George Akerlof

Georgetown University | GU · McCourt School of Public Policy

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities; defining power relations; and establishing and conveying...

Will the Arab Spring lead to long-lasting democratic change? To explore this question, I examine the determinants of the Arab world's democratic deficit in 2010. I find that the percentage of a country's landmass that was conquered by Arab armies following the death of the prophet Muhammad statistically accounts for this deficit. Using history as a...

by George Arthur Akerlof.

One of the more troubling aspects of the ferment in macroeconomics that followed the demise of the Keynesian dominance in the late 1960s has been the inability of many of the new ideas to account for unemployment remains unexplained because equilibrium in most economic models occurs with supply equal to demand: if this equality holds in the labor m...

Настоящая работа связывает два понятия - качества и неопреде- ленности. Наличие многочисленных разновидностей одних и тех же товаров ставит интересные и важные проблемы теории рынков. С од- ной стороны, анализ различий в качестве в условиях неопределенности может объяснить природу многих важных институтов рынка труда. С другой стороны, в данной раб...

Het werk van Akerlof, Spence en Stiglitz dwingt ons na te denken over de werking van markten en de gevolgen daarvan voor de welvaart en het te voeren beleid. De Bank of Sweden Prize voor Economische Wetenschappen 2001 is aan drie vermaarde Amerikaanse economen toegekend: George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence en Joseph E. Stiglitz. Het driemanschap h...

This paper relates quality and uncertainty. The existence of goods of many grades poses interesting and important problems for the theory of markets. On the one hand, the interaction of quality differences and uncertainty may explain important institutions of the labor market. On the other hand, this paper presents a struggling attempt to give stru...

MODERN GROWTH THEORY has laid great stress on the properties of systems capable of balanced growth. Two types of discussions have predominated: those which show convergence toward balanced growth, and those which discuss the character of balanced-growth paths. Presented here is a model of steady technological progress. One implication of our findin...