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.

Table of Contents

Part I Introduction
Introduction, or Why This Handbook

Part II Uncertainty, Risk and Professional Economic Ethics
Skin-in-the-Game Heuristic for Protection Against Tail Events
Ethics of Economic Decision Rules
In Praise of Imperfect Commitment
“Econogenic Harm”

Part III The Ethical Nature of Economic Practice
About Doing the Right Thing as an Academic Economist
Social Responsibility of Economists
Ethical Economist

Part IV The Ethical Entailments of Economic Theory
1. General Issues
2. Economic Theory and the Great Recession

Part V Ethical Issues in Economic Research
1. Experimental Economics
2. Econometrics
3. Field Research
4. Conflict of Interest

Part VI Ethical Issues in Applied Economics
1. Development
2. Economic Advising in Government and Beyond
3. Forensic Economics

Part VII Ethical Issues in Economic Education
Exposure and Dialogue Programs in the Training of Development Analysts and Practitioners
Ethics and Learning in Undergraduate Economics Education

Part VIII Looking Ahead
Creating Humble Economists
Codes of Ethics for Economists, Pluralism, and the Nature of Economic Knowledge