Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Labour economics, or labor economics, seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour. Labour is a commodity that is supplied by labourers, usually in exchange for a wage paid by demanding firms. Because these labourers exist as parts of a social, institutional, or political system, labour economics must also account for social, cultural and political variables.
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, and a full professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists, and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Neutrality of money is the idea that a change in the stock of money affects only nominal variables in the economy such as prices, wages, and exchange rates, with no effect on real variables, like employment, real GDP, and real consumption. Neutrality of money is an important idea in classical economics and is related to the classical dichotomy. It implies that the central bank does not affect the real economy by creating money. Instead, any increase in the supply of money would be offset by a proportional rise in prices and wages. This assumption underlies some mainstream macroeconomic models. Others like monetarism view money as being neutral only in the long run.
In statistics, economics, and finance, an index is a statistical measure of change in a representative group of individual data points. These data may be derived from any number of sources, including company performance, prices, productivity, and employment. Economic indices track economic health from different perspectives. Examples include the consumer price index, which measures changes in retail prices paid by consumers, and the cost-of-living index (COLI), which measures the relative cost of living over time.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism was a neoclassical economics academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). It was formulated most notably by John Hicks (1937), Franco Modigliani (1944), and Paul Samuelson (1948), who dominated economics in the post-war period and formed the mainstream of macroeconomic thought in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2018), 3rd ed., is a twenty-volume reference work on economics published by Palgrave Macmillan. It contains around 3,000 entries, including many classic essays from the original Inglis Palgrave Dictionary, and a significant increase in new entries from the previous editions by the most prominent economists in the field, among them 36 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Articles are classified according to Journal of Economic Literature(JEL) classification codes.
Miguel Sidrauski was an Argentine economist who made important contributions to the theory of economic growth by developing a modified version of the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model to describe the effects of money on long-run growth. He also published an article on exchange rate determination. Sidrauski taught economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Peter Kenneth Newman was an English economist and historian of economic thought. He helped to edit The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, to which he contributed several articles.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest, and social welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm, and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism, as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Murray Milgate, is an Australian-born academic economist and Sometime Fellow and director of studies in economics at Queens' College in the University of Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. He is the co-creator and co-editor of the celebrated original edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (1987) together with John Eatwell and Peter Newman.
In economics, non-convexity refers to violations of the convexity assumptions of elementary economics. Basic economics textbooks concentrate on consumers with convex preferences and convex budget sets and on producers with convex production sets; for convex models, the predicted economic behavior is well understood. When convexity assumptions are violated, then many of the good properties of competitive markets need not hold: Thus, non-convexity is associated with market failures, where supply and demand differ or where market equilibria can be inefficient. Non-convex economies are studied with nonsmooth analysis, which is a generalization of convex analysis.
Convexity is an important topic in economics. In the Arrow–Debreu model of general economic equilibrium, agents have convex budget sets and convex preferences: At equilibrium prices, the budget hyperplane supports the best attainable indifference curve. The profit function is the convex conjugate of the cost function. Convex analysis is the standard tool for analyzing textbook economics. Non‑convex phenomena in economics have been studied with nonsmooth analysis, which generalizes convex analysis.
Shannon C. Stimson is an American political theorist and historian of ideas, whose more recent work and teaching spans the economic and political thought of the early modern period through the nineteenth century. She is the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Government department at Georgetown University. Her academic posts have included appointments at Harvard University (1984-1991), UC Berkeley (1991-2014), the Fulbright Professorship in the United Kingdom, the Christensen Fellowship of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, the John K. Castle Chair in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University and she has been a Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens' College, Cambridge on two occasions. Her research has been supported through fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, as well as by several prize fellowships. Her articles have appeared in numerous edited volumes, journals of political thought, economics, the history of economic thought, and political science in America and Europe. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, the Adam Smith Review, and the Journal of Politics.
Stefano Zamagni is an Italian economist. Born in Rimini, Zamagni is Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. Zamagni is also a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association and President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist economy or an alternative form of a decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences.
Kevin W. S. Roberts was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2020.
