"The last decade has seen a lively debate in macroeconomics, with an increasing criticism on the model that seemed to be dominant in literature since the end of the 1990's, the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE, hereafter) and, consequently, the birth of some new theoretical approaches and methodologies"--

This is a key year for the evolution of international markets. The global economy is experiencing the most severe downturn since the thirties, it is temporarily leaving a path of sustained growth that characterized the last decades, and is facing an impressive decline of trade between countries. Banks are going bankrupt, the stock market has crashed, rms are going out of bu- ness or drastically reducing their production and exports, workers are being red and investment in new business creation or innovation is shrinking. Meanwhile, consumers con dence has dropped at its minimum, aggregate demand has been declining for months and expansionary policies and int- national coordination have failed to counteract the crisis until now. It is quite likely that all this will change sooner or later, but at the end of this crisis our understanding of the macroeconomy may change as well. In front of these crucial events, this book is not an attempt at proposing a radically new way of interpreting macroeconomic phenomena, and, as a m- ter of fact, it is not even a book on macroeconomic theory. My more modest goal is to collect a number of insights derived from recent research on the role of competition and innovation in the analysis of three topics: business cycles, trade and growth through innovations.

The birth and death of firms is one of the main features of the business cycle. Yet mainstream DGSE macroeconomic models mostly ignore this phenomenon, thereby excluding any potential impact of economic policy on the probability of the birth and death of firms. Those DGSE models that do allow for this phenomenon do so at the cost of drastic simplifications, which effectively rule out causal links between the strategic interaction of industrial firms and the macroeconomy. This innovative new book develops a bottom-up, agent-based framework that shows how strategic interactions at the level of oligopolistic firms, and even at the level of individuals, affect entire industrial sectors and the equilibrium of the macroeconomy. It will appeal to academic researchers and graduate students working in computational economics, agent-based modelling and econophysics, as well as mainstream economists interested in learning more about alternatives to DGSE models in macroeconomics.

Over the past two decades, experimental economics has moved from a fringe activity to become a standard tool for empirical research. With experimental economics now regarded as part of the basic tool-kit for applied economics, this book demonstrates how controlled experiments can be a useful in providing evidence relevant to economic research. Professors Jacquemet and L'Haridon take the standard model in applied econometrics as a basis to the methodology of controlled experiments. Methodological discussions are illustrated with standard experimental results. This book provides future experimental practitioners with the means to construct experiments that fit their research question, and new comers with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of controlled experiments. Graduate students and academic researchers working in the field of experimental economics will be able to learn how to undertake, understand and criticise empirical research based on lab experiments, and refer to specific experiments, results or designs completed with case study applications.

This SPR Departmental Paper will provide policymakers with a framework for studying changes to national data policy frameworks.

Macroeconomics is the application of economic theory to the study of the economy’s growth, cycle and price-level determination. Macroeconomics takes account of stylized facts observed in the real world and builds theoretical frameworks to explain such facts. Economic growth is a stylized fact of market economies, since England’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Until then, poverty was a common good for humanity. Economic growth consists in the persistent, smooth and sustained increase of per-capita income. A market economy shows periods of expanding and contracting economic activity. This phenomenon is the economic cycle. The price of money is the amount of goods bought with one unit of money, in other words, the inverse of the price level. Determination of the price level, or the value of money, is a fascinating subject in a fiat money economy.

This study provides a candid, systematic, and critical review of recent evidence on this complex subject. Based on a review of the literature and some new empirical evidence, it finds that (1) in spite of an apparently strong theoretical presumption, it is difficult to detect a strong and robust causal relationship between financial integration and economic growth; (2) contrary to theoretical predictions, financial integration appears to be associated with increases in consumption volatility (both in absolute terms and relative to income volatility) in many developing countries; and (3) there appear to be threshold effects in both of these relationships, which may be related to absorptive capacity. Some recent evidence suggests that sound macroeconomic frameworks and, in particular, good governance are both quantitatively and qualitatively important in affecting developing countries’ experiences with financial globalization.

The authors argue for an approach to economic analysis which regards the economy as an interactive system with heterogenous agents and not a system which treats aggregates as some representative individual. They then apply this approach to macro- and micro-analyses including monetary policy and firms, technological innovation and the insider-outsider model. They find that this approach proves more fruitful in explaining empirical phenomena than much of the existing theory.

Why are some countries richer than others? Why do some economies grow so much faster than others do? Do economies tend to converge to similar levels of per capita income? Or is catching up simply impossible? If modern technology has shown the potential to raise living standards to first-world levels, why is it that the vast majority of the world's population lives in poverty in underdeveloped countries? These questions have been at the heart of development economics since its inception several decades ago and are now at the center of the research agenda of the modern economics of growth. This book reviews the answers to these questions in the contemporary fields of growth theory and comparative development. It is a sequel to Development Theory and the Economics of Growth published in 2000 with the aim to vindicate the theoretical insights and accumulated empirical knowledge of classical development economics and to integrate them into the mainstream of modern growth economics. The growth and development fields have expanded in the last twelve years in welcome directions that aim to deepen our understanding of the fundamental determinants of comparative development. This new book evaluates these new directions, including developments in endogenous growth theory and economic geography as well as the rise and challenge of the new institutional economics, in the light of the earlier, classical contributions to development theory.