By Alejandra Salinas

In the neoclassical economic model, agents are assumed to act in pursuit of maximum utility—to know their preferences and some of the constraints they face—and to effectively satisfy their economic needs by means of market exchanges. In contrast, behavioral economists claim that individual judgments tend to be cogn...

By Daniel A. Sumner

Government intervention in food and fiber commodity markets began long ago. The classic case of farm subsidy through trade barriers is the English Corn Laws, which for centuries regulated the import and export of grain in Great Britain and Ireland. They were repealed in 1846. Modern agricultural subsidy programs in the...

By Amy Willis

In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts talks with historian Diane Ravitch about her new book, Slaying Goliath. Ravitch, a former proponent of charter schools, now bemoans what she sees as their broken promise to American students. Charters promised to be R&D centers for best educational practices, which...

By:

A new English translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) was published a few months ago. It is excellent, and I wrote on it for the City Journal here. I’ve been trying to convince my classical liberal friends to read Manzoni for a little while - with almost no success. It may well b...

Traditions and norms can seem at best out-of-touch and at worst offensive to many a modern mind. But Israeli computer scientist and Talmud scholar Moshe Koppel argues that traditions and norms--if they evolve slowly--create trust, develop our capacity for deferred gratification, and even, in the case of how we prepare ...

By Richard B. McKenzie

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, only seven states—Arkansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming—had resisted statewide stay-at-home or lockdown regulations to contain the virus (a new strain of coronavirus disease). Even though those states have less than 10 percent of the country's popu...

1920-2000

John C. Harsanyi was corecipient (with John Nash and Reinhard Selten) of the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.” Harsanyi’s interest in working on game theory was triggered when he read John Nash’s contributions of the ea...

By Rosolino Candela

"Liberty and responsibility," according to F. A. Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty, "are inseparable. A free society will not function or maintain itself unless its members regard it as right that each individual occupy the position that results from his action and accept it as due to his own action" (1960, p. 71). ...

By Dean Furbush

Program trading, the subject of considerable controversy in recent years, is the simultaneous trading of a portfolio of stocks, as opposed to buying or selling just one stock at a time. The New York Stock Exchange defines program trading as any trade involving fifteen or more stocks with an aggregate value in excess of...