Michael Reddell • Apr 20, 2018 •
That was the title of a speech David Parker gave a couple of weeks ago. Parker is, as you will recall, a man wearing many hats: Minister for the Environment, Associate Minister of Finance, Minister for Trade and Export Growth, and Attorney-General. Since he was speaking to a seminar organised by the Resource Management Law Association, this speech looked … Read More
Paul Walker • Feb 05, 2018 •
At the 2018 ASSA meeting Luigi Zingales delivered a lecture honouring Oliver Hart, co-winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for economics. In part Zingales said, In the 1970s, this question [the make-or-buy dLuigi Zingaleecision] started to receive attention in the so-called transaction-cost literature. The key contributions during that period were Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Williamson (1971 and … Read More
SciBooks • Apr 23, 2014 •
by Matt Nolan REVIEW: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty Harvard University Press (2014) RRP: US$39.95 Capital, by Thomas Piketty, is a book that had to be written. Both he, and his translator Arthur Goldhammer, have come together to produce a text that is insightful, interesting, challenging, and clear to the public. I … Read More
Bill Kaye-Blake • Jun 21, 2013 •
Paul Krugman made a point on his blog yesterday that really struck me: profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural” aspect of the economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy, etc. This is something I’ve seen suggested or hinted at or mentioned in a […] … Read More
Bill Kaye-Blake • Feb 15, 2013 •
Reading through the post-mortems of the financial crisis, I’ve been struck by something. The behaviour of the finance sector doesn’t fit the standard economics model, the Samuelson textbook depiction, or the Heckscher–Ohlin model of trade, or the Solow model, or any of the other bog-standard depictions of the economic system that we like to teach. A key [...] … Read More