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This course will introduce key concepts, theories and methods from socioeconomics. The first part of the course, will deal with the main economic actors and how their interactions are governed. Markets are seen as sets of social institutions. Institutions shape how consumers, firms and other economic actors behave. While it is difficult to understand how novelty emerges, we can study the conditions that are conducive to innovation. We will review how economic performance, social progress and human wellbeing are measured and what progress has been made. In the second part of the course, we will study a specific macroeconomic model that accounts for biophysical boundaries and inequality.
2020
Level: advanced
Foundations in Socioeconomics
This course has dual purposes, to introduce students to the various stages of research and to provide an introduction to feminist perspectives on the politics of producing knowledge. Each student will learn how to be an interdisciplinary researcher while coming to understand the opportunities that feminism presents as a way of seeing, knowing, and representing the world.
2015
Level: beginner
Critical Feminist Investigations
This graduate-level course examines issues related to women’s paid and unpaid work during a time of rapid integration of world markets. Students will analyze the role of government policy, unions, corporate responsibility, and social movements in raising women's wages, promoting equal opportunity, fighting discrimination in the workplace, and improving working conditions.
Level: advanced
Women and Work
What are the debates, feminist and otherwise, surrounding the phenomena of globalization? How does a gendered lens complicate our understandings of neoliberal globalization? How are particular labor regimes integral to global restructuring, and how are these gendered? What are the implications of global restructuring for bodies, identities, relations, and movements?
2014
Level: beginner
The Gender and Labor of Globalization
The goal of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the Latin American development experience by viewing it through a gender lens.
2014
Level: advanced
Gender in Latin American Development
For many social critics "globalization" is a signpost of “late-capitalism” with the rise of multinational corporations, mass consumption and the multidirectional flows of capital, labor, media, communication, ideologies and social movements across national borders. Feminist analyses of globalization and the gendered and sexualized permutations of these phenomena offer a critical stance for theorizing these processes, and for studying their complex articulations across time and space.
Level: advanced
Feminist Inroads in Epistemology, Method, and Theory
In recent years issues surrounding tax evasion and avoidance have gotten more attention in public debates and policy making around the world. It poses key questions about how we want to (re)organise our economies, what the rules of the game are, and who benefits from them. Any good economist today should have a basic understanding of this issue as it has implications for public finance and inequality, but market competition and macroeconomic statistics.
2022
Level: beginner
An introduction into (not) taxing wealth and profits – Economy Studies
Markets are the focus in modern economics: when they work, when they don’t and what we can or can’t do about it. There are many ways to study markets and how we do so will inevitably affect our conclusions about them, including policy recommendations which can influence governments and other major organisations. Pluralism can be a vital corrective to enacting real policies based on only one perspective and a plethora of approaches provide alternatives to the canonical view. Although they have differing implications, these approaches share the idea that we should take a historical approach, analysing markets on a case-by-case basis; and they share a faith in the power of both individuals and collectives to overcome the problems encountered when organising economic activity.
2020
Level: beginner
Markets, How Do They Work?
Written by the Nobel Prize winners in Economics Robert Shiller and George Akerlof, this book shows how deception and manipulation play a big role in the economic behavior of individuals, as well as showing how the assumption of "perfect information" is far away from the truth. Through both quantitative data and stories of how to reduce this noxious phenomenon, the authors paint a pretty different picture of how markets really works in a hyper-communicative scenario like nowadays.
2016
Level: beginner
Phishing for Phools
The ecological crisis challenges the ways to understand the links between the environment, society, and the economy. To train students to be able to think critically about the issues associated with the crisis, it is important to take multiple perspectives into account. This lecture by Economy Studies can help students develop a familiarity with the different schools of thought and conceptions that exist within economics.
2022
Level: beginner
Perspectives on the Environment - Economy Studies
Sustainable Development has become dominant in policy debates in the last two decades. Standard models in neoclassical economics as taught in undergraduate classes fail to capture the complex relationships between the economy and the environment.
2021
Level: beginner
Using Academic Travel to Teach Sustainable Economic Development
IS-LM is perhaps the prime example of `cognitive dissonance' in economics, and is problematic to many economists. On the one hand, the IS-LM model is still taught by many academic economists or they use it to derive the AD-AS approach. On the other hand, the same economists realize the limitations of the basic IS-LM model and would not now use it for policy analysis, as they did in the past. The distinction between pedagogical and analytical efficacy is made by all the authors in this volume regarding the IS-LM model.
2012
Level: advanced
IS-LM and Modern Macroeconomics
In most economics classes we focus on the production and consumption of goods and services, but what happens to the product and its packaging after it’s consumed? Waste disposal is a crucial step in the production process and as the theme of this month’s World Environment Day is #BeatPlasticPollution, we use the example of plastic bottles.
2023
Level: beginner
Production and Waste: Plastic Pollution – Economy Studies
Caring activities are one central element of feminist economists' analysis – also since in particular unremunerated work is a blind spot in mainstream economics and most other economic paradigms. Those focus on the market sphere: activities are considered as productive and as real labour if they are remunerated and market-intermediated. Goods and services are considered as labour if they create a value which can be traded on the market. Feminist Economics remarks that this perspective creates certain dichotomies and consequent devaluations: unproductive – productive; private – public; unpaid – remunerated OR paid less – well paid; female – male; soft work – hard work; caring – rationality.
2016
Level: beginner
Reproductive Labour and Care
Understanding international trade is central to economics and is currently a hot political issue. It’s an area where popular perceptions of mainstream economics are low, since they have historically missed some important downsides of trade agreements, especially the hollowing out of former manufacturing hubs in the Western world. et economists have for long time had a theory of trade with an impressive amount of scientific clout behind it: the gravity trade model.
2020
Level: beginner
A Theory of Enormous Gravity
The notion that the demand and supply side are independent is a key feature of textbook undergraduate economics and of modern macroeconomic models. Economic output is thought to be constrained by the productive capabilities of the economy - the ‘supply-side' - through technology, demographics and capital investment. In the short run a boost in demand may increase GDP and employment due to frictions such as sticky wages, but over the long-term successive rises in demand without corresponding improvements on the supply side can only create inflation as the economy reaches capacity. In this post I will explore the alternative idea of demand-led growth, where an increase in demand can translate into long-run supply side gains. This theory is most commonly associated with post-Keynesian economics, though it has been increasingly recognised in the mainstream literature.
2020
Level: beginner
It’s Demand All the Way Down
In both economics textbooks and public perceptions central banks are a fact of life. On the wall of my A-level economics classroom there was the Will Rogers quote “there have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking”, summarising how many economists view the institution. There is a widespread belief that there is something different about money which calls for a central authority to manage its operation, a view shared even by staunch free marketeers such as Milton Friedman. This belief is not without justification, since money underpins every transaction in a way that apples do not, but we should always be careful not to take existing institutions for granted and central banking is no exception. In this post I will look at the idea of private or free banking, where banks compete (and cooperate) to issue their own currency.
2020
Level: beginner
Whither Central Banks?
"A serious reconsideration of the 'economics of science' is long overdue," say Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent in the introduction to Science Bought and Sold. Indeed, it is only recently that one could speak of a field of economics of science at all.
2002
Level: advanced
Science Bought and Sold
This paper is a product of an online workshop held in Nigeria on the topic Unemployment: Policy Review and Recommendations. It explores the various unemployment policies introduced by the Nigerian Government and analysis how effective they are and suggests some practicable solutions to solving unemployment problems in the country. The workshop was organized by Rethinking Economics The Uploaders (RETU) as part of the project Solving the Major Economic Problem in Nigeria (SMEPN), an output of the Global Pluralist Economics Training (GPET). More details here: https://www.retheuploaders.org/programs/SMEPN
2021
Level: beginner
Unemployment in Nigeria: Policy Review and Recommendations
In this talk, Virgil Henry Storr, a Research Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, talks about his research into to post-disaster recovery and the role that social entrepreneurship plays in rebuilding the communities and social networks that get disrupted, or entirely eliminated.
2017
Level: beginner
Community revival in the wake of disaster: Lessons in local entrepreneurship
The principle of effective demand, and the claim of its validity for a monetary production economy in the short and in the long run, is the core of heterodox macroeconomics, as currently found in all the different strands of post-Keynesian economics (Fundamentalists, Kaleckians, Sraffians, Kaldorians, Institutionalists) and also in some strands of neo-Marxian economics, particularly in the monopoly capitalism and underconsumptionist school In this contribution, we will therefore outline the foundations of the principle of effective demand and its relationship with the respective notion of a capitalist or a monetary production economy in the works of Marx, Kalecki and Keynes. Then we will deal with heterodox short-run macroeconomics and it will provide a simple short-run model which is built on the principle of effective demand, as well as on distribution conflict between different social groups (or classes): rentiers, managers and workers. Finally, we will move to the long run and we will review the integration of the principle of effective demand into heterodox/post-Keynesian approaches towards distribution and growth.
2015
Level: advanced
The principle of effective demand: Marx, Kalecki, Keynes and beyond
In spite of the manifold critique about the state of economics in the aftermath of the financial crisis, an even increasing presence of economists and economic experts can be observed in the public sphere during the last years. On the one hand this reflects the still dominant position of economics in the social sciences as well as the sometimes ignorant attitude of economists towards findings of other social sciences. On the other hand this paper shows that the public debate on politico-economic issues among economists is dominated by a specific subgroup of economists, tightly connected to an institutional network of “German neoliberalism”. This group of “public economists” (i) is dominant in public debates even after the financial crisis, (ii) reproduces the formative German economic imaginary of the Social Market Economy in a German neoliberal interpretation and (iii) has a good access to German economic policymaking, rooted in a long history of economic policy advice.
2016
Level: advanced
Still the queens of social sciences? (Post-)Crisis power balances of “public economists” in Germany
Want to learn more about behavioural economics and its application to public policy? Take this free course from the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government.
Level: beginner
Behavioural insights for public policy
Gender, Development, and Globalization is the leading primer on global feminist economics and development. Lourdes Benería, a pioneer in the field of feminist economics, is joined in this second edition by Gunseli Berik and Maria Floro to update the text to reflect the major theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions and global developments in the last decade.
2015
Level: advanced
Gender, Development, and Globalization
UBC's Henry Siu, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, speaks about innovation in economics, technological progress and what it means for the fut...
2018
Level: beginner
Understanding technological change
In this short talk 'Measuring the Danger of Segregation' Trevon Logan, Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University, explores the impacts of structural racism on economics and health.
2020
Level: advanced
Measuring the Danger of Segregation
Steven G. Medema is a Research Professor at Duke University. His research focuses on the History of Economic Thought, having published extensively on the issue of social costs of production (conceptualized as externalities in neoclassical economics). In this recorded seminar, he exposes his working paper on the history of the concept of externalities in economic literature, starting from Pigou’s “The Economics of Welfare” (1920), where Pigou makes the case for governmental intervention in the market where there is a divergence between private and social costs or benefits of a productive activity. T
2017
Level: advanced
'Exceptional and Unimportant'? The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Externalities in Economic Analysis
The book provides an excellent comparative perspective on New Keynesian "New Consensus" economics and Post-Keynesian Economics at a beginner level. It also offers an interactive tool to understand how the economic models work, especially from a heterodox / pluralist perspective.
2022
Level: beginner
Introduction to Macroeconomics: Pluralist and Interactive
Colanders Macroeconomics 11e is specifically designed to help today’s students succeed in the principles of economics course and grasp economics concepts they can apply in their daily lives.
2019
Level: beginner
Macroeconomics 11ed.
"Leveraged" provides an authoritative guide to the new economics of our crisis-filled century with a focus on financial crises and financial economics.
2022
Level: expert
Leveraged
Colanders Microeconomics 11e is specifically designed to help today’s students succeed in the principles of economics course and grasp economics concepts they can apply in their daily lives
2019
Level: advanced
Microeconomics
Renowned scholars elaborate a critique on neoclassical economics and how it was unable to predict and even favoured the financial crisis. They refer to DSGE models, equilibrium theory and rational agents – a brief insight in the critique on neoclassic economics.
2012
Level: beginner
Financial Instability Mini-Documentary

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