Until the 70’s of the last century there was a great divide in Economics. On the one hand, Microeconomics studied the individual economic behavior, whether of a firm or a consumer, and was able to construct a General Equilibrium Theory that explained remarkably well (at least, for a social science) many economic regularities like market […]
No one denies that there exist some forms of discrimination in the labor market and in many other places of our societies. There is, however, debate about the cause or causes of this discrimination and about the best ways to deal with it. Does discrimination start with some sort of education or social pressure that […]
Decision making in areas such as production planning, distribution and grid management, logistics or financial portfolio management is usually based on mathematical models, mathematical optimization themselves. Let us assume that we have to take a decision of how many units to produce of two products A and B. The production system is common and has […]
A naïve application of simple economic models will predict that, as immigrants enter, the wages or the employment rate of native workers decrease. However, immigrants are not only workers, and they may bring with them entrepreneurship skills, so that they influence not only the supply side of the labor market, but the demand as well […]
To avoid any confusion regarding the object of study a disclaimer is in order. A statistical life is not a human life. The value of a human life is a concept that cannot be easily defined, if it can at all. I may value my life in such a way that I am willing to […]
Power has always been an issue of particular importance for the social sciences, in general, and for Political Economy in particular. Many studies in this field, from different approaches, have wondered about the nature, structure and sources of power. Particularly noteworthy are those authors –such us Susan Strange, Stephen Gill of Ulrich Beck– who have […]
At my workplace, we received recently a survey to measure our engagement at work. We were asked to evaluate different aspects of our daily job, such as the work atmosphere, productivity, performance…, and each question would accumulate points for our working team. For those items in which our team scored less, we were required to […]
When analyzing the economic consequences of copyright protection one must consider first how it affects the number and quality of the works that it protects; second, which are the effects on the availability of these works, and third, how are the benefits and costs shared by the different agents of the market (consumers, authors, producers […]
Scientific experiments using animals frequently involve the marking of animals that artificially changes their phenotype. For instance, penguins with flipper bands have been used to study climate change. However, as Saraux et al. show, this banding reduces penguins’ survival rate. Consequently the study may mix up the effects of banding with other changes in penguin […]
This is the ultimatum game: You are provisionally allocated USD10 with the following instructions. You have to decide a way to divide this money with another person. If she or he agrees, the division is carried out. If not, you both get nothing. What would you do? How would you react if you were the […]