Working within the context of the evolutionary-institutional transformation of higher education, the authors trace the development of an economic model by which the behavioral tendencies of modern universities can be evaluated. That model is expanded to provide insights to the following questions: Why do universities compete and how do they develop and implement their competitive strategies? How do universities make critical institutional decisions about operational missions, academic policies, and internal resource allocation? Do universities efficiently and effectively pursue the special social functions assigned to them? Patrick Raines and Charles Leathers present an integrated, coherent theory to explain the behavior of universities and provide a realistic economic model that predicts how universities allocate their scarce educational resources. This alternative view is contrasted with the mainstream explanations of university behavior based on the maximization of student welfare or faculty influences. The authors extend the existing literature on the operation of universities by presenting a history of the evolution of the modern entrepreneurial universities as well as an explanation of academic capitalism. This absorbing volume will appeal to anyone interested in the history of economic thought or the history of education. Scholars of Veblen, Smith, and Malthus will be fascinated by their individual and comparative theories of the purpose and failures of higher education.

The role of the stock market in the recent global financial crisis has led many to question the way in which the modern international financial system operates. This highly topical book offers important insights into the stock market, contrasting the speculative explanation of stock market fluctuations with the conventional efficient markets hypothesis. After summarising economists' views on stock market behavior from the classical period to the present day, the authors focus on two particular explanations of stock price fluctuations. They examine in detail the mainstream neo-classical theory with its emphasis on the efficient markets hypothesis. They then compare this with the theories of Veblen, Galbraith and Keynes who consider markets as being inherently prone to speculation and crisis, in contrast to the neo-classical approach which largely ignores the instability of stock markets and particularly the crashes that have recently occurred. The authors go on to develop a speculative model to account for stock market fluctuations which provides a useful and realistic explanation of how stock price expectations are formed. This book will be welcomed by bankers, financial and monetary economists, historians of economic thought and all those interested in the causes of the recent market crashes.