Compound Rates of Growth In the modern version of an old legend, an investment banker asks to be paid by placing one penny on the first square of a chessboard, two pennies on the second square, four on the third, etc. If the banker had asked that only the white squares be used, the initial […]
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.
Governments have been trying to set maximum or minimum prices since ancient times. The Old Testament prohibited interest on loans to fellow Israelites; medieval governments fixed the maximum price of bread; and in recent years, governments in the United States have fixed the price of gasoline, the rent on apartments in New York City, and […]
Adam Smith struggled with what came to be called the paradox of “value in use” versus “value in exchange.” Water is necessary to existence and of enormous value in use; diamonds are frivolous and clearly not essential. But the price of diamonds—their value in exchange—is far higher than that of water. What perplexed Smith is […]
A private pension plan is an organized program to provide retirement income for a firm’s workers. Some 56.7 percent of full-time, full-year wage and salary workers in the United States participate in employment-based pension plans (EBRI Issue Brief, October 2003). Private trusteed pension plans receive special tax treatment and are subject to eligibility, coverage, and […]
“ 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 with the firm (as executives, directors, or sometimes rank-and-file employees) […]
These entries are about real markets and how they work and include advertising, brand names, competition, entrepreneurship, and the free market.
Governments impose a variety of taxes. The analysis of taxes, therefore, requires multiple entries, including marginal tax rates, corporate taxation, and capital gains taxes.
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 banking, there is a separate category to cover those issues. The entries include bank runs, the Federal Reserve system, and the Savings and Loan crisis.
With extensive government regulation of many industries, there are many entries on aspects of that regulation, in industries ranging from agriculture, airlines, and energy tp trucking and pharmaceuticals.
Gustav Cassel, a Swedish economist, developed the theory of exchange rates known as purchasing power parity in a series of post-World War I memoranda for the League of Nations. The basic concept can be made clear with an example. If US$4 buys one bushel of wheat in the United States, and if 120 Japanese […]
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 early 1950s. He took up where Nash left […]