Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerging financial markets. In his magisterial...

David Hume (1711-1776) is arguably the most esteemed philosopher to have written in the English language. During his lifetime, however, Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published as the <em>Political Discourses</em> (1752). Hume...

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's "fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic forces driving the creation of media...

The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-which stood out in the midst of a review of...

Edmund S. Phelps has been McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University in New York City, New York, since 1982 and director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University's Earth Institute since 2001. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic...

In a 1966 article in the <em>American Economic Review</em>, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of "X-efficiency": the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pressure, firms are unlikely to use their resources...

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to a paper by...

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the...

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economic activity just as rich countries contain...

John Maynard Keynes made a major contribution to the development of professional investment management. Based on detailed archival research at King's College, Cambridge, we describe Keynes' investment philosophy, his investment performance, and the evolution of his investment approach as the...