Most economists will agree that the task of understanding and teaching Veblen is not an easy one. Locating a book for the non-specialist is even harder, and hence the purpose of this book. This pioneering text fully delivers what its title promises - Veblen in Plain English. For the non-specialist and student alike, Professor McCormick illuminates the ideas of Veblen in a manner that is well written and easy to understand. This is a refreshing and most welcome addition to literature on Veblen. The foreword is by Dr. Rick Tilman, another noted expert on Veblen.

This completely restructured, updated third edition of the volume first published in 1992 provides a general overview of the econometrics of panel data, both from a theoretical and from an applied viewpoint. Since the pioneering papers by Kuh (1959), Mundlak (1961), Hoch (1962), and Balestra and Nerlove (1966), the pooling of cross section and time series data has become an increasingly popular way of quantifying economic relationships. Each series provides information lacking in the other, so a combination of both leads to more accurate and reliable results than would be achievable by one type of series alone.

Much work has been done over the last four decades: investigation of the properties of the applied estimators and test statistics, analysis of dynamic models, the effects of eventual measurement errors, etc. These are just some of the problems addressed by this work. In addition, some specific difficulties associated with the use of panel data are also explored, such as attrition, heterogeneity, selectivity bias, pseudo-panels etc. Recently, much work has been done about unit roots and co integration using panel data. Some other fields have also experienced a strong development such as the econometrics of policy evaluation and the analysis of qualitative and truncated dependent variable models, among others, which all are also discussed.

The third, enhanced edition provides a complete and up to date presentation of these theoretical developments as well as surveys about how these econometric tools are used to study firms and household s behaviors and/or more macroeconomic phenomena such as economic growth. It contains sixteen entirely new chapters while the others have been largely revised to account for recent developments in the field.

Part I is concerned with the fundamentals of panel data econometrics, both linear and non linear; Part II deals with more advanced topics such as dynamic models, simultaneity and measurement errors, unit roots and co integration, incomplete panels and selectivity, duration and count models, etc. This volume also provides insights into the use of panel data in empirical studies. Part III deals with surveys in several major fields of applied economics, such as investment demand, foreign direct investment and international trade, production efficiency, labour supply, transitions on the labour market, etc. Six new chapters about R&D and innovation, wages, health economics, policy evaluation, growth empirics and the impact of monetary policy have been included.

Industry has been at the centre of some of the most formidable political and economic debates of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores the pivotal decades of the eighteenth-century in which the modern concept of industry was, for the first time, at the heart of heated debates in France and other European countries. The close reading of contemporary debates illuminates the origins of an economic key concept and suggests a fresh perspective on the rise of industry in the eighteenth-century.

This book investigates the implications of digital technologies on the industrial and business dynamics of modern economies. In-depth studies analyse how deep-rooted work practices of the Old Economy have been dramatically challenged when confronted with the entrepreneurial wave of the New Economy. Initially the digitization of existing processes was motivated by ideas of rationalization and cost-cutting. The book convincingly shows how reaping the full benefits necessitates fundamental changes in procedures and organizational design. The effects transcend the boundaries of the firm, as established channels of interaction with old partners must be reconfigured and familiar divisions of labour rethought. The Industrial Dynamics of the New Digital Economy presents novel and detailed data showing how vast and still dominant industries of the Old Economy have responded to the new challenges and exploited the emerging opportunities of digitization in very different ways. The book offers the first theoretical framework for analysing and evaluating the different strategies chosen by industries when struggling to rebuild competitive positions in the new digitized business environment and will be of great value to academics, industrial economists and all those interested in technology, innovation and the new economy.

This book explores the formation and evolution of Scandinavian central banks. It begins by defining the nature of "central banking" in general, before moving on to investigate how and when it became meaningful to regard today's Scandinavian central banks as such. It also explores how Scandinavian central banks have conformed to the defined ideals of "central banks" over the last 100 years, clarifying the distinctions between commercial banks and central banks, and between central banks and departments of governments. The author shows how the outbreak of the Great War was the catalyst which fundamentally transformed the originally purely commercial banks into "central banks". The book also analyses how different the three Scandinavian central banks are, how these differences can be explained by the different political and economic circumstances surrounding their original formation, and the differences in the political environments in which they later developed.

Many years after the publication of Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, works on capital theory from perspectives accommodating Sraffa's critical premises seem to have lost much of their initial strength and persuasion. This book, by contrast, aims at showing how Sraffa's theoretical contributions could be pursued in new directions, in effect providing an alternative paradigm to the postclassical economic theory and challenging the persistent dominance of a widespread economic culture based on that theory.

This book highlights the parallel transformations of the concepts of citizenship and the welfare state, and their dependence on the dominant political ideology, from the post-war period to the present. Kourachanis presents the welfare state as an integral part of the capitalist state and consequently, suggests that any structural changes to the capitalist state will have major impacts on the texture and content of the restructuring of the welfare state. The research compares different formulations of citizenship and the welfare state, reflecting on social citizenship and the post-war (or Keynesian) welfare state, as well as welfare provision under neoliberalism. The research will be vital reading for academics, researchers and students of social and public policy, political and humanitarian studies, as well as policy makers and members of labour unions and activists.

Computational intelligence encompasses a wide variety of techniques that allow computation to learn, to adapt, and to seek. That is, they may be designed to learn information without explicit programming regarding the nature of the content to be retained, they may be imbued with the functionality to adapt to maintain their course within a complex and unpredictably changing environment, and they may help us seek out truths about our own dynamics and lives through their inclusion in complex system modeling. These capabilities place our ability to compute in a category apart from our ability to erect suspension bridges, although both are products of technological advancement and reflect an increased understanding of our world. In this book, we show how to unify aspects of learning and adaptation within the computational intelligence framework. While a number of algorithms exist that fall under the umbrella of computational intelligence, with new ones added every year, all of them focus on the capabilities of learning, adapting, and helping us seek. So, the term unified computational intelligence relates not to the individual algorithms but to the underlying goals driving them. This book focuses on the computational intelligence areas of neural networks and dynamic programming, showing how to unify aspects of these areas to create new, more powerful, computational intelligence architectures to apply to new problem domains.

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx's theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists' profits. The "Fundamental Marxian Theorem" was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx's conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman's disproof of that claim. On one side of the debate, representing orthodox Marxian economics, are contributions by Simon Mohun and Roberto Veneziani. Although they concede that their simultaneist models cannot replicate Marx's theory of profit in all cases, they insist that this is as good as it gets. On the other side, representing the temporal single-system interpretation of Marx's theory (TSSI), are contributions by Kliman and Alan Freeman. They argue that his theory is logically valid, since it can indeed be replicated when it is understood in accordance with the TSSI. While the debate initially focused on logical concerns, issues of pluralism, truth, and scientificity increasingly assumed center stage. In his introduction to the volume, Nick Potts situates the debate in its historical context and argues forcefully that the arguments of the orthodox Marxist economists, and the manner in which those arguments were couched, were "suppressive and contrary to scientific norms." The volume concludes with a 2014 debate, in which many of the same issues re-surfaced, between the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff and proponents of the TSSI.

For over fifty years, Eli Schwartz has inspired generations of economists through his prolific publications and dedicated in teaching. In 2008, the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise at Lehigh University invited prominent academics and practitioners-including Nobel Prize recipients, Robert Solow and Harry Markowitz, and former Chairman of the Economic Advisers to Ronald Reagan, Murray Weidenbaum-to contribute pieces that reflect their own approaches to issues that Schwartz has explored over the long span of his career. The twelve original essays cover a range of topics, including tax reform, corporate finance, fiscal policy, banking, economic growth, and globalization, representing a variety of methodologies, including economic theory, econometrics, and case analysis. The collection emphasizes the underlying connections among seemingly disparate facets of economic activity, and underscores the tremendous influence of Schwartz on economic analysis, policy, and leadership today.

A Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is the unconditional government-ensured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs without a work requirement. Significant questions include: Why should we adopt a BIG? Can the U.S. afford it? Why don't the current welfare programs work? Why not guarantee everyone a job? Would anyone work if his or her income were guaranteed? Has a BIG ever been tested? This book answers these questions and many more in simple, easy-to-understand language.

This title covers a broad range of topics in the history of economics that have relevance to economic theories at the beginning of the 21st century. The author believes that one of the tasks for a historian of economics is to analyze and interpret theories currently outside the mainstream of economic theory, in this case non-Walrasian economics. By doing so, he argues, new directions and new areas for research can be developed that will extend the current theories. Familiar topics covered include: the division of labour, economies of scale, wages, profit, international trade, market mechanisms, and money. These are considered in the light of the well-known non-Walrasian schools of thought: the classical, Marxian, Austrian, and Cambridge schools.

Part of The Elgar Series on Central Banking and Monetary Policy, this book explores challenges surrounding central banking today. It goes beyond the immediate concerns with monetary policy and focuses instead on the concept of central banking more generally. Chapter authors explore emerging fields of central bank's actions, discussing, for instance, how monetary policy can affect income distribution, how it has differentiated impacts according to gender, how it can help to deal with climate change, and how it can promote financial stability and structural change. Policy makers, academics and the financial press will all benefit from the insight in The Future of Central Banking.

Long-rangedependent, or long-memory,time seriesarestationarytime series displaying a statistically signi?cant dependence between very distant obs- vations. We formalize this dependence by assuming that the autocorrelation function of these stationary series decays very slowly, hyperbolically, as a function of the time lag. Many economic series display these empirical features: volatility of asset prices returns, future interest rates, etc. There is a huge statistical literature on long-memory processes, some of this research is highly technical, so that it is cited, but often misused in the applied econometrics and empirical e- nomics literature. The ?rst purpose of this book is to present in a formal and pedagogical way some statistical methods for studying long-range dependent processes. Furthermore, the occurrence of long-memory in economic time series might be a statistical artefact as the hyperbolic decay of the sample autoc- relation function does not necessarily derive from long-range dependent p- cesses. Indeed, the realizations of non-homogeneous processes, e.g., switching regime and change-point processes, display the same empirical features. We thus also present in this book recent statistical methods able to discriminate between the long-memory and change-point alternatives. Going beyond the purely statistical analysis of economic series, it is of interest to determine which economic mechanisms are generating the strong dependence properties of economic series, whether they are genuine, or spu- ous. The regularities of the long-memory and change-point properties across economic time series, e.g., common degree of long-range dependence and/or common change-points, suggest the existence of a common economic cause.

Money is an important instrument of calculation: as a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, it is increasingly becoming itself an object of exchange and calculation on financial markets, which tend less to the production and exchange of real goods. The question therefore is: has the economy lost its measure?

This book about mathematics and methodology for economics is the result of the lifelong experience of the authors. It is written for university students as well as for students of applied sciences. This self-contained book does not assume any previous knowledge of high school mathematics and helps understanding the basics of economic theory-building. Starting from set theory it thoroughly discusses linear and non-linear functions, differential equations, difference equations, and all necessary theoretical constructs for building sound economic models. The authors also present a solid introduction to linear optimisation and game theory using production systems. A detailed discussion on market equilibrium, in particular on Nash Equilibrium, and on non-linear optimisation is also provided. Throughout the book the student is well supplied with numerous examples, some 2000 problems and their solutions to apply the knowledge to economic theories and models.

Shmanske and Kahane have brought together nearly all of the important authors in the quickly growing field of Sports Economics to contribute chapters to this two-volume set. All of the authors are writing about subjects that they love and subjects that they have devoted years of study to. The result is truly informative in its content and path breaking in its importance to the field. Anyone contemplating research in the field of sports economics will find the works in these volumes to provide both ample background in subject after subject and numerous suggestions for future avenues of research.
The editors have recognized two ways that economics and sports interact. First, economic analysis has helped everyone understand many of the peculiar institutions in sports. And second, quality data about individual productivity, salaries, career histories, teamwork, and managerial behavior has helped economists study topics as varied as the economics of discrimination, salary dispersion, and antitrust policy. These two themes of economics helping sports and sports helping economics provide the organizational structure to the two-volume set.
The reader will find that sports economists employ or comment on practically every field in economics. Labor Economics comes into play in the areas of salary formation, salary dispersion, and discrimination. Baseball's history and the NCAA are studied with Industrial Organization and Antitrust. Public Finance and Contingent Value Modeling come into play in the study of stadium finance and franchise location. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is examined with data from gambling markets. Macroeconomic effects are studied with data from mega events like the Super Bowl, The World Cup, and the Olympics. The limits of Econometrics are pushed and illustrated with superb data in many of the papers herein. Topics in Applied microeconomics like demand estimation and price discrimination are also covered in several of the included papers. Game Theory, measurement of production functions, and measurement of managerial efficiency all come into play. Talented authors in each of these fields have made contributions to these volumes.
The volumes are also rich from the point of view of the sports fan. Every major team sport is covered, and many interesting comparisons can be made especially between the North American League organization and the European-style promotion and relegation leagues. Golf, NASCAR, College athletics, Women's sports, the Olympics, and even bowling are represented in these pages. There is literally something for everyone.

This is the fourth volume of Paul Davidson's major contributions to the economics and policy debates of our times, with writings on the debates surrounding the interpretation of the General Theory. The book contains professional articles, newspaper columns and papers that explain why Keynes' General Theory, as developed by Post Keynesian theorists, and provides important policy implications for the economic problems of the twenty-first century global economy.

The Making of a Post-Keynesian Economist: Cambridge Harvest gathers up the threads of the last decade of the author's twenty eight years in Cambridge, before his return to Australia. The essays include autobiography, theory, review articles, surveys, policy, intellectual biographies and tributes, and general essays.

For much of the twentieth century, mainstream economists have treated human agents in their models as if they were rational beings of unbounded computational capacity - the notorious 'Homo Economicus' of much economic theory. However, the patent inadequacies of this understanding of human nature have become increasingly apparent, and economists have begun looking for more realistic models, incorporating the insights of evolutionary theory. The authors address the question of human nature in economics, examining not only some of the recent writing on this subject in evolutionary psychology and related disciplines, but also the ideas of important thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition. Beginning with the ancient Greeks and progressing to the modern day, the contributors explore the works of such thinkers as Augustine, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall and Kenneth Boulding. Many of these works are placed in a Darwinian, evolutionary perspective, with the imperative that the study of human nature must be consistent with our understanding of human evolution, and should consider how human beings are moulded by cultural and institutional influences. Naturally, Darwin's own view of human nature is also explored, undermining the mistaken notion that Darwinism promotes human nature as greedy, uncooperative and self-seeking. This enlightening, original and highly readable work will be of great interest to professional economists and students, researchers and teachers of evolutionary economics.

Kuklys examines how Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sena (TM)s approach to welfare measurement can be put in practice for poverty and inequality measurement in affluent societies such as the UK. Sen argues that an individuala (TM)s welfare should not be measured in terms of her income, but in terms what she can actually do or be, her capabilities. In Chapters 1 and 2, Kuklys describes the capability approach from a standard welfare economic point of view and provides a comprehensive literature review of the empirical applications in this area of research. In the remaining chapters, novel econometric techniques are employed to operationalise the concepts of functionings and capability to investigate inequality and poverty in terms of capability in the UK. Kuklys finds that capability measurement is always a useful complement to traditional monetary analysis, and particularly so in the case of capability-deprived disabled individuals.

This book addresses major issues facing postal and delivery services throughout the world. Worldwide, there is currently a considerable amount of interest in postal and delivery economics. The industry is reacting to a state of near crisis and is implementing different drastic changes. The European Commission and member States are still wrestling with the problem of how to implement entry liberalization into postal markets, how to address digital competition, and how to maintain the universal service obligation (USO). The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 in the U.S. has perhaps created and exacerbated the problems faced by USPS. Digitalisation, technological development and online platforms are strongly affecting both the way postal and delivery operators are managing their services as well as their role on the market. Strong emphasis was attributed to the assets of Postal Operators (POs) and their added value in the digital age as well as on new business strategies. This volume presents original essays by prominent researchers in the field, selected and edited from papers presented at this year's 26th Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics held in Split, Croatia, from May 30- June 2, 2018.Topics addressed by this volume include quality of service, last mile solutions, and competition in the liberalized market. This book will be a useful tool not only for graduate students and professors, but also for postal administrations, consulting firms, and federal government departments.

This book explores inclusive development in the Indian context, not only within each of the country's major economic and social sectors, but also across countries in the particular context of globalization. In the emerging scenario of most expanding economies, including India, this topic remains particularly significant. The book's sixteen chapters are divided into eight sections that address burning issues related to inclusive development - historical setting and policy context; current issues and future challenges; inclusiveness in the agricultural sector; inclusiveness in the industrial sector; inclusiveness in the health sector; inclusiveness and poverty; inclusiveness in the social context; and inclusiveness in the globalization context. The book highlights several positive developments displayed by the Indian economy in recent years, including the current growth rate of about 7 percent, which is among the highest rates around the globe. At the same time, it draws attention to the fact that while there is every reason to feel proud of these achievements, we cannot ignore the strains and brewing distress, especially in rural areas, or the concerns in environmental and social sectors, including health and education, relating to sociological divisions and disturbances, water and air pollution, and ecosystem and biodiversity losses. Important and relevant from both academic and policy perspectives, the book includes essays from some of the most eminent economists and social scientists in the South Asian region, providing vital takeaways for researchers and NGOs, as well as corporate sector and government decision-makers.