Knowledge that Transforms

This is a review article of the book The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, by Joel Mokyr, published in 2002.

This is a review article of the book Knowledge, Information, and Expectations in Modern Macroeconomics: In Honor of Edmund S. Phelps, edited by Philippe Aghion, Roman Frydman, Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Woodford, and published in 2004.

Stephen Haber et al. explore economic growth in key sectors of the Mexican economy, 1876–1929, an era of political instability and (1914–17) civil war. The authors demonstrate that economic growth continued amidst political instability and offer an explanation for their conunterintuitive finding. Reviewing the evidence advanced by the authors, Robert Bates summarizes and comments on their argument, and applies it to “out of sample” data from Africa.

This is a review article of the book Economic and Financial Crises in Emerging Market Economies, edited by Martin Feldstein and published in 2003.

This is a review article of Putting Auction Theory to Work (Cambridge University Press 2004) by Paul Milgrom.

This article reviews the theory of speculative bubbles. Bubbles are a promising candidate as an explanation for the stock price run-up and collapse of the 1990s in the United States. The theory considers both irrational and rational bubbles, with emphasis on the latter. Rational bubbles, defined as the excess of security or portfolio prices over present values, can occur under conditions that are well understood. One argument relies on the assumed Pareto-optimality of equilibrium that rules out rational bubbles, but it is suggested that this argument is implausible.

This paper provides an introduction to how knowledge is modeled in economic contexts and the role played by the concepts of knowledge and common knowledge in economic analysis.