- How did economics change as a discipline once Paul Samuelson's 'Foundations of Economic Analysis' imposed mathematical rigor on it?
- 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?
Microeconomics
The study of individual and firm economic decision-making.
- What did Friedrich von Hayek argue the price system does that no central planner could replicate?
- What is the permanent income hypothesis and how did it reshape economists' understanding of consumption?
- What does Tobin's portfolio selection theory say about why rational investors diversify their assets?
- How did Tobin's Keynesian training at Harvard shape his approach to asset allocation?
- Why do individual consumers have less incentive to influence regulatory outcomes than the industries being regulated?
- How did Stigler's work on search costs and information change how economists think prices convey knowledge?
- What does Modigliani's life-cycle hypothesis predict about how households borrow, save, and spend over a lifetime?
- Why does a country's age distribution affect its aggregate savings rate under this theory?
- What does the Modigliani-Miller theorem claim about how a firm's financing choices affect its market value?
- Why are the theorem's unrealistic assumptions actually useful for understanding real corporate finance?
- What assumption about government did James Buchanan challenge with public choice theory?
- Why did Buchanan argue that politicians and bureaucrats pursue self-interest just as market actors do?
- How did Buchanan's work with Gordon Tullock at the University of Virginia lay the groundwork for public choice theory?
- What did Robert Solow's 1956 growth model say happens to an economy that only accumulates capital?
- How did Harry Markowitz's 1952 paper show that combining uncorrelated assets can lower a portfolio's overall risk?
- What does beta measure in William Sharpe's Capital Asset Pricing Model?
- What did Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani's theorems establish about corporate capital structure?
- How did these three laureates' work together lay the foundation for index funds and options pricing?
- What question did Coase's 1937 paper ask about why firms exist rather than pure market transactions?
- What are transaction costs, and how do they explain the boundaries of a firm?
- What areas of human behavior did Gary Becker analyze using microeconomic tools?
- What did Becker's 1968 paper on crime argue about how offenders make decisions?
- How did Becker's approach challenge the traditional division of labor between economics and sociology?
- How did Douglass North argue that institutions explain long-run economic divergence between societies?
- What common thread connects optimal taxation and auction design as economic problems of hidden information?
- What problem does the Black-Scholes-Merton formula actually solve for options traders?
- How did Robert Merton arrive at the same pricing formula as Black and Scholes independently?
- Why is it notable that Fischer Black died before the prize was awarded?
- What happened to Long-Term Capital Management, and why is that ironic given the laureates' work?
- How does unequal information between buyers and sellers cause a used-car market to collapse in Akerlof's 'lemons' model?
- What did Michael Spence mean by arguing that education can function as a signal rather than a source of ability?
- How do uninformed parties design contracts to extract information from better-informed ones, according to Stiglitz's work?
- How do economies of scale and consumer demand for variety explain why countries trade near-identical goods?
- Why does Oliver Williamson argue that firms exist as bounded organizations rather than networks of contracts?
- What did Eugene Fama's efficient markets hypothesis claim about an investor's ability to beat the market?
- How can markets be both hard to beat in the short run and wrong over the long run?
- Why did the old regulatory toolkit of breaking up firms and capping prices fail for two-sided platforms?
- What is mechanism design and how did Tirole apply it to industry-specific regulation?
- What is the Almost Ideal Demand System and what does it measure?
- What is Holmström's informativeness principle and how does it guide how pay should be tied to performance signals?
- How does Hart's incomplete contracts theory explain who should own assets when agreements can't cover every contingency?
- Why do CEOs typically receive equity rather than fixed pay, according to this work?
- What did Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson argue was the primary determinant of long-run national prosperity?
- How did the researchers use colonial history to test their theory in a way that resembled a controlled experiment?