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Economic Regulation

Corruption

By François Melese

In the world’s worst offending countries, corrupt government officials steal public money and collude with businesses to sell laws, rules, regulations, and government contracts. The World Bank reports that “higher levels of corruption are associated with lower per capita income” (World Bank 2001, p. 105). Corrupt...

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Basic Concepts

Prisoners’ Dilemma

By Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff

The prisoners’ dilemma is the best-known game of strategy in social science. It helps us understand what governs the balance between cooperation and competition in business, in politics, and in social settings. In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interr...

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Biographies

William Stanley Jevons

1835-1882

  William Jevons was one of three men to simultaneously advance the so-called marginal revolution. Working in complete independence of one another—Jevons in Manchester, England; leon walras in Lausanne, Switzerland; and carl menger in Vienna—each scholar developed the theory of marginal utility to...

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Corporations and Financial Markets

Insider Trading

By Stanislav Dolgopolov

“ Insider trading” refers to transactions in a company’s securities, such as stocks or options, by corporate insiders or their associates based on information originating within the firm that would, once publicly disclosed, affect the prices of such securities. Corporate insiders are individuals whose employment...

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Biographies

Robert A. Mundell

1932-2021

Robert Mundell was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in economics “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas.” In much of the work on macroeconomics before Mundell’s work of the early 1960s, economists assumed—implicitly...

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Basic Concepts

Gross Domestic Product

By Lincoln Anderson

Gross domestic product, the official measure of total output of goods and services in the U.S. economy, represents the capstone and grand summary of the world's best system of economic statistics. The federal government organizes millions of pieces of monthly, quarterly, and annual data from government agencies, compan...

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Biographies

James J. Heckman

1944-

  In 2000, James Heckman, along with daniel mcfadden, received the Nobel Prize in economics. Heckman won the prize for “his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples,” highly technical work that it is difficult to explain to the layman. Nevertheless, the work rewarded by th...

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