The first Wall Street

Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the birth of american finance

When Americans think of investment and finance, they think of Wall Street - though this was not always the case. During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and ...

Hayek's challenge

an intellectual biography of F. A. Hayek

Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent social theorists of the twentieth century as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology ...

Optional law

the structure of legal entitlements

Spurred by the advances in option theory that have been remaking financial and economic scholarship over the past thirty years, a revolution is taking shape in the way legal scholars conceptualize property and the way it is protected by the law. Ian Ayres's Optional ...

The spacious word

cartography, literature and empire in Early Modern Spain

Pilgrimage to the end of the world

the road to Santiago de Compostela

From Tibetan Buddhists at Jokang to Muslims at Mecca for the hajj, pilgrims across faiths and cultures travel thousands of miles - often by foot - to reach holy sites. Such journeys are considered proof of ultimate devotion, the most important act of an individual's life ...

The power of productivity

wealth,poverty,and the treat to global stability

The disparity between rich and poor countries is the most serious, intractable problem facing the world today. The chronic poverty of many nations affects more than the citizens and economies of those nations; it threatens global stability as the pressures of immigration become unsustainable and ...

The laws of cool

knowledge work and the culture of information

Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of ...

Who should pay for Medicare?

Good news first? The good news is that Americans today are living longer, in part because of continual advances in healthcare. But the bad news is that with our aging population larger than ever before, nothing is being done to ensure that we can continue ...

Social Security Programs and retirement around the world

micro-estimation

The making of environmental Law

The unprecedented expansion in environmental regulation over the past thirty years--at all levels of government--signifies a transformation of our nation's laws that is both palpable and encouraging. Environmental laws now affect almost everything we do, from the cars we drive and the places we ...

The high cost of free parking

Free parking isn't really free. In fact, the average parking space costs more than the average car. Initially, developers pay for the required parking, but soon tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking has diffused throughout the ...

Strong religion

the rise of fundamentalisms around the world

Philosophy in a time of terror

dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

German idealism and the jew

the inner anti-semitism of philosophy and German Jewish responses

Economic and financial crises in emerging market economies

In the late 1990s, economic and financial crises raged through East Asia, devastating economies that had previously been considered among the strongest in the developing world. The crises eventually spread to Russia, Turkey, and Latin America, and impacted the economies of many industrialized nations as ...

Structural impediments to growth in Japan

As the much-lauded "miracle" of Japan's stunning economic growth has ground down into a seemingly unshakeable economic stagnation, analysts have focused their attention on the underlying systems that present obstacles to continued success. In this, the first book-length academic treatment of this important issue ...

Globalization in historical perspective

As awareness of globalization grows, so too does our need to understand it historically. This volume is one of few to consider globalization in the context of the history of international trade: its eleven papers explore how the process of globalization can be measured by ...

Bloody good

chivalry, sacrifice and the Great War

Memoirs of an unregulated economist

In this witty and modest intellectual autobiography, George J. Stigler gives us a fascinating glimpse into the little-known world of economics and the people who study it. One of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century, Stigler was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982 ...

On the future of history

the postmodernist challenge and its aftermath