Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
78,175
result(s) for
"Economic methodology"
Sort by:
Economics and history : surveys in cliometrics
\"Economics and History presents six state-of-the-art, comprehensive surveys from some of the leading scholars in cliometrics. The contributions consider a broad range of topics from this highly topical area, covering the following issues: time series econometrics and their applications in cliometrics, international migration, income maintenance programs in the USA in the first half of the 20th Century, social savings, health and stature, and human development - a long run view. This collection will serve as a unique resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on quantitative and econometrics courses, as well as academics and professional economists more generally\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics
A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach.
Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a \"rational bubble\" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.
eBook
Handbook of research methods and applications in economic geography
\"This Handbook provides an overview and assessment of the state-of-the-art regarding research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variety of scholarly traditions and with a background in different academic disciplines including economics, economic, human and cultural geography, and economic history. The resulting Handbook covers a broad spectrum of methodologies and approaches applicable in analyses pertaining to the geography of economic activities and economic outcomes.\" From publisher's website.
Book
The Poverty of Clio
The Poverty of Clio challenges the hold that cliometrics--an approach to economic history that employs the analytical tools of economists--has exerted on the study of our economic past. In this provocative book, Francesco Boldizzoni calls for the reconstruction of economic history, one in which history and the social sciences are brought to bear on economics, and not the other way around. Boldizzoni questions the appeal of economics over history--which he identifies as a distinctly American attitude--exposing its errors and hidden ideologies, and revealing how it fails to explain economic behavior itself. He shows how the misguided reliance on economic reasoning to interpret history has come at the expense of insights from the humanities and has led to a rejection of valuable past historical research. Developing a better alternative to new institutional economics and the rational choice approach, Boldizzoni builds on the extraordinary accomplishments of twentieth-century European historians and social thinkers to offer fresh ideas for the renewal of the field. Economic history needs to rediscover the true relationship between economy and culture, and promote an authentic alliance with the social sciences, starting with sociology and anthropology. It must resume its dialogue with the humanities, but without shrinking away from theory when constructing its models. The Poverty of Clio demonstrates why history must exert its own creative power on economics.
eBook
Global education policy, impact evaluations, and alternatives : the political economy of knowledge production
This book contributes to how we conceptualize and investigate the role and influence of knowledge production by international organizations within the field of global education reform. After elaborating on what it means to approach the intersection of these issues from a political economy perspective, the book develops a focus on knowledge production broadly to examine specifically the production of impact evaluations, which have come to be seen by many as the most credible form of policy-relevant knowledge. Moreover, it not only unpacks the methodological, technical, political, and organizational challenges in the production of impact evaluations, but also details an approach to critically understanding and examining the role that impact evaluations, once produced, play within the political economy of global education reform more generally. Finally, this book demonstrates the application of this approach in relation to a global education policy from El Salvador and reflects on the implications of this case for alternative ways forward, methodologically and otherwise.
Book
Ontology and the history of economic thought
Tony Lawson has long advocated an ‘ontological turn’ in the history of economic thought. This essay aims to contribute towards that goal by considering how one aspect of the methodology adopted by a prominent heterodox economist was informed by ontological considerations. The economist is Friedrich Hayek, the aspect of his methodology concerns the possibility of reductionism, while the ontological category that informs his anti-reductionist methodology—though not, as we shall see, in a wholly consistent way—is that of ‘emergence’. The account presented below suggests that the notion of emergence played an increasingly important, and also increasingly explicit, role in the arguments Hayek mounts against reductionism in his postwar work on theoretical psychology and social theory. In the case of his theoretical psychology, notwithstanding the fact that he had access to a set of concepts that afforded him the opportunity to mount an emergentist case against reductionism, Hayek’s most prominent argument against reductionism was, and remained, computational—rather than emergentist—in nature. In the case of his mature, post-1960 social theory, however, Hayek explicitly advanced a consistently ‘emergentist’ case against reductionism, based on the importance of organising relations for the generation of higher-level structural properties such as the coordinative powers of the liberal market economy. The implications of this ontologically informed discussion of Hayek’s arguments against reductionism for existing interpretations of Hayek’s work are considered.
Journal Article
Wheat from Chaff: Meta-Analysis as Quantitative Literature Review
This paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research, meta-regression analysis or MRA. Economics is theory-driven. Yet, we must learn empirically if economics is to advance. MRA offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study-to-study variation in economic research. MRA is used to assess the evidence for Ricardian equivalence, and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review. Furthermore, MRA establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics.
Journal Article
Synthesizing the Malthusian and Senian approaches on scarcity
Food entitlement decline (FED) and food availability decline (FAD) are two approaches to explaining famines that have different policy implications. One focuses on the systemic level, whereas the other is concerned with the individual level. They therefore analyse relatively distinct causal mechanisms. Thus, an important question is whether these approaches can be reconciled. Another related question is how FAD- and FED-based explanations relate to classical Malthusian views about rapid food requirement increase (FRI). This paper analyses these questions and argues that these three approaches can indeed be reconciled within a single framework by outlining the causal sources of FAD, FED and FRI. This task requires, among other things, the separation of ontological categories and empirical measures. As a consequence of this argument, the paper suggests that there are only seven possible ontological combinations of how a famine situation can arise as a direct cause. Simultaneously, it maintains that there are virtually an infinite number of ways in which these combinations may act as indirect causes (rooted in economic, political and social conditions). The analysis is exemplified by the Bengal famine of 1943 because that famine is a well-known case. The wider research and policy applicability of this general account are discussed but have yet to be tested in relation to other scarcity cases (water, land, fish). This synthesis is made possible by the incorporation of critical realist interventions into economic theory.
Journal Article