As usual the budget is as much about the theatre of the event as it is the economics of what is being announced. The chancellor, George Osborne, was able to make some dramatic pronouncements about pensions…
In times of financial uncertainty and crisis, high stress reactions lead to traders becoming more risk averse, which drives pessimism and further falls in finance, according to a new study. This is because…
The Bitcoin craze has hit Iceland, where an entrepreneur has set up his own cryptocurrency and announced plans to give every citizen a handful for free. Baldur Odinsson says he is setting up a new cryptocurrency…
The number of cosmetic surgery operations in the UK hit 50,000 a year for the first time in 2013. This is worrying given that the Keogh review into the industry following the PIP scandal, which saw thousands…
Charles Wyplosz, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)
The news from France has not been good over the last few years. Poor economic growth, stubbornly high unemployment, plant closures on the rise, strikes (not new, really), voter disenfranchisement and the…
How happy do you feel today? How satisfied are you with your life? Do you think your life has any worth? These are the kind of questions increasingly put to survey respondents as academics and politicians…
Literature has mirrored the shifting economic climate over the past century, according to a study published today by researchers in Bristol and London. When times are tough financially, it seems, books…
Why do people migrate? At first glance it seems reasonable to assume that most people move hoping to find better conditions or opportunities elsewhere, such as jobs, higher wages, safety or freedom of…
How much would you pay for staying alive? How much would you pay for breathing pure air? That may seem a silly question since air is everywhere, accessible to all. Air is a global public good, part of…
Household debt in the UK recently hit a record high, surpassing the previous peak reached in September 2008. That was the month when Lehman Brothers collapsed, sparking off the global financial crisis…
The Autumn Statement is a curious ritual. With the chancellor already delivering an annual budget based around a medium-term strategy, the autumn statement does not provide an opportunity for any major…
George Osborne long ago realised that policy programmes designed to avert crises do not win elections. What he has offered instead in his Autumn Statement is once again a simple trade-off of public austerity…
In 1991, Michael Pusey unleashed Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-building state changes its mind. In his book, Pusey took aim at the Canberra econocrats who ruled the key federal government…
Economics has been heavily criticised for being unnecessarily complex, unresponsive to criticism, and unable to predict and respond to major financial crises. Recently, we have seen calls for a broader…
Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens has again weighed in on the value of the Australian dollar, telling a group of economists the bank is open to the idea of intervening to bring its value down. With the…
Maxine Montaigne, London School of Economics and Political Science
In the five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the discipline of economics has had an uncomfortable spotlight turned on its inner workings and assumptions. Movements such as Occupy have passionately…
Alex Stremme, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
This year, the Nobel prize in economics went to three researchers for their contributions to the field of empirical and theoretical finance. This is not the first time the committee has honoured work in…
The 2013 winners have now been announced. David Spencer responds in a postscript at the bottom of this article. What are economists for? Well, one obvious answer is to “do economics”, defined in the academic…
What do bankers and bacteria have in common? Finite resources, quick decision-making and an appreciation of trade-offs, according to a study in Ecology Letters. So could bacterial modelling ever help us…