Multidisciplinary Economics The Birth of a New Economics Faculty in the Netherlands

This volume reports on the inaugural conference of the Utrecht School of Economics and the Tjalling C. Koopmans Research Institute. Its title refers to the objective of the new faculty and is rooted in the history of economics at Utrecht: it originated in Law, with economists attached to the Social Sciences, Geography and History. Thus was born an economics with institutional, historical and spatial dimensions. The naming of its research institute was natural in the sense that Koopmans, one of the world’s most distinguished economists, was actually a student at Utrecht, but in mathematics and physics: he moved to economics later as a graduate student. In another sense, Koopmans might appear a surprising choice, given that Multidisciplinary Economics will signal to many a broader social science dimension. Yet Koopmans was more than general equilibrium theory, econometric theory and linear programming, although he was all these things: he had a strong sense of social purpose and was centrally concerned with the contribution theory could make to a better understanding of society, as revealed by Frankel and Sandoz (his daughters: as non-economists a nice touch!) and by Kay, in a thoughtful contribution on the nature of the market economy. Frey is another outsider providing a thought-provoking contribution: he takes the unfashionable, but convincing stance that corporate governance can learn from public governance, and in doing so uses psychology to inform the extremely narrow perspective of traditional agency theory. The contributions of further eminent outsiders, for example Buiter, coupled with those of the five, newly inaugurated full professors, Alessie, Garretsen, Kool, Schenk and Unger, complete a substantial volume of wide interest: the editors, de Gijsel and Schenk, are to be congratulated on its quality and relevance.

Keith Cowling, University of Warwick

"An important contribution to the field. Rich in ideas". ProfessorNoreena Hertz.