# All Questions

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### Is zero inflation desirable?

Is zero inflation really desirable? To be more precise: Does inflation in real life have benefits that in some situations outweigh its social cost? E.g.: it works as a disincentive against holding ...
27k views

### How can I obtain Leontief and Cobb-Douglas production function from CES function?

In most Microeconomics textbooks it is mentioned that the Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function, $$Q=\gamma[a K^{-\rho} +(1-a) L^{-\rho} ]^{-\frac{1}{\rho}}$$ (where the ...
7k views

### What is the economic purpose of increasing the minimum wage?

It is generally accepted among economists that minimum wage warps the equilibrium point between the supply and demand of labor by instituting a price floor and increases unemployment for unskilled ...
18k views

### Fundamental equations in economics

For the other sciences it´s easy to point to the most important equations that ground the discipline. If I want to explain Economics to a physicist say, what are considered to be the most important ...
1k views

### Implications of abolishing Fractional Reserve Banking on mortgages and interest rates

Suppose for a moment that someone with legislative power decides to abolish Fractional Reserve Banking and passes a law that forces banks to only lend the money they own, that is M0. What would be the ...
4k views

### How do economies grow?

These days, we hear again and again about the so-called "need" for economic growth. But how do countries actually grow economically? That is, why/how does their GDP increase over time? Related, what ...
2k views

### What is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?

I suppose GDP is supposed to create a measure of a country's wealth/welfare, something easily indexable. But how exactly is it composed? And is its composition disputed? How good is it at measuring a ...
3k views

### Mathematical Micro/Macro Economics Textbook Recommendation

I was formerly an economics major and now also majoring in mathematics. I want a textbook that is rigorously based on mathematics; not just using mathematcis whenever the author wants, but in a more ...
1k views

### Price Elasticity of Demand for Positive Price Increases

What does it mean when the price elasticity of demand %Qd/%P is greater than one? Typically I hear that it means the demand is elastic since if, say, the price decreases by 1% the demand for the ...
18k views

### How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Decades ago a factory job could support a wife and kids until retirement and they offered insurance, benefits, etc. Now, no more unions, those jobs as well as tech and customer service jobs are ...
4k views

### Productivity vs real earnings in the US — what happened ca 1974?

Somewhat related to the most recent US elections, I've been researching the whole "white working class" situation, and one strange anomaly has popped up. When one looks at a graph of productivity (...
1k views

### What would happen if the world switched to a single currency?

What would happen if all countries suddenly stopped using local currencies and adopted a global currency (like the Euro, but for everyone)?
2k views

### From an economics perspective, what are the ramifications of a currency with fixed money supply?

I'm thinking specifically of bitcoins. What are the pros and cons of having a fixed number of coins, as opposed to more "normal" currencies? Would the currency have no inflation?
559 views

### Experiments contradicting the expected utility model

This is a question I asked on the cognitive science beta which never got any answer there. I do not know what the policy should be for question migration/reposting (maybe worth discussing in the meta?)...
1k views

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### Seminal papers that later were proven to contain errors

I was reading on institutions, and I came across Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR) paper on The Colonial Origins of comparative development: An Empirical Investigation, and this paper seemed so '...
655 views

### Destroying the dollar

Let's destroy the USD dollar: I am the government of a small, economically and geopolitically unimportant country that has its own currency and a local central bank. I order the local central bank (at ...
469 views

### Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage

The aim of this question is to better explore the mathematical economics model behind Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage and the claims that can be made based on this model. This seems ...
396 views

### The Case for Basic Income in developed and underdeveloped countries

From what I can tell, the idea of the basic income guarantee is very popular in some circles as an excellent alternative to a lot of modern welfare systems. Has anybody developed a theoretic or ...
971 views

### Inflation and economic growth

Noticeable works about the impact of inflation on economic growth are dated back to the 90s. For example, Barro (1995): the impact effects from an increase in average inflation by 10 percentage ...
809 views

### Interest rate parity: Counter intuitive

What is the basis for interest rate parity to hold? I know, the reason stated is excess returns Excess returns as such should not be the reason for a currency depreciation. for e.g. when we posit ...
345 views

### Are there fundamental reasons why (exponential) economic growth is highly desirable?

One of the most widely published measures of the economy is the economic growth as a % of the GDP; i.e. the degree to which an economy grows exponentially. In my understanding, when the rate of ...
28k views

798 views

### Are there data for the evolution of global economic inequality

Please excuse my ignorance of economics. I recently learned about the Gini-Coefficient as a measure of the economic inequality in a country. I have since seen several plots of this coefficient over ...
658 views

### Why (neoclassical) economic models have no profits, unlike the real world?

Consider a simple neoclassical model of an economy populated by firms with a constant returns to scale production function, using homogeneous labour and capital. Firms are equal, and are price takers ...
2k views

### Available code for computing solutions to matching algorithms?

The question of designing matching procedure (between high-schools and students, med intern and hospitals, kidney donors and receivers,...) has been widely studied by economists and vastly contributed ...
12k views

### Finding demand function given a utility min(x,y) function

I am confused about a particular point regarding finding a demand function. All the problems in this practice set I am doing have involved applying the method of Lagrangian multipliers. But I am ...
1k views

### What is the necessity of the FDIC in the US banking system?

A bank's basic function is to "borrow short and lend long". In other words, it borrows money from depositors over the short term, promising to repay it on demand, while it lends most of that money out ...
34k views

### How to derive firm's cost function from production function?

I recently learned how to solve the following type of problem using the method of Lagrangian multipliers: Given a consumer with utility function $u(x,y)$, wealth $w$, prices $p =(p_x,p_y)$, budget ...
3k views

### (Preference Relation/Set) Continuous $\succsim$ imply closedness of upper and lower contour sets

[ADDED/MODIFIED] : I have put my proof where the commodity space is simply $\mathbb{R_+}$(e.g. nonnegative reals) for simplicity below. Please share your 2 cent. I have put words to aid my own ...
959 views

### Why is modest inflation a good thing? [duplicate]

I have been reading a BBC news article about inflation in the UK, which is saying that inflation has recently become negative (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33147660). The article suggests that ...
2k views

### Can the stock market show indefinite exponential growth?

In a comments on a question on money.SE, the following dialog took place: Eventually there will not be enough matter to represent all the money, so we know for certain that the answer is "No" for a ...