Category Archives: Public Economics

Efficiency: A Term to Use Sparingly

Posted on 2010/08/28 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Microeconomic Theory II for PhD students starts again on Tuesday here at Temple University. I intend to talk about understanding economics as a way to (i) see clearly what the objectives are (whether they come from us as economists or … Continue reading →

Posted in Public Economics, microeconomics | 3 Comments

The degradation of US democracy

Posted on 2010/03/03 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Read this post by Daniel Little and weep. If you care about democracy and the public good, that is. This kind of thing is a main reason that standard economics has done a serious disservice to humanity by emphasizing the … Continue reading →

Posted in Political Economy, Public Economics | Leave a comment

The pundits’ dilemma

Posted on 2009/10/18 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Mark Liberman says this in the Language Log today, among other good points: Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It’s interesting stories, not accurate ones, … Continue reading →

Posted in Mechanism Design, Public Economics, microeconomics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Paul Romer on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize

Posted on 2009/10/12 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

My old teacher Paul Romer has a fantastic post on Ostrom’s prize award. A long quote follows, but I do strongly recommend the whole thing: Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a … Continue reading →

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Glaeser on the “Nobel” prize in economics

Posted on 2009/10/12 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Ed Glaeser has a nice essay explaining the work of the awardees of this year’s prize in the New York Times.

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Levitt on the “Nobel” prize in economics 2009

Posted on 2009/10/12 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Here is Steven Levitt admitting that he should have known about Ostrom. Nice to see an admission that over-narrowness is not very productive in science.

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Swedish National Bank’s Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, 2009

Posted on 2009/10/12 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for the honor they received. I wish I had time to discuss this properly right now, but class prep is calling. Meanwhile, here is a post by Alex Tabarrok on Wiliamson and one … Continue reading →

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Lecture Notes on Social Choice Theory

Posted on 2009/08/29 by Dimitrios Diamantaras

I am putting here a deck of Beamer slides that I made for my graduate microeconomics class at Temple University. I will be posting more as I deem the slide decks acceptable. It may take a while… Here it is: … Continue reading →

Posted in Public Economics, microeconomics | 1 Comment