- What long-term economic outcome followed the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe?
Macroeconomics
The study of economies at the aggregate level.
- How did Jan Tinbergen's macroeconometric models try to describe a national economy?
- What is Samuelson's correspondence principle, and how does it link stable equilibria to testable predictions?
- How did Samuelson's 1948 textbook shape the way generations of students learned economics?
- What is the neoclassical synthesis that Samuelson's textbook popularized?
- How did governments measure economic performance before Simon Kuznets developed national income accounting?
- What is the Kuznets curve, and what does it claim about inequality during industrialisation?
- Why did Kuznets himself warn that GDP measures output rather than welfare?
- What does the IS-LM framework model, and why did it become the standard teaching tool in macroeconomics?
- Why do economists still debate whether the IS-LM model captures what Keynes originally meant?
- How does Leontief's input-output matrix represent the flow of goods between sectors of an economy?
- Why was solving Leontief's equations impractical before the arrival of computers?
- How is input-output analysis used today by governments assessing shocks like tariffs or energy crises?
- What did Gunnar Myrdal believe markets did to inequality without state intervention?
- What did Friedrich von Hayek argue the price system does that no central planner could replicate?
- Why did Myrdal later argue that the economics prize should be abolished?
- How did Tjalling Koopmans arrive at similar mathematics through wartime shipping logistics?
- How can scarcity problems in economics be expressed as systems of linear inequalities?
- How did Schultz's idea compare returns on education against returns on physical machinery?
- What does Arthur Lewis's dual-sector model say happens to wages as workers move from farms to factories?
- How did Lawrence Klein turn Keynesian macroeconomic theory into a system of equations that could model an entire national economy?
- What was the Wharton Econometric Forecasting model, and who ended up using it?
- What limitation did Klein himself recognize about econometric models of national economies?
- How is Tobin's q ratio calculated, and what does a high or low q signal about business investment?
- What connection did James Tobin have to the 1972 warnings about environmental limits to growth?
- How did Tobin's Keynesian training at Harvard shape his approach to asset allocation?
- What is regulatory capture, and why does Stigler argue that regulated industries end up controlling the agencies meant to restrain them?
- What did Adam Smith claim about competitive markets that Gérard Debreu later set out to prove mathematically?
- What mathematical tools did Debreu use in Theory of Value to prove that a general equilibrium of prices exists?
- What conditions does Debreu's equilibrium proof require, and why are they difficult to find in real economies?
- Why were economic comparisons between countries unreliable before Richard Stone's national accounting framework?
- How does a double-entry accounting system ensure that a country's income, production, and expenditure all add up to the same total?
- Why might Richard Stone have been uneasy about GDP becoming the primary measure of a government's success?
- What did Robert Solow's 1956 growth model say happens to an economy that only accumulates capital?
- Why is technological progress treated as 'exogenous' in the Solow growth model?
- What is the 'Solow residual,' and why was it nicknamed the measure of our ignorance?
- Why did the Nobel committee wait three decades after Solow's original paper to award the prize?
- What did Ravi Batra's 1987 book predict, and did it come true?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee credit Batra's book sales with averting the depression it predicted?
- What is the Lucas critique, and why did it unsettle macroeconomic modeling?
- Why would workers and firms eventually cancel out the effects of a predictable government stimulus?
- How did economists' views on rational expectations evolve after the Lucas critique was absorbed?
- Why can't a government credibly promise not to inflate the economy if it retains full discretion over monetary policy?
- How does Kydland and Prescott's time-inconsistency problem justify central bank independence?
- What did Kydland and Prescott's real business cycle work attribute economic fluctuations to?
- What did the original Phillips curve claim about the relationship between inflation and unemployment?
- How did Phelps show that worker expectations undermine the inflation-unemployment trade-off in the long run?
- What question does mechanism design ask that standard economic analysis does not?
- What did Krugman's economic geography work explain about why manufacturing clusters in particular cities?
- Why do rational expectations complicate the study of how policy affects the economy?
- How do Sargent's and Sims's approaches complement each other in macroeconomic analysis?
- What EU mandate led Italy's statistics agency to include illegal activity revenue in GDP calculations?
- Which illegal activities did ISTAT fold into Italy's official national accounts?
- How did William Nordhaus's DICE model attempt to put a dollar figure on climate change?
- What does it mean for ideas to be 'non-rival' in Paul Romer's growth theory?
- Why had mainstream economic growth models left out both the environment and innovation for so long?
- How long did the institutional choices made during colonization persist after independence?
- What is Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, and how did Aghion and Howitt formalise it into a growth model?
- Why had earlier economic models treated productivity growth as an unexplained residual?