National income accounts (NIAs) are fundamental aggregate statistics in macroeconomic analysis. The ground-breaking development of national income and systems of NIAs was one of the most far-reaching innovations in applied economics in the early twentieth century. NIAs provide a quantitative basis for choosing and assessing economic policies as well as making possible quantitative macroeconomic modeling […]
The Library of Economics and Liberty carries the popular Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David R. Henderson.
This highly acclaimed economics encyclopedia was first published in 1993 under the title The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. It features easy-to-read articles by over 150 top economists, including Nobel Prize winners, over 80 biographies of famous economists, and many tables and charts illustrating economics in action. With David R. Henderson’s permission and encouragement, the Econlib edition of this work includes links, additions, and corrections.
Many people believe that only government intervention prevents rampant discrimination in the private sector. Economic theory predicts the opposite: market mechanisms impose inescapable penalties on profits whenever for-profit enterprises discriminate against individuals on any basis other than productivity. Though bigoted managers may hold sway for a time, in the long run the profit penalty makes […]
National defense is in many ways a public, or “collective,” good, which means two things. First, consumption of the good by one person does not reduce the amount available for others to consume. Thus, all people in a nation must “consume” the same amount of national defense (the defense policies implemented by the government), although […]
The modern history of drug regulation in the United States has been marked by the simultaneous pursuit of two goals—safety and efficacy. Since passage of the 1962 amendments to the Food and Drug Act, most members of the medical and regulatory establishment have regarded those two goals as complementary. By the early seventies, however, critics […]
Most of the energy consumed in America today is produced from the combustion of fossil fuels, primarily oil, coal, and natural gas. Energy can be generated, however, in any number of ways. Figure 1 indicates the sources of energy employed by the American economy as of February 2004. Figure 1 U.S. Energy Sources, 2004 The economy […]
The entries in this category are on various aspects of the labor market and include discrimination, the gender gap, immigration, job safety, and wages and working conditions.
These deal with various issues in law and economics such as antitrust, liability, and intellectual property.
With the decline in transportation costs, especially across oceans, and with the worldwide decline in trade barriers, international trade has become even more important. Topics include free trade, protectionism, foreign exchange, and international capital flows.
Partly because of the economy-wide effects of money and banking, and partly because of the specific government policies that regulate the money supply and baking, there is a separate category to cover these issues. Entries include ban runs, the Federal Reserve System, and deposit insurance.
Tjalling Koopmans shared the 1975 Nobel Prize with Leonid Kantorovich “for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources.” Koopmans, a native of the Netherlands, started in mathematics and physics, but in the 1930s switched to economics because it was “closer to real life.” In 1938 he succeeded Jan Tinbergen at the League […]
Frank H. Knight was one of the founders of the so-called Chicago school of economics, of which milton friedman and george stigler were the leading members from the 1950s to the 1980s. Knight made his reputation with his book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, which was based on his Ph.D. dissertation. In it Knight set out […]