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On measuring welfare: Marshall versus Hicks
This article presents arguments by Willig (1976) and Hausman (1981) who compared Marshall’s and Hicks’s methods for measuring welfare changes due to price shifts. While both considered Hicks’s method to be superior, Willig argued that the two approaches result in very similar estimates of consumer surplus for goods that both i) account for a small share of total expenditure, and ii) have a small income elasticity of demand. Hausman challenged Willig’s conclusion by showing

Filippos Papasavvas
2 days ago


How have GPTs affected the US economy?
Jovanovic et al (2005) analyzed the impact of two general-purpose technologies (GPTs) on the US economy: electricity and information...

Filippos Papasavvas
Aug 19, 2024


On Marshall's consumer surplus
Alfred Marshall’s derivation of ‘consumer surplus’ in his book ‘Principles of Economics’, was one of the first attempts by economists to...

Filippos Papasavvas
Apr 16, 2023


The role of foreign powers in the Greek Civil War
Iatrides and Rizopoulos (2000) argue that the communists’ defeat in the Greek Civil War (1942-1949) was generally the result of the...

Filippos Papasavvas
Mar 13, 2023


On the birth of free trade
In his 1994 paper, Avner Greif detected systematic cultural differences between two medieval trading societies: the ‘collectivist’...

Nikolas Neos
Jan 22, 2023


World food regimes: a short history
Xu (2019) distinguishes between three historic world food regimes: the period when the UK was the world’s major food importer...

Filippos Papasavvas
Aug 31, 2022


On the origins of (de)regulation
Starting in the 1970s, neoliberalism and deregulation began to rear their head, leading to the rollback of government under Thatcherism...

Sean Hays
Feb 5, 2022


The traces of historical processes in contemporary economic outcomes (reasons to study econ history)
Working on data on the institutions in the antiquity, Roland(2018) distinguishes them into two institutional clusters resulting in either...

Nikolas Neos
Feb 5, 2022


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