First paragraph: Mrs. Thatcher’s controversial premiership in the UK ran from 1979 to 1990. It witnessed the end of the post-war Keynesian macroeconomic consensus and the introduction of monetarist policies targeting inflation by attempting to control the growth of the money supply. The...

In Cambridge, UK, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were some of the most distinguished post-war non-neoclassical economists, which included Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa. The Cambridge capital theory controversies seemed to have been decisively settled in Cambridge,...

This paper considers from a methodological point of view why disputes in macroeconomics over its fundamental assumptions regularly occur. It analyses the problem first using Kuhn's concept of the paradigm and then draws on McCloskey's use of rhetorical analysis. It finds the latter of limited...

In 2008, the three main banks in Iceland collapsed. There is strong evidence that the banks would have become insolvent even without the subprime crisis. Yet there was a marked difference in opinion at the time about the viability of the Icelandic banks. A clean bill of health was given by the...

In this paper, we estimate a dynamic structural model of a rm s decision to invest in R&D and use it to measure the expected long-run bene t from R&D investment. We apply the model to German rms in ve high-tech manufacturing industries and distinguish rms by whether they sell in just the...

Over the past decade, nighttime lights have become a widely used proxy for measuring economic activity. This paper examines the potential for high frequency nighttime lights data to provide 'near real-time' tracking of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Morocco. At the national...

In this paper we develop a structural empirical model that allows us to estimate the impact of R&D on firm profitability through two channels. In the first channel, R&D investment by the firm can impact the firm's production efficiency and lower its marginal cost. This productivity channel...