From the 1930s, Leontief defended the validity of input-output analysis on the basis of a very specific epistemology: operationalism. Operationalism was not proper to Leontief but it was a common epistemological reference from the 1930s to the 1950s –especially about the status of scientific...

The proof of the existence of the Standard commodity contained in Sraffa's book (section 37) has been debated recently. Lippi (2008) has argued that the algorithm in section 37 of Sraffa’s book is not precisely stated and does not need to converge to the desired eigenvalue and eigenvector. In...

As a case study on the status of women in the economics profession, this article analyzes the fascinating career of Anne P. Carter. Prior to 1966 there were no women in the economics faculty at Harvard. In 1966 Carter became the first assistant professor of the Harvard Economics Department but,...

The article shows that mainstream economics, which now includes such current as new institutional economics, is the result of an evolution shaped by three institutions (capitalism, university and mathematics) by imposing to the profession of economists their founding beliefs. These beliefs are:...

This review of the book by Thomas Piketty, The capital in the XXI century, presents the central themes of the work and exposes its scope on the relationship between inequality and wealth. In particular a positive reflections on the progressive tax is added.

This review of the book by Thomas Piketty, the capital in the XXI century, presents the central themes of the work and exposes its scope on the relationship between inequality and wealth. In particular a positive reflections on the progressive tax is added.

The present paper discusses the ‘battle of methods’ in economics in its epistemic pursuit in the framework of a dialectics between science and art. The traditional distinction between deduction and induction has come to be characterized as a ‘theory-data confrontation’; while the former...

The present study is, in particular, an attempt to test the relationship between tax level and political stability by using some economic control variables and to see the relationship among government effectiveness, corruption, and GDP. For the purpose, we used the Vector Autoregression (VAR)...

The way the expresssion "applied economics" was employed changed deeply from one author to another. In this article we examine the meaning of this concept in Leon Walras' and Wassily Leontief's works regarding mathematical models of general interdependence and general equilibrium. It appears...

In this paper the authors present the findings of their research on a vast database containing the relevant information on the scientific characteristics of the three cohorts of assistant professors recruited in Italy in the early 1980s, the 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium....