Explorations in Pragmatic Economics

George A. Akerlof is Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Explorations in Pragmatic Economics provides that long awaited compilation of favorite hits by Akerlof and his coauthors. ...the book compiles some of the most innovative articles written in the past few decades. It is a must read...for any economist, be it a micro, macro, behavioral, or misbehavioral one.

• Introduction ; PART 1: MICROECONOMICS ; 1. The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism ; 2. The Economics of Caste and of the Rate Race and Other Woeful Tales ; 3. Discriminatory, Status-based Wages among Tradition-oriented, Stochastically Trading Coconut Producers ; 4. Economics and Identity ; 5. The Economics of "Tagging" as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning ; 6. An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States ; 7. Men Without Children ; 8. The Economic Consequences of Cognitive Dissonance ; 9. The Economics of Illusion ; 10. Procrastination and Obedience ; 11. Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit ; PART 2: MACROECONOMICS ; 12. Relative Wages and the Rate of Inflation ; 13. The Microeconomic Foundations of a Flow of Funds Theory of the Demand for Money ; 14. Irving Fisher on his Head: The Consequences of Constant Threshhold-Target Monitoring of Money Holdings ; 15. Jobs as Dam Sites ; 16. Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange ; 17. The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis anmd Unemployment ; 18. A Near-Rational Model of the Business Cycle, with Wage and Price Inertia ; 19. The Macroeconomics of Low Inflation ; 20. Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior