Kevin M. Murphy

An authoritative textbook based on the legendary economics course taught at the University of Chicago—now fully updated and expandedPrice theory is a powerful analytical tool kit for measuring, explaining, and predicting market outcomes. This expanded second edition of Chicago Price Theory offers a unique approach to the subject, emphasizing hands-on, practical applications that can help students adeptly integrate economic theory with real-world forces. A key distinction is its focus on market equilibrium and gains from trade. Unlike many microeconomics texts, this book emphasizes how, through markets, households and businesses adapt to conditions like price controls and externalities. It modernizes the Marshallian idea of forward-falling supply, especially for analyzing human capital, and makes use of the cost function and Hicks-Marshall laws to analyze a variety of economic phenomena. Rooted in Chicago’s price theory tradition, this textbook enables students to understand human behavior through the lens of price theory, showing how a small set of well-mastered tools makes it possible to analyze a remarkably wide range of economic questions. Now features a full chapter closely integrating economic reasoning with the treatment-control paradigmCovers topics such as occupational choice, the evolution of inequality, the value of a statistical life, prohibition, and competitionComes with lesson plans for minicourses in industrial organization, health, macro, labor, public finance, and urban economicsAccompanied by video lectures taught by Kevin M. Murphy, Gary Becker, Casey B. Mulligan, and Robert MintonUses the economics of “nudges” to understand business contracts and the organization of civil societyIncludes analysis of business-to-business transactionsDiscusses the future implications of artificial intelligence

An authoritative textbook based on the legendary economics course taught at the University of ChicagoPrice theory is a powerful analytical toolkit for measuring, explaining, and predicting human behavior in the marketplace. This incisive textbook provides an essential introduction to the subject, offering a diverse array of practical methods that empower students to learn by doing. Based on Economics 301, the legendary PhD course taught at the University of Chicago, the book emphasizes the importance of applying price theory in order to master its concepts. Chicago Price Theory features immersive chapter-length examples such as addictive goods, urban-property pricing, the consequences of prohibition, the value of a statistical life, and occupational choice. It looks at human behavior in the aggregate of an industry, region, or demographic group, but also provides models of individuals when they offer insights about the aggregate. The book explains the surprising answers that price theory can provide to practical questions about taxation, education, the housing market, government subsidies, and much more. Emphasizes the application of price theory, enabling students to learn by doingFeatures chapter-length examples such as addictive goods, urban-property pricing, the consequences of prohibition, and the value of a statistical lifeSupported by video lectures taught by Kevin M. Murphy and Gary BeckerThe video course enables students to learn the theory at home and practice the applications in the classroom

This iteration of the American Encounters series addresses artists' conceptions of political and military authority through portraiture during and after North American and European revolutionary upheavals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The works discussed demonstrate shifting ideals of leadership through examination of artistic style, from restrained Neoclassicism to dynamic Romanticism, as well as the iconography of martial and civilian power. The publication also explores the proliferation and replication of images of leaders, particularly George Washington, as well as the demand for the revolutionary hero and first president's likeness in France. Catalogue essays elucidate the reasons for the transmission of portraits of Washington across the Atlantic in the context of artistic, political, and military exchange between the two countries. Contributions also delve into issues of colonial, post-colonial, and post-revolutionary identity, investigating the ability of artists to navigate oscillating national, social, and cultural boundaries.

In Taxing Visions, Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy explore taxes, rents, economic depression, and financial inequity as subject matter in several visually provocative paintings and works on paper. Although this period is often identified artistically with leisure-laden impressionist landscapes, flowing-with-abundance still-life paintings, and class-conscious “official” portraits, practitioners working in a variety of stylistic idioms reckoned with financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. These paintings, drawings, and prints demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn, ultimately picking up where facts, figures, and the printed word leave off. Featured artists include William Michael Harnett, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as several lesser-known individuals, in part because their art “taxes” our sensibilities of socioeconomic propriety. Taxing Visions shows satire and protest playing out through a sizable body of work, with artists confronting recession and depression with equal parts reportage, invective, humor, and hope. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University and the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California.

Economists assume that people make choices based on their preferences and their budget constraints. The preferences and values of others play no role in the standard economic model. This feature has been sharply criticized by other social scientists, who believe that the choices people make are also conditioned by social and cultural forces. Economists, meanwhile, are not satisfied with standard sociological and anthropological concepts and explanations because they are not embedded in a testable, analytic framework. In this book, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy provide such a framework by including the social environment along with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These extended utility functions provide a way of analyzing how changes in the social environment affect people’s choices and behaviors. More important, they also provide a way of analyzing how the social environment itself is determined by the interactions of individuals. Using this approach, the authors are able to explain many puzzling phenomena, including patterns of drug use, how love affects marriage patterns, neighborhood segregation, the prices of fine art and other collectibles, the social side of trademarks, the rise and fall of fads and fashions, and the distribution of income and status.