Murray Rothbard's posthumous Economic Thought Before Adam Smith is notable for its vilification of 'the quiet Scottish professor.' While there is little disagreement that Smith was, at best, an ambivalent champion of free markets, Rothbard's indictment of him as a proto-Marxist is less than...

This paper provides a non-technical and illustrated introduction to the econometric contributions of the 2003 Nobel Prize winners, Robert Engle and Clive Granger, with special emphasis on their implications for heterodox economists.

Economists have two standard explanations for the absence of substantial nominal wage pressures in the current macroeconomic climate. The first, and more traditional, view asserts that the NAIRU has drifted downward over the last decade, while the second posits the establishment of a "new...

Economists have become interested in the behavior of random processes with positive feedback but have sometimes found it difficult to introduce students to this research. Simulation of the law of large numbers with increasing amounts of feedback provides a convenient framework for such...

This article explores a possible connection between two behavioural anomalies in economics, the observed responsiveness of individual decision makers to sunk costs, and the apparent failure of backward induction to predict outcomes in experimental bargaining games. In particular, we show that...

The theory of compensating differentials has proven difficult to test with observational data: the consequences of selection, unobserved firm and worker characteristics, and the broader macroeconomic environment complicate most analyses. Instead, we construct experimental, real-effort labor...

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial effects, empirical evidence of such effects is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real-effort...

Donations in-kind can be a mixed blessing for charities, who are often more adept at solicitation than resale. Many organizations rely on raffles to turn donations into cash, but auctions are also common. Theory predicts that all-pay mechanisms should produce more revenue than winner-pay...