This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
In sociology and in economics,the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality,price,or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899,the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer,the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status.
The Ricardian equivalence proposition is an economic hypothesis holding that consumers are forward-looking and so internalize the government's budget constraint when making their consumption decisions. This leads to the result that,for a given pattern of government spending,the method of financing such spending does not affect agents' consumption decisions,and thus,it does not change aggregate demand.
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in the 1997 Birthday Honours.
National accounts or national account systems (NAS) are the implementation of complete and consistent accounting techniques for measuring the economic activity of a nation. These include detailed underlying measures that rely on double-entry accounting. By design,such accounting makes the totals on both sides of an account equal even though they each measure different characteristics,for example production and the income from it. As a method,the subject is termed national accounting or,more generally,social accounting. Stated otherwise,national accounts as systems may be distinguished from the economic data associated with those systems. While sharing many common principles with business accounting,national accounts are based on economic concepts. One conceptual construct for representing flows of all economic transactions that take place in an economy is a social accounting matrix with accounts in each respective row-column entry.
The Boskin Commission,formally called the "Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index",was appointed by the United States Senate in 1995 to study possible bias in the computation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI),which is used to measure inflation in the United States. Its final report,titled "Toward A More Accurate Measure Of The Cost Of Living" and issued on December 4,1996,concluded that the CPI overstated inflation by about 1.1 percentage points per year in 1996 and about 1.3 percentage points prior to 1996.
John B. Shoven is the former Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research,the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University,the Buzz and Barbara McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He specializes in public finance and corporate finance and has published on social security,corporate and personal taxation,mutual funds,pension plans and applied general equilibrium economics.
Laurence Jacob Kotlikoff is an American economist who has served as a professor of economics at Boston University since 1984. A specialist in macroeconomics and public finance,he has contributed to a range of fields,including climate change and carbon taxation,the global macroeconomic transition and the future of economic power,inequality,fiscal progressivity,economic guides to personal financial behavior,banking reform,marginal taxation and labor supply,healthcare reform,and social security. He is the author of over 20 books,and his scholarly articles have been published in a range of journals,including the American Economic Review,the Quarterly Journal of Economics,and the Journal of Political Economy.
Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was an American economist who served as the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. An influential econometric scholar,he was famed for his work on the relationship between productivity and economic growth,the economics of climate change,and the intersection between economics and statistics. Described as a "master" of his field,he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971,and was described as a worthy contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Optimal tax theory or the theory of optimal taxation is the study of designing and implementing a tax that maximises a social welfare function subject to economic constraints. The social welfare function used is typically a function of individuals' utilities,most commonly some form of utilitarian function,so the tax system is chosen to maximise the aggregate of individual utilities. Tax revenue is required to fund the provision of public goods and other government services,as well as for redistribution from rich to poor individuals. However,most taxes distort individual behavior,because the activity that is taxed becomes relatively less desirable;for instance,taxes on labour income reduce the incentive to work. The optimization problem involves minimizing the distortions caused by taxation,while achieving desired levels of redistribution and revenue. Some taxes are thought to be less distorting,such as lump-sum taxes and Pigouvian taxes,where the market consumption of a good is inefficient,and a tax brings consumption closer to the efficient level.
The Fair Tax Act is a bill in the United States Congress for changing tax laws to replace the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and all federal income taxes,payroll taxes,corporate taxes,capital gains taxes,gift taxes,and estate taxes with a national retail sales tax,to be levied once at the point of purchase on all new goods and services. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to households of citizens and legal resident aliens as an advance rebate of tax on purchases up to the poverty level.
James Michael "Jim" Poterba,FBA is an American economist who is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,and current National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) president and chief executive officer.
Generational accounting is a method of measuring the fiscal burdens facing current and future generations. Generational accounting considers how much each adult generation,on a per person basis,is likely to pay in future taxes net of transfer payments,over the rest of their lives.
Public economics(or economics of the public sector) is the study of government policy through the lens of economic efficiency and equity. Public economics builds on the theory of welfare economics and is ultimately used as a tool to improve social welfare. Welfare can be defined in terms of well-being,prosperity,and overall state of being.
Emmanuel Saez is a French-American economist who is a professor of economics at the University of California,Berkeley. His work,done with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman,includes tracking the incomes of the poor,middle class and rich around the world. Their work shows that top earners in the United States have taken an increasingly larger share of overall income over the last three decades,with almost as much inequality as before the Great Depression. He recommends much higher marginal tax rates,of up to 70% or 90%. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009,a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2010,and an honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.
Optimal capital income taxation is a subarea of optimal tax theory which studies the design of taxes on capital income such that a given economic criterion like utility is optimized.
Sanjiv M. Ravi Kanbur,is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs,International Professor of Applied Economics,and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He worked for the World Bank for almost two decades and was the director of the World Development Report.
Alan Jeffrey Auerbach is an American economist,public policy scholar,and author. Auerbach is known for his contributions to public finance and taxation policy. He serves as the Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law and Director of the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California,Berkeley. Auerbach is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2021,he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun.
Stefanie Stantcheva is a French economist who has served as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University since 2021. She has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique since 2018. In 2018,she was described by The Economist as one of the best young economists of the decade.
Damon Jones is an American economist and associate professor at the Harris School of Public Policy in the University of Chicago. Alongside his academic research,Jones is a popular science communicator and regularly provides expert commentary on issues related to economics and public policy. During the COVID-19 pandemic he investigated the disproportionate impact of coronavirus disease on communities of color,and delivered evidence on his findings before the United States House Committee on the Budget.
