in the classical age is defined in the modern analysis as a factor of ethics and politics, only becoming an object of study as a separate discipline during the 18th century. (Full article...)

Heterodox economics is a broad, relative term referring to schools of economic thought which are not commonly perceived as belonging to mainstream economics. There is no absolute definition of what constitutes heterodox economic thought, as it is defined in contrast to the most prominent, influential or popular schools of thought in a given time and place.

Groups typically classed as heterodox in current discourse include the Austrian, ecological, Marxist-historical, post-Keynesian, and modern monetary approaches. (Full article...)

Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference." An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships." Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics. The other, Ragnar Frisch, also coined the term in the sense in which it is used today.

A basic tool for econometrics is the multiple linear regression model. Econometric theory uses statistical theory and mathematical statistics to evaluate and develop econometric methods. Econometricians try to find estimators that have desirable statistical properties including unbiasedness, efficiency, and consistency. Applied econometrics uses theoretical econometrics and real-world data for assessing economic theories, developing econometric models, analysing economic history, and forecasting. (Full article...)

Computational economics is an interdisciplinary research discipline that combines methods in computational science and economics to solve complex economic problems, such as in the field Complexity Economics. This subject encompasses computational modeling of economic systems. Some of these areas are unique, while others established areas of economics by allowing robust data analytics and solutions of problems that would be arduous to research without computers and associated numerical methods. Computational methods have been applied in various fields of economics research, including but not limiting to the following research discussions.  

Econometrics: Non-parametric approaches, semi-parametric approaches, and machine learning. By dynamic systems modeling: Optimization, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling, and agent-based modeling inside Complexity Economics. (Full article...)

Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed two-person zero-sum games, in which a participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by the losses and gains of the other participant. In the 1950s, it was extended to the study of non zero-sum games, and was eventually applied to a wide range of behavioral relations. It is now an umbrella term for the science of rational decision making in humans, animals, and computers.

Modern game theory began with the idea of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games and its proof by John von Neumann. Von Neumann's original proof used the Brouwer fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets, which became a standard method in game theory and mathematical economics. His paper was followed by Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, which considered cooperative games of several players. The second edition provided an axiomatic theory of expected utility, which allowed mathematical statisticians and economists to treat decision-making under uncertainty. (Full article...)

Eli Filip Heckscher (24 November 1879 – 23 December 1952) was a Swedish political economist and economic historian who was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics.

He is known for the Heckscher–Ohlin theorem, an influential model of international trade that predicts that capital-abundant countries export capital-intensive goods, while labor-abundant countries export the labor-intensive goods. (Full article...)

Paul Robin Krugman (/ˈkrʊɡmən/ ^ⓘ KRUUG-mən; born February 28, 1953) is an American New Keynesian economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024. In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

Krugman was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and, later, at Princeton University which he retired from in June 2015, holding the title of professor emeritus there ever since. He also holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010, and is among the most influential economists in the world. He is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory and international finance), economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises. (Full article...)

Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented toward the social ecology of money.

Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics, questioning the extent to which it is positive and objective, and showing how its models and methods are biased by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics and a one-sided favoring of masculine-associated assumptions and methods. While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such "culturally feminine" topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena. (Full article...)

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔmɑ pikɛti]; born 7 May 1971) is a French economist who is a professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, associate chair at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Piketty's work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. Piketty proposes improving the education systems and considers diffusion of knowledge, diffusion of skills, diffusion of idea of productivity as the main mechanism that will lead to lower inequality. In 2019, his book Capital and Ideology was published, which focuses on income inequality in various societies in history. His 2022 A Brief History of Equality is a much shorter book about wealth redistribution intended for a target audience of citizens instead of economists. (Full article...)

The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), or neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis is an academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) with neoclassical economics.

The neoclassical synthesis is a macroeconomic theory that emerged in the mid-20th century, combining the ideas of neoclassical economics with Keynesian economics. The synthesis was an attempt to reconcile the apparent differences between the two schools of thought and create a more comprehensive theory of macroeconomics. (Full article...)

William Stanley Jevons FRS (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; 1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) was an English economist and logician.

Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862) as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and by Léon Walras in Switzerland (1874), marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal revolution in economics in the late 19th century established his reputation as a leading political economist and logician of the time. (Full article...)

The pluralism in economics movement is a campaign to change the teaching and research in economics towards more openness in its approaches, topics and standpoints it considers. The goal of the movement is to "reinvigorate the discipline ... [and bring] economics back into the service of society". Some have argued that economics had greater scientific pluralism in the past compared to the monist approach that is prevalent today. Pluralism encourages the inclusion of a wide variety of neoclassical and heterodox economic theories—including classical, Post-Keynesian, institutional, ecological, evolutionary, feminist, Marxist, and Austrian economics, stating that "each tradition of thought adds something unique and valuable to economic scholarship". (Full article...)

The German historical school of economics was an approach to academic economics and to public administration that emerged in the 19th century in Germany, and held sway there until well into the 20th century. The professors involved compiled massive economic histories of Germany and Europe. Numerous Americans were their students. The school was opposed by theoretical economists. Prominent leaders included Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920) in Germany, and Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) in Austria and the United States. (Full article...)

Johann Heinrich von Thünen (24 June 1783 – 22 September 1850), sometimes spelled Thuenen, was a prominent nineteenth-century economist and a native of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, now in northern Germany.

Even though he never held a professorial position, Thünen had substantial influence on economics. He has been described as one of the founders of agricultural economics and economic geography. He made substantial contributions to economic debates on rent, land use, and wages. (Full article...)

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Turing Award in 1975 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.

Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. (Full article...)

Milton Friedman (/ˈfriːdmən/ ^ⓘ; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics in the mid-1970s. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas Jr.

Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. He introduced a theory which would later become part of mainstream economics and he was among the first to propagate the theory of consumption smoothing. During the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing both Marxist and Keynesian government and economic policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its initial conclusions. He theorized that there existed a natural rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted a macroeconomic viewpoint known as monetarism and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy, as compared to rapid, and unexpected changes. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization, and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's monetary policy in response to the 2008 financial crisis. (Full article...)