The earth’s natural resources are finite, which means that if we use them continuously, we will eventually exhaust them. This basic observation is undeniable. But another way of looking at the issue is far more relevant to assessing people’s well-being. Our exhaustible and unreproducible natural resources, if measured in terms of their prospective contribution to […]
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 competition takes place in markets—meeting grounds of intending suppliers and buyers.1 Typically, a few sellers compete to attract favorable offers from prospective buyers. Similarly, intending buyers compete to obtain good offers from suppliers. When a contract is concluded, the buyer and seller exchange property rights in a good, service, or asset. Everyone interacts voluntarily, […]
Minimum wage laws set legal minimums for the hourly wages paid to certain groups of workers. In the United States, amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act have increased the federal minimum wage from $.25 per hour in 1938 to $5.15 in 1997.1 Minimum wage laws were invented in Australia and New Zealand with the […]
A patent is the government grant of monopoly on an invention for a limited amount of time. Patents in the United States are granted for seventeen years from the date the patent is issued or for 20 years from the date of filing. Other countries grant patents for similar time periods. Italy and Mexico grant […]
Major league sports, as every reader of the sports pages knows, is a major league business. As a result, economics has a lot to say about how players, teams, and leagues will act under different circumstances. But would you believe that economics can be used to predict which teams will win and which will lose? […]
As the category\'s name suggests, entries in this category are on important historical developments, two of the main ones being the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression.
With the decline in transportation costs, especially across oceans, and the recent increase in trade barriers, topics in international trade has become even more important.
Sometimes defined as the theory of the economy as a whole, macroeconomics includes issues such as economic growth, fiscal policy, monetary policy, national income accounts, and unemployment.
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.
James Buchanan is the cofounder, along with Gordon Tullock, of public choice theory. Buchanan entered the University of Chicago’s graduate economics program as a “libertarian socialist.” After six weeks of taking Frank Knight’s course in price theory, recalls Buchanan, he had been converted into a zealous free marketer. Buchanan’s next big conversion came while reading […]
In 1990, U.S. economists Harry Markowitz, William F. Sharpe, and Merton H. Miller shared the Nobel Prize “for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics.” Their contributions, in fact, were what started financial economics as a separate field of study. In the early 1950s Markowitz developed portfolio theory, which looks at how investment […]