Lars P. Syll

The results reported here suggest that an exam school education produces only scattered gains for applicants, even among students with baseline scores close to or above the mean in the target school. Because the exam school experience is associated with sharp increases in peer achievement, these results weigh against the importance of peer effects in the education production function … Of course, test scores and peer effects are only part of the exam school story. It may be...

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The Economist — economics prone to fads and methodological crazes When a hot new tool arrives on the scene, it should extend the frontiers of economics and pull previously unanswerable questions within reach. What might seem faddish could in fact be economists piling in to help shed light on the discipline’s darkest corners. Some economists, however, argue that new methods also bring new dangers; rather than pushing economics forward, crazes can lead it...

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Om ekonomiskt vetande — Fronesis nr 54-55 Efter den globala finanskrisen 2008 har den ekonomiska vetenskapen hamnat i blickfånget. Studentrörelser och heterodoxa ekonomer har kritiserat det dominerande ekonomiska paradigmet och krävt ökad pluralism. Den senaste tidens politiska utveckling har blottat nyliberalismens brister och aktualiserat frågan om dess koppling till den ekonomiska vetenskapen. I Fronesis nr 54–55 fördjupar vi oss i det ekonomiska...

The use of mathematics in physics and economics My idea is to examine the most well-known works of a selection of the most famous neoclassical economists in the period from 1945 to the present. My survey of well-known works by four famous mathematical neoclassical economists (Samuelson, Arrow, Debreu, Prescott) who all won the Nobel Prize for economics, has not revealed any precise explanations or successful predictions. This supports my conjecture that...

My youngest — born in 1999 — asked me the other day what kind of music her dad listened to back in the swinging 80s. So here, Linnea, is a little taste of paternal nostalgia: [embedded content][embedded content][embedded content][embedded content][embedded content][embedded content] And, when it came to dancing, this was the absolute favourite: [embedded content]

Why IS-LM doesn’t capture Keynes’ approach to the economy Suppose workers are unemployed. As a result, although willing to work even at lower wages, they are unable to buy consumption goods. As a result, firms are unable to sell those goods if they produced them. So they do not employ the workers who, as a consequence, do not have the wages to buy the consumption goods. The economy is caught in a vicious cycle of deficient demand. According to the IS/LM...

Endogenous growth theory — a crash course  

Postmodern mumbo jumbo soup The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the...