The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics

For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation-a tradition of sustained and lively inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice and the content of professional economic ethics. It explores current thinking that has emerged in these areas while widening substantially the terrain of economic ethics. There has never been a volume that poses so directly and intensively the question of the need for and content of professional ethics for economics. The Handbook incorporates the work of leading scholars and practitioners, including academic economists from various theoretical traditions; applied economists, beyond academia, whose work has direct and immense social impact; and philosophers, professional ethicists, and others whose work has addressed the nature of "professionalism " and its implications for ethical practice. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/oso/public/content/oho_economics/9780199766635/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Harold Alderman Peter J. Boettke Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth Jingnan Chen Angelina Christie David Colander Herman Daly Jishnu Das John B. Davis Erwin Dekker George F. DeMartino Sheila C. Dow William Easterly David Ellerman Gerald Epstein Robert H. Frank Alan Freeman Robert F. Garnett, Jr. Des Gasper Rachel Glennerster Sven Ove Hansson Daniel Houser Ravi Kanbur Arjo Klamer David M. Levy Thomas Mayer Deirdre N. McCloskey Julie A. Nelson Robert H. Nelson Kyle W. O'Donnell Susan Offutt Sandra J. Peart Shawn Powers Vijayendra Rao Martin Ravallion Constantine Sandis Tomas Sedla?ek Joseph E. Stiglitz Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edward R. Teather-Posadas Dennis F. Thompson Robert J. Thornton Irene van Staveren Robert H. Wade John O. Ward Sharon D. Welch Jonathan B. Wight Bart J. Wilson Stephen T. Ziliak