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...

שמשון ביכלר ויהונתן ניצן פרסמו באחרונה את ספרם "ההון ושברו" (פרדס, 2022, 602 עמ'), בו הם דנים במשותף בתהפוכות כלכליות ותיאורטיות עדכניות. הספר ראה אור כעשרים שנה לאחר...

This interview was commissioned in October 2019 for a special issue on 'Accumulation and Politics: Approaches and Concepts' to be published by the Revue de la régulation. We submitted the text in March 2020, only to learn two months later that it won't be published. The problem, we were...

In the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet devoid of life. Looking closer, the aliens see that life on Earth was once abundant, but was wiped out by a mass extinction. Curiously, this event was driven not by geological disaster, but by one of the extinct species itself. In...

Unternehmen sollten auf Gewinnmaximierung verzichten, um Gewinne maximieren zu können. So lautet die paradoxe Anforderung, mit der Personen konfrontiert sind, die Unternehmen im System der Wirtschaft einer modernen Gesellschaft führen. Diesem Paradoxon kommt man durch die Rekonstruktion der...

This paper aims to identify and critically evaluate the theoretical explanations of mergers happening in clusters. We identified two streams of theories: neoclassical and behavioural explanations of merger waves. Neoclassical theories include q theory and industry shock hypothesis. Behavioural...

This paper considers the consequences of a two-sector vertically-integrated model of firms producing output using firm-specific capital with a second sector producing firm-specific capital by adapting raw capital purchased in the market. Analysts rarely observe each sector separately....

Steve Keen's book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: "I regard Neoclassical economics as not merely a bad methodology for economic...

Unternehmen sollten auf Gewinnmaximierung verzichten, um Gewinne maximieren zu können. So lautet die paradoxe Anforderung, mit der Personen konfrontiert sind, die Unternehmen im System der Wirtschaft einer modernen Gesellschaft führen. Diesem Paradoxon kommt man durch die Rekonstruktion der...

This paper is a revised version of a discussion with Nobel laureate Vernon Smith on the limits of neoclassical theory and on the opportunity to recover the alternative approach of classical economists and Marx. Vernon Smith is certainly right to insist on the heuristic force of the classical...

The labor market occupies center stage in modern theories of fluctuations. The most important phenomenon to explain and understand in a recession is the sharp decline in employment and jump in unemployment. This chapter for the Handbook of Macroeconomics considers explanations based on frictions...

This paper aims to identify and critically evaluate the theoretical explanations of mergers happening in clusters. We identified two streams of theories: neoclassical and behavioural explanations of merger waves. Neoclassical theories include q theory and industry shock hypothesis. Behavioural...

The world is facing with challenges that were hard to imagine a few decades ago. The last century was one in which the world experienced the enthusiasm of progress as a result of the implementation of methods proposed by neoclassical growth theory. The effects of climate change cause us to...

The theories of country growth models are supported by the high scale variation observed in these countries' growth rates. This is the reason behind those typical questions, like "Why did some East Asian countries grow so much?", amongst others. Therefore, a lot of recent research has been...

A new, capitalism-denying book is on the shelves, and it makes a stunning discovery: "Capitalism without competition is not capitalism"! Capitalist crisis, like climate change, tends to breed "capitalism deniers". The problem, argue the deniers, lies not in capitalism but in its "distortions"....

In various forms, economists are still taking sustained action to find specific answers to questions related to the issue of economic fluctuations. In this context of continuing concerns, both the "old" classics and the "new" classics have made substantial progress in their own theories of the...

This paper surveys the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment and its criticisms. We identify four main strands in neoclassical investment theory: (i) the traditional Wicksellian model; (ii) the Fisherian "array-of-opportunities" approach; (iii) the Jorgensonian model; (iv) the now...

This paper embeds firm dynamics into the Neoclassical model and provides a simple framework to solve for the transitional dynamics of economies moving towards more selection. As in the Neoclassical model, markets are perfectly competitive, there is only one good and two production factors...

We study Switzerland's weak growth during the 1990s through the lens of the business cycle accounting framework of Chari et al. (Econometrica 75(3):781-836, 2007). Our main result is that weak productivity growth cannot account for the 1993-1996 stagnation episode. Rather, the stagnation is...

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...

Neoclassical economics is the official scientific underpinning of capitalism as well as its main ideological defence, and according to Keen, it fails in both tasks. Contrary to received opinion, neoclassicism cannot explain capitalism – either in detail or in the aggregate – and the policies...