The pre-war approaches to trade unions were mainly based on the theoretical and methodological viewpoints of early institutional economics. Trade unions were conceived of as politico-economic organizations whose members were motivated by relative comparisons and also were concerned with issues...

Although most of the marginalist economists’ methodology was influenced by 19th century classical physics, the work of second generation marginalist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth represents the highest point of classical physics influence to the development of mainstream economic methodology....

Psychological ideas had always played a role on the formation of economic thought as can be seen in the works of many influential pre-classical and classical authors. Up to the beginning of the 20th century, there was almost no methodological objection regarding the incorporation of ideas from...

umner Slichter was “perhaps the most influential industrial economist in America”, while Emil Lederer was “the leading academic socialist of Germany in the 1920’s”. However, most aspects of their works remain unexplored. This paper analyzes Lederer’s and Slichter’s central theses....

With a career spanning over many decades, Tony Lawson has made important contributions ranging from the philosophy of social sciences, history economic thought, methodology of economics, political economy, monetary theory, to the theory of ethics. His work concerning ontology has had a...

The aim of this paper is to offer certain insights into the process of declining of scholastic economics in late medieval and early modern European intellectual circles. In this attempt, the paper adopts the metatheoretical framework of Laudan’s philosophy of science and introduces the concept...

In modern literature, the concept of work effort is used as an additional explanation of involuntary unemployment. In particular, it is assumed that higher wages have a positive effect on work effort and this is the fundamental point of the efficiency wage models of involuntary unemployment....

The vast majority of pre-Classical and of many Classical economists thought that it was natural to incorporate value judgments and norms in their economic reasoning. However, there was a gradual dominance of the idea of a neutral or value-free economic science which gained momentum with the...

Consumer theory is considered to be the hard core of the neoclassical canon. The present work traces the various historical stages which led to the acceptance of the theory, and attempts to offer some possible explanations for its eventual establishment. The paper starts with a brief historical...

The main starting point of this paper is the idea that trade unions do not only care about real wage level but also about a reference or aspiration wage level. After citing a number of empirical works, the paper argues that the attainment of the reference wage is a priority for the union. This...