This unique Handbook explores both the economics of the firm and the theory of the firm, two areas which are traditionally treated separately in the literature. On the one hand, the former refers to the structure, organization and boundaries of the firm, while the latter is devoted to the...

This paper combines several important arguments, which have puzzled economic theory for decades, to arrive at a more adequate description of the current global crisis. The main theoretical innovation is to view the long-run economic evolution as a stepwise evolution of money forms. Moreover, as...

The current economic crisis proves how deep the contradictions inherent in contemporary capitalism really are. At the same time it is evident that the financial crisis goes hand in hand with a social crisis, since an increasing number of people lost trust in governments, trade unions and other...

Traditional macroeconomics and agent-based simulation (ABS) seem to be two disjunctive worlds, two different sprachspiele in the sense of Wittgenstein. It is not just the fact that macroeconomics has a long and distinguished history that on top of more than 200 years of discourse has recently...

Thorstein Veblen's class analysis implicitly was a critique of the class analysis of some Marxists, who reduced the interdependence of economic base and ideological superstructure to a causal link from the former to the latter. Veblen's emphasis on the directive to take culture into account...

This paper discusses the works of Joseph Schumpeter and Richard Goodwin using the common perspective that both were theoretical mavericks of mainstream economic theory development in the 20th century. In particular the fact that their activities overlapped during their cooperation at Harvard...

This paper sets out to discuss recent economic developments from a twofold perspective. Both spotlights focus on the special role played by the current deep global crisis. The first line of argument centers on the history of economic ideas and shows how evolutionary economics has emerged as a...