A brief statement of the costumary foundations of economic processes and institutions and a review of theoretical approaches to custom.

The estimation of models with time-varying coefficients is usually performed by Kalman-Bucy filtering. The two-sided filter proposed by Schlicht (1988) is statistically and computationally superior to the one-sided Kalman-Bucy filter. This paper describes the estimation procedure and the program...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Practical problems arise, however, if the time series contains structural breaks (as produced by German unification for German time series, for instance),...

Customs and institutions affect and are affected by economic relations and processes. The two-way interaction is particularly important in studying history where the scale of the temporal canvas ensures that very few variables can be treated as parametric. This paper assesses the methodology...

Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard and improve the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the trade-off...

This note proposes a growth model that is derived from the standard Solow growth model by replacing the neoclassical production function with Kaldor’s technical progress function while maintaining a marginalist theory of factor prices in the spirit suggested by von Weizsäcker (1966, 1966b)....

Abstract This note offers two comments on the article “Social Influences towards Conformism in Economic Experiments” by Hargreaves Heap that is to appear in the Economics e-Journal. One relates to the concept of conformism, the other lines out some phenomena where an explicit recognition of...

Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

This note proposes a growth model that is derived from the standard Solow growth model by replacing the neoclassical production function with Kaldor’s technical progress function while maintaining a marginalist theory of factor prices in the spirit suggested by von Weizsäcker (1966, 1966b)....

This note identifies a severe mistake in my article “Unexpected Consequences of Ricardian Expectations” that appeard in this journal in the July 2013 issue.