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This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy. Although the exchange centered on the effects of overhead costs on marginal productivity theory and the so-called adding-up theorem, it also provided significant elements to assess the methodological differences between two of the most representative American economists of the interwar years.

Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.

This chapter presents the indirect preferences for all full rank Gorman and Lewbel demand systems. Each member in this class of demand models is a generalized quadratic expenditure system (GQES). This representation allows applied researchers to choose a small number of price indices and a function of income to specify any exactly aggregable demand system, without the need to revisit the questions of integrability of the demand equations or the implied form and structure of indirect preferences. This characterization also allows for the calculation of exact welfare measures for consumers, either in the aggregate or for specific classes of individuals, and other valuations of interest to applied researchers.

HAVING been taught by Professor Moore at the London Business School, I am much in awe of his formidable mathematical talent and approached with some trepidation his latest contribution to the distinguished Pelican Library of Business Management … only to find that no formal mathematical skill beyond 0‐level albegra is required. What is required is clear logical thinking, but of a quantitative kind. This does not make it easy, but it is certainly essential. As the author says, if individuals' skill to handle problems that arise over a wide range of business functions are to be enhanced, greater effort needs to be placed on developing the skills of reasoning per se, and less on the teaching of mathematical theorems and techniques.

The mathematical science approach to the study of social affairs has been much debated not least among scholars of international relations. Wight (2002, p. 37) reviews the current debate – discussing the views of Michael Nicholson and Steve Smith quite extensively – and comments:all of this adds up to a very confused picture in terms of the philosophy of science. IR has struggled to incorporate an increasingly diverse set of positions into its theoretical landscape. In general, the discipline has attempted to maintain an unsophisticated and outdated two-category framework based on the science/anti-science issue.…Currently there are three continuums that the discipline seems to consider line up in opposition to each other. The first of these is the explaining/understanding divide (Hollis & Smith, 1990). The second is the positivism/post-positivism divide (Lapid, 1989; Sylvester, 1993). The third is Keohane's distinction between rationalism and reflectivism (Keohane, 1989). The newly emerging constructivism claims ‘the middle ground’ in between. (Adler, 1997; Price & Reus-Smit, 1998; Wendt, 1999)

By the criterion most beloved by the economics profession, economists have not failed; on the contrary, we are a glorious success. The criterion I am referring to is, of course, that of success in the marketplace. The marketplace continues to value our output highly. The profession is growing at a much faster rate than gross world product. The services it generates are well paid for and in high demand. Its current output and accumulated capital stock of “knowledge” grows at a vigorous rate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate dynamic food demand in urban China, with use of a complete dynamic demand system – dynamic linear expenditure system-linear approximate dynamic almost ideal demand system (DLES-LA/DAIDS), which pushes forward the techniques of demand analysis.

The authors employ a transitionary demand process and develop a new approach of complete demand system with a two-stage dynamic budgeting: a strongly separable DLES in the first stage and a LA/DAIDS in the second stage. Employing provincial aggregate data (1995-2010) from the China urban household surveys, The authors estimated the demand elasticities for primary food products in urban China.

The results indicate that most primary food products are necessities and price inelastic for urban households in China. The authors also found that the dynamic model tends to yield relatively smaller expenditure elasticities in magnitude than the static models do due to the friction effect of dynamic adjusting costs, such as habit formation, switching costs, and learning process. However, the dynamic effects on own price elasticities are inconclusive due to the add-up restriction.

The research contributes to the demand analysis methodologically, and can be used for better projections in policy simulation models.

This paper methodologically relaxes the restrictive assumption of instant adjustment in static models and allows consumers to make a dynamic decision in food consumption. Empirically, the authors introduce a new complete dynamic demand model and carry out a case study with the use of urban household data in China.