Program trading, the subject of considerable controversy in recent years, is the simultaneous trading of a portfolio of stocks, as opposed to buying or selling just one stock at a time. The New York Stock Exchange defines program trading as any trade involving fifteen or more stocks with an aggregate value in excess of $1 […]
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.
Financial regulation in the United States, and elsewhere in the developed world, breaks down into two basic categories: safety-and-soundness regulation and compliance. While this entry focuses on U.S. financial services regulation, it broadly reflects what occurs elsewhere. Financial institutions serve various purposes. Depository institutions (banks, savings and loans [S&Ls], and credit unions) transform liquid liabilities […]
To economists, efficiency is a relationship between ends and means. When we call a situation inefficient, we are claiming that we could achieve the desired ends with less means, or that the means employed could produce more of the ends desired. “Less” and “more” in this context necessarily refer to less and more value. Thus, […]
The Internet and Economics “The Internet changes everything”—or so we were told at the height of the Internet craze. According to a prominent Wall Street Journal article titled “Goodbye Supply and Demand,” one of the changes it was claimed to have brought about was a transformation of the basic economic forces at work in the […]
A monopoly is an enterprise that is the only seller of a good or service. In the absence of government intervention, a monopoly is free to set any price it chooses and will usually set the price that yields the largest possible profit. Just being a monopoly need not make an enterprise more profitable than […]
Economics historian Mark Blaug called Jacob Viner “the greatest historian of economic thought that ever lived.” One of Viner’s greatest accomplishments is his book Studies in the Theory of International Trade. This work is not just a history of the theory of international trade but also a guidebook that tells where the early economists who […]
In 2002, Vernon Smith and daniel kahneman were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Smith received his prize “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.” The dominant view among economists as recently as the 1970s was that economists, unlike chemists or biologists, […]