We write this essay for both lay readers and scientists, though mainstream economists are welcome to enjoy it too. Our subject is the basic toolbox of mainstream economics. The most important tools in this box are demand, supply and equilibrium. All mainstream economists – as well as many...

Many questions in urban and regional economics can be characterized as including both a spatial and a time dimension. However, often one of these dimensions is neglected in empirical work. This paper highlights the danger of methodological inertia, investigating the effect of neglecting the...

Statistically significant results are more rewarded than insignificant ones, so researchers have the incentive to pursue statistical significance. Such p-hacking reduces the informativeness of hypothesis tests by making significant results much more common than they are supposed to be in the...

The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double-counting implies over-statement of levels of GDP and national income. Across countries, those with higher propensities to invest...

The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double-counting implies over-statement of levels of GDP and national income. Across countries, those with higher propensities to invest...

The national income and product accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value when the cumulated capital leads to more rental income. From the perspective of resources available intertemporally for consumption, the double-counting issue implies...

The national income and product accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value when the cumulated capital leads to more rental income. From the perspective of resources available intertemporally for consumption, the double-counting issue implies...

Audit correspondence studies are field experiments that test for discriminatory behavior in active markets. Researchers measure discrimination by comparing how responsive individuals ("audited units") are to correspondences from different types of people. This paper elaborates on the tradeoffs...

Chapter 1 - An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy (Reinhard Jung, Stefanos Gimatzidis) -- Chapter 2 - Writing the Deep History of Human Economy (Randall McGuire) -- Chapter 3 - Wealth, Women's Labor, and Forms of Value: Thinking From the Study of Ancestral Central America...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented policy responses and a large literature evaluating their impacts. This paper re-examines this literature and investigates the role of researchers' degrees-of-flexibility on the estimated effects of mobility-reducing policies on social-distancing...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors in cash welfare and SNAP receipt in three major U.S. household surveys. We find high rates of misreporting, particularly failure to report receipt. The surveys inaccurately capture patterns of multiple program participation, even...

This book studies past economics from anthropological, archaeological, historical and sociological perspectives. By analyzing archeological and other evidence, it examines economic behavior and institutions in ancient societies. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it critically discusses...

Robbins belongs to the prehistory of microfoundations, for his definition of economics helped to buttress the centrality that individual choice acquired after the Second World War. This, however, was an unintended effect of his seminal Essay. Our claim is that, underlying his definition of...