The Curtailment of Critical Commentary in Australian Economics
Coelho, De Worken-Eley and McClure (2005) showed that, 1963 through 2004, critical commentary declined significantly in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Using the same method, we investigated the same question for all of the economic journals produced in Australia, and then published the results in Australian Economic Papers (Dollery, Byrnes and Akimova 2007). We found the same trend in Australia for the period 1962 to 2005. This suggests that the downward trend may apply across economics journals generally. This short note simply relates the basic finding of our Australian Economic Papers article.
Theory versus Application: Does Complexity Crowd Out Evidence?
Donald F. Gordon hypothesized that mathematical complexity in economics is inversely related to operationalism. Here we (i) operationalize Gordon's hypothesis, (ii) test for the significance of trends in complexity for the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and (iii) test Gordon's hypothesis by conducting analyses of the contents of articles from the American Economic Review (AER), as well as the contents of articles citing the AER articles. The results do not refute the hypothesis that complexity crowds out operationalism in economics. Additionally, the presence of significant, positive trends toward complexity suggests that the magnitude of the crowding out is on the rise in these journals.
Brauer groups of genus zero extensions of number fields
We determine the isomorphism class of the Brauer groups of certain nonrational genus zero extensions of number fields. In particular, for all genus zero extensions E of the rational numbers Q that are split by Q(√2), Br(E) ≅ Br(Q(t)).