Knowledge that Transforms

The list below specifies doctoral degrees conferred by U.S. and Canadian universities during academic year July 2011 to June 2012. Lists of degree recipients and subject classifications are provided by the university. Note: Dissertations without classifications may be found under “Y Miscellaneous Categories.”

In this essay, I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period 1850–1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to show that they are people too—with more than enough warts and foibles to show they are human! I contrast the general view of the role of economics in Grand Pursuit with Robert Heilbroner's remarkably different conception in The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. I also discuss more generally the question of why economists might be interested in their history at all. (JEL B10, B20, B30, N00)

Contingent charges for financial services, such as fees for unauthorized overdrafts, are often controversial. We study the economics of contingent charges in a stylized setting with naive and sophisticated consumers. We contrast situations where the naive benefit from the presence of sophisticated consumers with situations where competition works to subsidize the sophisticated at the expense of the naive, arguably unfairly. The case for regulatory intervention in these situations depends in good part, but not only, on the weight placed on distributional concerns. The economic and legal issues at stake are well illustrated by a case on bank charges recently decided by the U.K. Supreme Court. (JEL D14, D18, G21, G28, L51)

In Reinhart and Rogoff's economic history This Time is Different, the authors provide a panoramic view of crises from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Published just as the current global financial storm arrived, the book quickly showed how history could provide not just useful perspective but also, as we can now see, very prescient guidance in the aftermath. In the longer run, the book serves to inspire ongoing work in long-run macro-financial history. (JEL F30, G01, G20, N20)

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution through the arrival of a particular ideology in Britain, associated with the earlier European intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. This review considers how Mokyr's “idealist” approach fares as an account of the Industrial Revolution, compared to the spate of recent proposed “materialist” explanations. (JEL N13, N63)

The Mirrlees Review of taxation in the United Kingdom is a landmark in the analysis of U.K. fiscal policy, and of wide interest to public finance economists around the world. This review concentrates on what we can learn from the Review about the current state of public economics and directions for future research. (JEL E62, H20, H50)