Journal of Economic Literature
Book Reviews
2026-08-28
Leeat Yariv of CA Institute of Technology reviews “Explorations in Pragmatic Economics: Selected Papers of George A. Akerlof (and Co-Authors)” by George A. Akerlof,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Twenty previously published papers, all motivated by empirical examples, explore topics in micro- and macroeconomics using models derived from close observation. Papers discuss the market for “lemons,” or the economic consequences of asymmetric information for markets; the economics of caste, work conditions and the “rat race,” and the ways in which indicators can distort equilibrium; discriminatory, status-based wages among tradition-oriented stochastically trading coconut producers; economics and identity; the economics of tagging as applied to the optimal income tax, welfare programs, and manpower planning; an analysis of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the United States; men without children; the economic consequences of cognitive dissonance; the economics of illusion; procrastination and obedience; the economic underworld of bankruptcy for profit; relative wages and the rate of inflation; the microeconomic foundations of a flow-of-funds theory of the demand for money; the consequences of constant threshold-target monitoring of money holdings; jobs as dam sites; labor contracts as partial gift exchange; the fair wage-effort hypothesis and unemployment; a near-rational model of the business cycle, with wage and price inertia; the macroeconomics of low inflation; and behavioral macroeconomics and macroeconomic behavior. Akerlof is Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the 2001 Nobel Laureate in… Index.”