The Biology of Financial Bubbles

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Free Banking History

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The Cato Blog has a great post based on an  excerpt from Larry White's piece on Free Banking in History and Theory .  Free banking is the view that money and banking are best left to the invisible hand of market forces - no need for a central bank, lender of last resort or bank regulation. Free bankers argue that these things tend to destabilise banking systems and economies. They point to historical episodes where monetary and banking systems were relatively free of interference by the government to show the efficacy of free banking - episodes where banks issued notes redeemable for a precious commodity. Of course, no historical system is perfectly free of government interference, but Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century probably comes closest. I've dabbled in free banking history in the past - see my article on Australia here and my article on early joint-stock banking here . I find that free banking worked when there were credible constraints on the ab...
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Innovation and Religion

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Stuart Henderson, my PhD student, has a  great blog post at the NEP-HIS Blog , which reviews a paper by Roland Benabou, Davide Ticchi and Andrea Vindigni entitled Religion and Innovation . In this paper, the authors argue that greater religiosity is almost uniformly and very significantly associated to less favourable views of innovation. However, Stuart rightly points out that there may be difference across denominations - some religions may positively effect innovation. Indeed, the economic historian in me would point out that many of the founding fathers of modern science had a theistic worldview which underpinned their science - e.g., Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Lister, Maxwell, Kelvin, Pasteur etc. In other words, these pioneers believed that there is a God who has created all things in an orderly manner and that there are laws of science which can be discovered through human investigation. Without this presupposition, one has to ask would modern science exis...
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Christmas Songs and Macroeconomics

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At this time of year, there is nothing better than listening to a good Christmas song and thinking (deeply) about the macroeconomy. In the video below, the folks at econstories  combine the two in their 'Deck the Bells with Macro Follies' spoof. I hope that all my blog followers have a prosperous 2016!
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