Market Economics

Many developed countries have to deal with low female labor market participation. Within (OECD) countries, only 61 % of women of working age actively participated in the labor market in 2008, whereas the ratio is 80%for men. This gap is particularly alarming as women recently tend to be higher educated on average, with better school degrees and higher shares of university graduates. Hence, activating this untapped skilled labor resource is a key issue in the current policy debate. Supporting self-employment among unemployed women might be more promising in this regard, given that women ...

THE STATUE IN THE STONE is a complete treatise on Jobs-to-be-Done philosophy. While many have contributed to the ideology, the founding fathers are (in alphabetical order): Lance Bettencourt, Clayton Christensen, Theodore Levitt, and Anthony Ulwick. Clayton Christensen taught that “A customer "hires" a product to accomplish a job.” The customer’s job is a goal, objective, or problem to be solved. Built upon this basic truth, jobs-to-be-done philosophy is the most powerful framework ever created to understand customer motivation. It turns out that customers do not care about brands, ...

There’s no doubt that our world has gotten more extreme. Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, cyberattacks, political radicalization—virtually, everywhere we look there is mayhem bearing down on us, putting trillions of assets at risk. And at least two factions have formed around how to respond. In Chaos Kings, Scott Patterson depicts how one faction, led by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan, believes humans can never see the big disaster coming.

In this vital work, author Michael Levine offers compelling evidence that problems in business, large and small, typically stem from inattention to tiny details. Social psychologists and criminologists agree that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, soon thereafter the rest of the windows will be broken - and the perception will build that crime in that neighborhood is out of control. The same principle applies to business.

Americans have long been skeptical of corporations, and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs. In For Profit, law professor William Magnuson argues that the story of the corporation didn’t have to come to this. Throughout history, he finds, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them.

Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a "viral loop" - to use the product means having to share it with others. After all, what's the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The end result is a business that spreads rapidly, scales quickly, and has the promise to create staggering wealth.

In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros writes about the origins of the crisis and proposes a set of policies that should be adopted to confront it. Soros places the current crisis in the context of his decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity.

Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.

Based on the single largest neuromarketing study ever conducted, Buyology reveals surprising truths about what attracts our attention and captures our dollars.

Sixty percent of humanity - some four-point-three billion people - live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right, combined with aid from rich countries. But anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this approach misses the broader political forces at play. Global poverty - and the growing divide between "developing" and "developed" countries - has to do with how the global economy has been designed over the course of 500 years. Global inequality doesn't just exist; it has been created.

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception.

Great companies can fail: not because they do anything wrong, but because they do everything right. Meeting customers' current needs leads firms to reject breakthrough innovations, "disruptive technologies", that create the products and opportunities of the future.

Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground - the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative - “sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient” - often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings.

Now in its second edition, Boombustology is an authoritative, up-to-date guide on the history of booms, busts, and financial cycles. Engaging and accessible, this popular audiobook helps investors, policymakers, and analysts navigate the radical uncertainty that plagues today's uncertain investing and economic environment. Author Vikram Mansharamani, an experienced global equity investor and prominent Harvard University lecturer, presents his multi-disciplinary framework for identifying financial bubbles before they burst.

This book defines stock investment terms, methods of investment, suggested companies to invest in, and the use of economic indicators to evaluate market conditions before investing, The author shares many years of stock investing experience to provide basic information as well as advanced investing concepts including obtaining high income and using stock option strategies for additional investing yields from investment portfolios.

Every few years a book - through a combination of the author’s unique voice, storytelling ability, wit, and insight - simply breaks the mold. Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods is one example. Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is another. Now comes Youngme Moon’s Different, a book for “people who don’t read business books”. Actually, it’s more like a personal conversation with a friend who has thought deeply about how the world works...and who gets you to see that world in a completely new light.

The current global financial crisis carries a "made in America" label. In this forthright and incisive book, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up.

We have entered into an entirely new era, an age of increasingly frequent and intense periods of turbulence in the global economy. Unlike past recessions, today's crises have precipitated a need for businesses to develop a new mindset, one that takes into account intermittent periods of disturbance, allowing them to thrive while under the constant threat of chaos.

Understand and take advantage of the fluctuations of markets and come out ahead by learning when and where to invest your money. Economies, companies and markets operate in accordance with patterns which are influenced by naturally occurring events combined with human psychology and behaviour. The wisest investors learn to appreciate these rhythms and identify the best opportunities to take actions which will transform their finances for the better.

The recent changes in our economic landscape have only exposed and intensified a phenomenon: an explosion in sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping. From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist to emerging sectors such as peer-to-peer lending (Zopa), "swap trading" (Swaptree), and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not only what we consume but how we consume.

George Soros, called "a superstar among money managers" by The New York Times, shares the investment strategies he uses to read the mind of the market.