The EU's current ten year strategy "Europe 2020" aims to set out a vision of a European social market economy for the 21st century that will promote economic growth with social and ecological attributes. This article analyzes the roles ascribed to the government and the market and the extent...

Economists are divided about population growth: the pessimism of neo-Malthusians contrasts strongly with the optimism of cornucopians. Despite their differences, both schools of thought reject economic orthodoxy and prefer evolutionary forms of theory. Their interpretations of evolution are...

In the 1950s, Jacques Rueff's references to social order seem pretty clear: it is not a spontaneous phenomena. Although Rueff is generally seen as a liberal economist, this has prompted commentators to see in his approach something more artificial than Hayek's own ideas on social order. Hayek...

The aim of this article is to discuss why we should synthesize feminist and post-Keynesian/Kaleckian economics. We answer three related questions. Why does post-Keynesian economics need feminist economics? Why does feminist economics need post-Keynesian macroeconomics? Finally, what is the...

What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey's work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are...

Widespread use of the term "neoliberalism" is of surprisingly recent origin, dating to only the late 20 th century. The "neoliberalism" literature has nonetheless settled on an origin story that depicts the term as a self-selected moniker from the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium. This paper...

This paper compares Deirdre McCloskey's reading of the "bourgeois reevaluation" with Sergio Ricossa's. Italian economist Sergio Ricossa was – like McCloskey – schooled in the neoclassical, formalistic tradition, but in time drifted toward a more "Austrian" approach, as he was influenced by...

This paper investigates two different approaches to the analysis of institutions using game theory and discusses their methodological and theoretical implications for further research. Starting from von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory, we investigate, how Schotter and Schelling's approaches to...

Institutions matter both for long-term economic evolution as well as for more short-termed economic performance. The law is particularly important in shaping the institutional framework for economic activities. This paper gives an overview of typical evolutionary explanations of legal change,...

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this essay, we present and evaluate his main contributions to the economics of entrepreneurship. The focus is on how Kirzner defines the entrepreneurial function. In order to...