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.
Economic analysis of advertising dates to the 1930s and 1940s, when critics attacked it as a monopolistic and wasteful practice. Defenders soon emerged who argued that advertising promotes competition and lowers the costs of providing information to consumers and distributing goods. Today, most economists side with the defenders most of the time. Advertising comes in […]
Whenever people decide whether the advantages of a particular action are likely to outweigh its drawbacks, they engage in a form of benefit-cost analysis (BCA). In the public arena, formal BCA is a sometimes controversial technique for thoroughly and consistently evaluating the pros and cons associated with prospective policy changes. Specifically, it is an attempt […]
“Competitiveness,” particularly with reference to an entire economy, is hard to define. Indeed, competitiveness, like love or democracy, actually has several meanings. And the question “Is America competitive?” has at least three interpretations: How well is the United States performing compared to other countries? How well has America performed in international trade? Are we doing […]
K-12 In the 1980s, economists puzzled by a decline in the growth of U.S. productivity realized that American schools had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. After rising every year for fifty years, student scores on a variety of achievement tests dropped sharply in 1967. They continued to decline through 1980. The decline was […]
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.
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 the Nobel committee has been valuable for economists’ […]
Joseph Schumpeter described Bastiat nearly a century after his death as “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived.” Orphaned at the age of nine, Bastiat tried his hand at commerce, farming, and insurance sales. In 1825, after he inherited his grandfather’s estate, he quit working, established a discussion group, and read widely in economics. […]