Recently in Economcs Category

A brief look at financial panics, past and present.

Vast Bailout by U.S. Proposed in Bid to Stem Financial Crisis
from New York Times, September 19, 2008

The Financial Crisis: Fed Lent $121 Billion on Week
from Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008

Panic of 1907
from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

Financial Panics and Crises
from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History

It's not uncommon for students to use information from the Web in research papers without closely evaluating it. One of criteria for evaluation should always be "currency" of the information. The Washington Post recently gave an excellent example of investors often make the same mistake.  It has real world consequences. Take a look at the following article:

2002's News, Yesterday's Sell-Off, Sept. 9, 2008

In these jittery times, let's hope that most investors are making decisions based on current, reliable information!

Democracy Now! is a daily radio news show from a left-liberal perspective.  Here's a discussion (written and in audio) with Nomi Prins (journalist and former investment banker) and Michael Hudson (Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City) on AIG and the other recent bailouts.

The Cato Institute has a daily podcast covering economic and political issues, both national and international. Here's the RSS feed: http://www.cato.org/rss/daily_podcast.xml.

Go here to the daily podcast homepage to see recent topics:
http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/podcast-archive.php.

Subject Guide: Economics

In Our Time is a BBC radio program hosted by Melvyn Bragg that deals with a lot of interesting intellectual topics.  Recently, he had an excellent program on enclosures in 18th century Britain.  The Contributors were:

Rosemary Sweet, Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester
Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow
Mark Overton, Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter.

And there's a short bibliography provided.  Check it out.  Have a listen.  
(Here's an article on Enclosures from the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.)

---Fred Rowland
.

I found an interesting literature review from Web of Science that discusses the knowledge on development issues embedded within literary accounts. 

The fiction of development: Literary representation as a source of authoritative knowledge
JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES 44 (2): 198-216 FEB 2008

ABSTRACT: "This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority and representational form, and explore these by comparing and contrasting selected works of recent literary fiction that touch on development issues with academic and policy-related representations of the development process, thereby demonstrating the value of taking literary perspectives on development seriously. We find that not only are certain works of fiction 'better' than academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development but they also frequently reach a wider audience and are therefore more influential. Moreover, the line between fact and fiction is a very fine one, and there can be significant advantages to fictional writing over non-fiction."


---Fred Rowland

Through May 7, 2008, the library is having a trial of the online edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online (2nd Edition).  In addition to the excellent content, the interface is very slick, browseable alphabetically and by topic, an advanced search that allows you to limit search to full-text, bibliographies, contributors, article titles, abstracts, keywords, and by topic.

Kenneth J. Arrow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, says "The New Palgrave will be an indispensable reference tool for both junior and senior scholars in economics and perhaps even more for the journalist or business executive. The topics are exhaustive."

Check it out today!