The Macroeconomics of Intensive Agriculture

Prehistoric Intensive Agriculture

The ancient lowland Maya have been traditionally portrayed as swidden (shifting cultivation) agriculturalists (1). The persistence of the swidden concept has inhibited field inquiry of past modes of lowland subsistence, often preserving what may be an unfounded bias concerning the cultivation techniques employed by the Maya. Moreover, the absence of adequate subsistence research has, in effect,...

Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity across Europe 1 Running head : Intensive agriculture and soil biodiversity

The Macroeconomics of Microfinance

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impacts of economy-wide microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small-scale businesses. In our analysis, we find that the redistributive impacts of microfinance are stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the aggregate impacts are smaller. Making the typical microfinance program mo...

Disequilibrium macroeconomics: an episode in the transformation of modern macroeconomics

ed from issues they could not handle but which enabled them to analyse the dynamics in which they were interested. However, a more common reaction was to focus on the formal models and to confine their theorizing to what could be said rigorously. Founding macroeconomics on rigorous utilitymaximizing microfoundations was important. This was, no doubt, the reason why Patinkin’s Chapter 13 was neg...

The Microfoundations of Macroeconomics

We consider the microfoundations controversy from the perspective of economic evolution and show that the debate can benefit from lessons learned in evolutionary biology. Although the analogy between biology and economics has been noted before, it has rarely focused on clarifying the micro-macro distinction in economic theory and modelling. The macroevolution controversy in biology has generate...