Articles

Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.

Article

Start-Up Governments, or Can Bureaucracies Innovate?

Jan 4, 2016

For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong 鈥 aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?

Article

Replication and Transparency in Economic Research

Dec 3, 2015

In 2003, McCullough and Vinod wrote, “Research that cannot be replicated is not science, and cannot be trusted either as part of the profession’s accumulated body of knowledge or as a basis for policy.”(1)

Article

Theory vs data, computerization, old wine and new bottles

Oct 24, 2015

In 1953, Oskar Morgenstern proposed to reform the eligibility criterion for fellows of the Econometric Society, in an attempt to foster empirical work.

Article

The Efficiency of Markets

Sep 30, 2015

A student of microeconomics learns that any competitive equilibrium leads to a Pareto efficient outcome (First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics). What do we mean by the efficiency or inefficiency of markets?

Article

The Fairness of Markets

Sep 28, 2015

A student of microeconomics learns that any desirable efficient market allocation can be sustained by a competitive equilibrium (the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics), given appropriate lump-sum wealth redistributions. This is typically understood as a means to correct unfair market outcomes. What are the real world implications of the second theorem? How well does it address distributional concerns?