Optimal Control Theory for Undergraduates

Dynamic optimization is widely used in financial economics, macroeconomics and resource economics. This is accounting for some tension between the undergraduate and graduate teaching of economics because most undergraduate programs still concentrate on static economic analysis. This paper shows how, with the help of the Microsoft Excel Solver tool, the principles of dynamic economics can be taught to students with minimal knowledge of calculus. As it is assumed that the reader has no prior knowledge of optimal control theory, some attention is paid to the main concepts of dynamic optimization.Optimal Control Theory, Economic Education, Microsoft Excel

Wilfred Edward Graham Salter: The Merits of a Classical Economic Education

During his honours research on an index of industrial production at the University of Western Australia, Salter gained an understanding of the composite commodity theorem. The applied work on the index of industrial production provided him with the analytic foundations for his two famous contributions to economic theory, in capital theory and international trade theory. In his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge he agreed with Joan Robinson that it is impossible to measure the aggregate capital stock because the assumptions of the composite commodity theorem do not hold in a general equilibrium framework. But Salter was not bothered by the elusive nature of capital because he saw no need to measure the capital stock in the first place. He developed a vintage model of capital, in which technical progress occurs at the margin of the capital stock, when new investment goods are installed. In the dependent economy model Salter, however, accepted the aggregation of exportables and importables because in a small open economy the terms of trade are unaffected by domestic economic policy. Thus, Salter recognised that the capital stock is an invalid aggregate in a macroeconomic model, but internationally traded goods are a valid aggregate in the dependent economy model. His success as an economic theorist lies in the fact that he understood when to apply the composite commodity theorem as an analytic tool, and when to avoid it.

Optimal Control Theory for Undergraduates Using the Microsoft Excel Solver Tool

Dynamic optimisation is widely used in financial economics, macroeconomics and resource economics. This accounts for friction between the undergraduate and graduate teaching of economics because most undergraduate programmes still concentrate on static economic analysis. This paper shows how, with the help of the Microsoft Excel Solver tool, the principles of dynamic economics can be taught to students with minimal knowledge of calculus. As it is assumed that the reader has no prior knowledge of optimal control theory, some attention is paid to the main concepts of dynamic optimisation.

Labour Taxes and Work Hours in Australia

In the 1970s, work hours in Europe were similar to work hours in America, but today Europeans work less than Americans. Prescott (2004) attributes the decline in European work hours to an increase in the effective marginal tax rate on labour income. The Australian labour market experience confirms that the taxation of labour income is an important determinant of the decision to work. In Australia taxes and work hours did not change much in the long-run, but Australian work hours rebounded after a temporary increase in taxes in the 1980s. The resilience of Australian work hours suggests that a return to the tax rates of the 1970s would restore the European labour supply.

INVESTMENT AND TECHNICAL PROGRESS IN THE G7 COUNTRIES AND AUSTRALIA

The vintage model of capital accumulation predicts that technical progress depends on the installation of new capital equipment. In this paper it is found that investment raises labor productivity in the G7 countries and Australia. This finding implies that the decline in investment during the global financial crisis will have a long lasting detrimental effect on labor productivity and hence wages.

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND EVOLUTION: PARENTAL PREFERENCE FOR QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF OFFSPRING

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the model developed in Galor and Moav, Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth (2002), in which agents vary genetically in their preference for quality and quantity of children. We simulate a parametric form of the model, enabling examination of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern rates of economic growth. The simulations allow an assessment of the strength of the biological foundations of the model and demonstrate the susceptibility of the modern high-growth state to invasion by cheaters. Extending the model from two to three genotypes suggests the possibility of a return to Malthusian conditions rather than a permanent state of modern growth.

A Short History of Derivative Security Markets

Contracts for future delivery of commodities spread from Mesopotamia to Hellenistic Egypt and the Roman world. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, contracts for future delivery continued to be used in the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and they survived in canon law in western Europe. It is likely that Sephardic Jews carried derivative trading from Mesopotamia to Spain during Roman times and the first millennium AD, and, after being expelled from Spain, to the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. Derivative trading on securities spread from Amsterdam to England and France at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, and from France to Germany in the early nineteenth century. Circumstantial evidence indicates that bankers and banks were at the forefront of derivative trading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.