piketty and the growth dilemma revisited in the context of ecological economics 2017 elsevier b v piketty s capital has provoked considerable debate regarding inequality the existence of increasing inequality creates a challenge for ecological economics in this paper we set out some of the problems inherent in piketty s approach and how they are addressed from the point of view of ecological economics we use jackson and victor s response as a point of departure to make several points piketty s work involves an unreconciled inconsistency between his laws and the institutional context which becomes problematic when one starts to think about inevitability he simply assumes away ecological problems to make future forecasts for inequality as such his forecasts are undermined since ecological issues are fundamental to any viable future economy furthermore piketty effectively reproduces rather than contests the mainstream practice of delegating ecological issues to a sub discipline jackson and victor meanwhile focus on the mainstream economic aspect of piketty s work and construct a model to contest a model in so doing they provide an ideational response to what is also a problem of ideological frameworks though it can be important to contest an idea they inadvertently through family resemblance contribute to the reproduction of the problematic position of ecological concerns within dominant ways of conceiving economics

on sraffa s standard commodity is its price invariant with respect to changes in income distribution in his 1960 book sraffa suggested using a composite commodity which he called the standard commodity to solve ricardo s search for an invariable measure of value i e a standard capable of isolating the price movements of any other commodity induced by changes in income distribution the absence in sraffa s book of an explicit proof of the invariance property of this standard gave rise to many misunderstandings about its meaning and its role as an invariable measure of value in order to clear up these questions bellino on sraffa s standard commodity cambridge journal of economics vol 28 121 32 2004 has proposed a proper definition of an invariable measure of value showing that sraffa s standard commodity does fulfil the requirements of this definition he claims that the fulfilment of this property but not the constancy of its nominal price qualifies the standard commodity as an invariable measure of value in this paper a proof of the invariance of the price of the standard commodity with respect to changes in income distribution is given and the equivalence of this property with bellino s definition of invariance is shown

uncertainty risk and the financial crisis of 2008 the distinction between uncertainty and risk originally drawn by frank knight and john maynard keynes in the 1920s remains fundamentally important today in the presence of uncertainty market actors and economic policy makers substitute other methods of decision making for rational calculation specifically actors decisions are rooted in social conventions drawing from innovations in financial markets and deliberations among top american monetary authorities in the years before the 2008 crisis we show how economic actors and policy makers live in worlds of risk and uncertainty in that world social conventions deserve much greater attention than conventional ipe analyses accords them such conventions must be part of our toolkit as we seek to understand the preferences and strategies of economic and political actors

collective bargaining firm size and pensions in canada abstract the following paper analyzes the provision of job related pensions in canada the empirical results indicate that both unions and firm size have significant effects on the distribution of pensions the significance of unions on the provision of pensions does decline as firm size increases

the limits of central bank policy economic crisis and the challenge of effective solutions the paper examines the development of central bank policy prior to and during the recent financial crisis the argument is made that it contained multiple failures that not only generated constraints on adequately identifying and addressing the crisis but also contributed to that crisis those failures derived from a combination of theory and institutional practice specifically the use of forms of inflationary targeting based on broad adherence to the taylor rule framework and the use of versions of a conventional theoretical macro model ctmm were both problematic this was particularly so in the way policy was focused through issues of the primacy of price stability the institutional arrangements of the central banks were also problematic the division of labour between the central banks and other regulatory bodies and the limited information available within a liberalised finance system hampered efforts to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation partly due to the constraints imposed by the thinking and strategies that had been developed the central banks never got to grips with the fundamental problems of the crisis interest rate policy and liquidity provision were undertaken in ways that steadily radicalised the approaches of the banks but always in a way that was event led and always in ways that could not resolve those fundamental problems the nature of the crisis highlights the importance of transforming the approach and institutional framework of the central banks relatedly it highlights the need for a more keynesian and heterodox approach to economics within decision making bodies at central banks

forward looking contrast explanation illustrated using the great moderation in reorienting economics lawson introduces the concept of contrast explanation initially defined using the question form why x rather than y where it is a surprising or unexpected outcome that motivates the search for an explanation of the contrast in the following paper i elaborate upon the initial question form asking why the perpetuation of y rather than an alternative possible x this question focuses on relative stability but can be a sceptical or contrarian form from a realist perspective any stability expressed in events as regularity is highly conditional as such underlying the question form is an invitation to explore the instability or vulnerability of order with a view to the ways that order might break down this motivates a forward looking focus of investigation that is particularly appropriate for looking at systemic issues in economics i use the global financial crisis to illustrate the potential here copyright oxford university press

contrast explanation in economics its context meaning and potential in this article we place tony lawson s account of contrast explanation in context lawson s development of it is given meaning both by the roots of the approach in his work on social ontology and the state of economics that provides the grounds for the critique contained in that social ontology this is important because such an approach to explanation is not new most notably van fraassen and garfinkel have developed it in particular ways and for particular purposes within the philosophy of science and social theory setting out the different ways in which the contrastive approach has been developed is useful for identifying what is different about lawson s approach its potential and limits lawson s proposal is more modest and focusses on causal investigation in a manner that flows from his approach to social ontology contrast explanation provides a substitute for controlled experiments and facilitates identifying social mechanisms it also enables exploration of the manifold presuppositions of our explanatory questions we argue that this is a useful and important contribution to overcoming some of the many problems economics faces

deliberative monetary valuation in search of a democratic and value plural approach to environmental policy the use of deliberative methods to assess environmental values in monetary terms has been motivated by the potential for small group discussion to help with preference formation and the inclusion of non economic values in this review two broad approaches are identified preference economisation and preference moralisation the former is analytical concentrates upon issues of poor respondent cognition and produces a narrow conception of value linked to utilitarianism the latter emphasises political legitimacy appeals to community values and tends to privilege arguments made in the public interest both approaches are shown to embrace forms of value convergence which undermine the prospects for value pluralism as a result exclusion and predefinition of values dominates current practice in order to maintain democratic credentials the importance attributed to monetary value needs to be left as an open question to be addressed as part of a process determining an agreement to pay to this end we identify a discourse based approach as a third way consistent with the democratic and value plural potential of deliberative monetary valuation

out of the corridor keynes and the crisis we should learn from keynes to focus on the macroproblems of our day today s problem is the financial crisis and the resulting great recession neither the standard keynesian policies of decades past nor the monetary policy doctrine of recent years provides useful solutions dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory is part of the crisis wreckage but turning to old or to new keynesian theory will be of little use a balance sheet recession requires that policy address the problems in the private sector s capital as well as its income accounts we need serious theoretical work on problems of system stability using for example agent based methods monetary theory needs to develop analysis of processes in which intertemporal budget constraints are violated network theory will be useful in that quest

recovering probability distributions from option prices this article derives underlying asset risk neutral probability distributions of european options on the s p 500 index nonparametric methods are used to choose probabilities that minimize an objective function subject to requiring that the probabilities are consistent with observed option and underlying asset prices alternative optimization specifications produce approximately the same implied distributions a new and fast optimization technique for estimating probability distributions based on maximizing the smoothness of the resulting distribution is proposed since the crash the risk neutral probability of a three four standard deviation decline in the index about 36 percent 46 percent over a year is about 10 100 times more likely than under the assumption of lognormality recently the increasing popularity of derivatives and some highly publicized failures to control risk have led to increased efforts to find reasonable methods to measure the sensitivity of large institutional derivatives portfolios to extreme events merely because such events are rare is not sufficient to ignore them since on the few occasions when they do occur significant amounts of money can change hands potentially wiping out profits accumulated over long prior periods a key assumption behind methods of estimation is the joint probability distribution of constituent underlying asset returns this has long been a concern of financial economists since probability assumptions are critical to much of their research during the last quarter century heretofore probability distributions of stock market returns have typically been estimated from historical time series unfortunately common hypotheses may not capture the probability of extreme events and the events of interest are rare or may not be present in the historical record even though they are clearly possible

macroeconomics after the crisis time to deal with the pretense of knowledge syndrome the recent financial crisis has damaged the reputation of macroeconomics largely for its inability to predict the impending financial and economic crisis to be honest this inability to predict does not concern me much it is almost tautological that severe crises are essentially unpredictable for otherwise they would not cause such a high degree of distress what does concern me about my discipline is that its current core by which i mainly mean the so called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one this is dangerous for both methodological and policy reasons to be fair to our field an enormous amount of work at the intersection of macroeconomics and corporate finance has been chasing many of the issues that played a central role during the current crisis including liquidity evaporation collateral shortages bubbles crises panics fire sales risk shifting contagion and the like however much of this literature belongs to the periphery of macroeconomics rather than to its core i will discuss the distinction between the core and the periphery of macroeconomics as well as the futile nature of the integrationist movement that is the process of gradually bringing the insights of the periphery into the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium structure i argue that the complexity of macroeconomic interactions limits the knowledge we can ever attain and that we need to place this fact at the center of our analysis we should consider what this complexity does to the actions and reactions of the economic agent and seek analytical tools and macroeconomic policies that are robust to the enormous uncertainty to which we are confined

the uk research assessment exercise and the narrowing of uk economics the aim of this paper is to delineate an empirically grounded structure causal going concern recursive model of uk economics that in the context of the rae and local department decision making explains the progressive elimination of heterodox economics the progressive homogenization of mainstream economics from 1992 to the present and the continued rise to dominance of a select group of departments and indicates whether these regularities will continue under the research excellence framework selectivity exercise in 2014

pre industrial inequality is inequality largely the result of the industrial revolution or were preindustrial incomes as unequal as they are today for want of sufficient data these questions have not yet been answered this paper infers inequality for 30 pre industrial societies using what are known as social tables stretching from the roman empire 14 ad to byzantium in 1000 to england in 1688 to nueva espana around 1790 to china in 1880 and to british india in 1947 it applies two new concepts in making those assessments what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio rather than simply offering measures of inequality we compare its observed level with the maximum feasible inequality or surplus that could have been extracted by the elite the results especially when compared with modern poor countries give new insights into the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run

what is this school called neoclassical economics what is this school called neoclassical economics does it exist should it where does the term neoclassical economics come from and is there any connection between any of the current interpretations of the term and its original meaning how do we make sense of competing current interpretations is there a sustainable formulation these and related questions are raised and answered in an attempt to bring clarity to ongoing economic discussion and debate thereby to under labour for a more relevant academic economics discipline

the research assessment exercise the state and the dominance of mainstream economics in british universities in previous research on the impact of the research assessment exercise on heterodox economics and heterodox economists in the uk the author concluded that reliance on diamond list journals to rank departments would drive economic departments to discriminate positively in terms of their hiring promotion and research strategies in favour of mainstream economists and their research in order to maintain or improve their ranking as a consequence the author predicted there would be no or only a token presence of heterodox economists in an increasing number of departments whether the conclusions still hold and the predictions materialise is the subject of the paper copyright 2007 oxford university press

statistical arbitrage and securities prices this article introduces the concept of a statistical arbitrage opportunity sao in a finite horizon economy a sao is a zero cost trading strategy for which i the expected payoff is positive and ii the conditional expected payoff in each final state of the economy is nonnegative unlike a pure arbitrage opportunity a sao can have negative payoffs provided that the average payoff in each final state is nonnegative if the pricing kernel in the economy is path independent then no saos can exist furthermore ruling out saos imposes a novel martingale type restriction on the dynamics of securities prices the important properties of the restriction are that it 1 is model free in the sense that it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model 2 can be tested in samples affected by selection biases such as the peso problem and 3 continues to hold when investors beliefs are mistaken the article argues that one can use the new restriction to empirically resolve the joint hypothesis problem present in the traditional tests of the efficient market hypothesis in a fairly general environment this article proposes a novel martingaletype restriction on the dynamics of securities prices this restriction has a number of important properties most notably the restriction may be viewed as model free because it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model to derive the restriction we rely on the concept of statistical arbitrage a generalization of pure arbitrage a pure arbitrage opportunity pao is a zero cost trading strategy that offers the possibility of a gain with no possibility of a loss as is well known the existence of paos is incompatible with a competitive equilibrium in asset markets the fundamental theorem of the financial theory establishes a link between the absence of paos and the existence of a positive pricing kernel which supports securities prices while the absence of paos is a necessary condition for any equilibrium model this condition alone often yields pricing implications that are too weak to be practically useful for example when valuing options in incomplete markets the no arbitrage bounds on option prices are typically very wide to strengthen pricing implications several recent articles

tantalus on the road to asymptopia my first reaction to the credibility revolution in empirical economics authored by joshua d angrist and jorn steffen pischke was wow this paper makes a stunningly good case for relying on purposefully randomized or accidentally randomized experiments to relieve the doubts that afflict inferences from nonexperimental data on further reflection i realized that i may have been overcome with irrational exuberance moreover with this great honor bestowed on my con article i couldn t easily throw this child of mine overboard as angrist and pischke persuasively argue either purposefully randomized experiments or accidentally randomized natural experiments can be extremely helpful but angrist and pischke seem to me to overstate the potential benefits of the approach i begin with some thoughts about the inevitable limits of randomization and the need for sensitivity analysis in this area as in all areas of applied empirical work i argue that the recent financial catastrophe is a powerful illustration of the fact that extrapolating from natural experiments will inevitably be hazardous i discuss how the difficulties of applied econometric work cannot be evaded with econometric innovations offering as examples some under recognized difficulties with instrumental variables and robust standard errors i conclude with comments about the shortcomings of an experimentalist paradigm as applied to macroeconomics and some warnings about the willingness of applied economists to apply push button methodologies without sufficient hard thought regarding their applicability and shortcomings

an updated ranking of academic journals in economics we conduct an update of the ranking of economic journals by kalaitzidakis mamuneas and stengos 2003 however our present study differs methodologically from that earlier study in an important dimension we use a rolling window of years between 2003 and 2008 for each year counting the number of citations of articles published in the previous ten years this allows us to obtain a smoother longer view of the evolution of rankings in the period under consideration and avoid the inherent randomness that may exist at any particular year using this framework we proceed to examine the relative ranking of the canadian journal of economics over time we find the canadian journal managed not only to maintain its relative position but to also improve it over time

what s in a name tony lawson on neoclassical economics and heterodox economics in this article i respond to tony lawson s what is this school called neoclassical economics lawson s paper is provocative because it reformulates neoclassical economics based on veblen s original intent as a mismatch created by recognising the value of an evolutionary approach to the economy whilst remaining over reliant on elements of a taxonomic approach for lawson many heterodox economists may be neoclassical under this description i argue that there is clearly a case to be heard but that the reformulation of the neoclassical raises a number of issues there are issues concerning the specific critique of the current usage of the term neoclassical regarding genealogy and meaning there are specific issues regarding the further development of the new old veblen definition of the neoclassical how clear is the definition in a practical context as a way to identify a neoclassical group based on the commitments of the critique and the definition what does it mean to be more realistic and what is the strategic value of such a provocation for heterodoxy i argue that the combination of these are reasons for more consideration of issues of social ontology not less insofar as the terms of the argument are incomplete and this invites both lawson and those he is criticising to progress the argument particularly on method

american and european economics and economists america and europe differ with regard to what economics is understood to be how it is practiced and how professional academic economists behave specifically 1 american u s and canadian economists contribute by far the largest share of journal publications and are cited much more often than european economists while west european economists consider other aspects of their professional activities more relevant in particular participating in local and national affairs 2 economic research by americans tends to focus on abstract issues defined within the profession itself and involves fads while the activities of european economists though not necessarily their research are more concerned with practical issues and follow a more steady course and 3 american academics are geared to postgraduate teaching while in europe they are mostly engaged in undergraduate teaching these differences can be explained by the different market conditions faced by american and european economists in america the academic market is much larger and the degree of government intervention is typically much smaller this paper explores how this leads to different focuses for european and american economists in addition it asks whether the ongoing economic unification in europe may not alter these patterns

a note on mr meade s relation and international capital movements recognition that a change in investment expenditure always leads to an equal increase in voluntary saving has been highlighted by several commentators as one of the key innovations in keynes s general theory see especially hicks 1936 239 robinson 1937 ch 2 meade 1975 82 patinkin 1976 65 1993 647 and skidelsky 1992 554 following a reference in kami s 1931 189 seminal presentation of the multiplier this identity relationship between investment and voluntary saving has been called mr meade s relation and in a brief note meade 1993 has described how he first discovered and presented it to the cambridge circus in the first half of 1931 1 first meade set out the causal relationships among increases in investment income and saving in the form of arrowed lines within a sequential diagram this method of process or period analysis often using robertson s 1936 1940 equivalent tabular presentation remains an important part of post keynesian textbooks see harcourt et al 1967 ch 10 chick 1983 ch 14 and davidson 1994 ch 3 but has virtually disappeared from modern day research as far as we are aware chick 1985 cottrell 1986 earl 1990 and dalziel 1996a b are the only recent authors to advocate its wide use

not your grandfather s imf global crisis productive incoherence and developmental policy space the response by the international monetary fund imf and developing country national governments to the current global financial crisis represents a moment of what i term productive incoherence which has displaced the constraining neoliberal coherence of the past several decades productive incoherence refers to the proliferation of inconsistent and even contradictory strategies and statements by the imf that to date have not congealed into any sort of new organised regime those who see continuity at the imf emphasise the reassertion of the imf s authority the reiteration of pro cyclical policy adjustment and the maintenance of existing governance patterns within the institution in contrast evidence of discontinuity includes a world now populated by increasingly autonomous states in the south the normalisation of capital controls and fund conditionality programmes that are inconsistent in key respects in the face of this evidence it is best to understand the current conjuncture as an interregnum that is pregnant with new development possibilities

logit estimates of strike incidence from canadian contract data logit estimates of strike incidence are made based on a unique and comprehensive data set of 2 437 collective agreements the appropriate level of aggregation since that is where bargaining occurs the results are interpreted through a theoretical framework emphasizing that strikes are more likely when the joint costs of using the strike mechanism are low relative to the cost of alternative mechanisms for achieving the same purposes such functions of strikes are to generate information elicit truth telling establish reputations provide catharsis and solve intraorganizational conflict

targeting bias and expected impact of complex innovations on developing country agriculture evidence from malawi agronomic analyses of new technologies are often conducted under carefully controlled research station programs or trials managed by self selected farmers oftentimes the technologies are then scaled up with minimal evaluation under real world conditions yet the interim step between agronomic trials and large scale promotion is crucial to generate evidence on the social and economic impact of technologies that is both internally valid and generalizable the article focuses on a participatory action research program in malawi designed to test and identify scalable technology options to intensify the smallholder sector and contribute to poverty reduction and food and nutrition security we examine the socioeconomic characteristics of farmers testing technologies and find evidence of systematic targeting of better endowed farmers after controlling for observable differences using matching and a doubly robust estimator we find evidence of early positive effects on maize yield and harvest value although placebo tests suggest possible selection on unobservables we note that attention should be given to program design and household characterization to better define and improve targeting criteria technology selection and external validity

the credibility revolution in empirical economics how better research design is taking the con out of econometrics since edward leamer s memorable 1983 paper let s take the con out of econometrics empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution while leamer s suggested remedy sensitivity analysis has played a role in this we argue that the primary engine driving improvement has been a focus on the quality of empirical research designs the advantages of a good research design are perhaps most easily apparent in research using random assignment we begin with an overview of leamer s 1983 critique and his proposed remedies we then turn to the key factors we see contributing to improved empirical work including the availability of more and better data along with advances in theoretical econometric understanding but especially the fact that research design has moved front and center in much of empirical micro we offer a brief digression into macroeconomics and industrial organization where progress by our lights is less dramatic although there is work in both fields that we find encouraging finally we discuss the view that the design pendulum has swung too far critics of design driven studies argue that in pursuit of clean and credible research designs researchers seek good answers instead of good questions we briefly respond to this concern which worries us little

high noon for microfinance impact evaluations re investigating the evidence from bangladesh recently microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified it such as pitt and khandker chemin applied propensity score matching to the pitt and khandker data finding different impacts but does not disaggregate by gender of borrower we first replicate chemin and extend his analysis in two ways we test the robustness of propensity score matching results to selection on unobservables using sensitivity analysis and we investigate propensity score matching estimates of impacts by gender of borrowers the mainly insignificant impacts of microfinance differ greatly by gender of borrower but are all vulnerable to selection on unobservables we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal with these data

discussion of ceo compensation and corporate risk taking evidence from a natural experiment abstract gormley matsa and milbourn in this issue examine the design and causal effects of ceos equity portfolio incentives on firm risk in a novel research setting in which certain firms experience a large exogenous shock that increases their left tail risk and reduces their investment opportunities gormley et al find that boards and ceos both make adjustments to ceos equity portfolios following the shock they also find that ceos with more convex equity portfolios i e vega prior to the shock reduce risk less following the shock despite certain measurement and identification concerns gormley et al is an innovative attempt to address an important and challenging research question partial identification and sensitivity analysis an important class of techniques that are well suited for providing causal inferences about gormley et al s and other important research questions that are impeded by endogeneity concerns

applied economics contrast explanation and asymmetric information the purpose of this paper is to illustrate the workings of an explanatory method for applied economics it is a method that is rarely explicitly examined or defended in the discipline but which i believe has a lot of promise for the sorts of contexts that economists must address my strategy is to show that and how the method in question effectively underpins at least one study already widely regarded as explanatorily successful copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

top indian incomes 1922 2000 this article presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922 2000 in india using individual tax return data the data show that the shares of the top 0 01 percent 0 1 percent and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the early to mid 1980s but then rose again so that today these shares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920s and 1930s this u shaped pattern is broadly consistent with the evolution of economic policy in india from the 1950s to the early to mid 1980s was a period of socialist policies in india whereas the subsequent period starting with the rise of rajiv gandhi saw a gradual shift toward more pro business policies although the initial share of the top income group was small the fact that the rich were getting richer had a nontrivial impact on the overall income distribution although the impact is not large enough to fully explain the gap observed during the 1990s between average consumption growths shown in national sample survey based data and the national accounts based data it is sufficiently large to explain a non negligible part of it

history institutions and economic performance the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in india we analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the british in india and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators these areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education these differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices

a model and empirical estimates of worker pension coverage in the u s an important issue in labor market policy today is private pension coverage it is well known that pension benefits have grown rapidly in the post world war ii years for example pension and other benefit payments as a percentage of total employee compensation rose from 7 4 in 1953 to 13 0 by 1973 11 27 yet pension participation is far from universal the most recent estimate is that 48 of all wage and salary workers currently are covered partly in response to this the president s commission on pension policy has recommended in its final report federal legislation to establish a national minimum funded pension system which would be required of all employers 8 7 this paper attempts to explain the variation in pension coverage two opposing views of pensions having very different implications for pension policy can be identified the first is implicitly adopted by the president s commission in this view pensions are exogenous to the competitive forces of the labor market distributed on a random basis as a bonus pensions do not substitute for other forms of compensation and therefore everyone would prefer to be covered a very different theory is that pensions result from competitive forces implicit in the labor market is a market for pensions in which the supply is the outcome of firms attempting to minimize costs while demand results from workers maximizing utility by choosing the optimal package of wage and nonwage compensation an outcome of this implicit market is a trade off between pension benefits and other forms of compensation if pensions are purchased in this manner systematic differences in pension coverage should emerge some workers will prefer wages and

of mice and men automated valuation models and the valuation profession the rise in the use of automated valuation models avms poses questions about the long term survival of the property valuation profession avms provide quick and cheaper valuations which in this v

the local electoral impacts of conditional cash transfers evidence from a field experiment abstract i assess the impacts of targeted government transfers on a local incumbent s electoral performance i use the randomized roll out of a cct program in the philippines although the program was usually implemented in all villages in a municipality a subset of beneficiary municipalities were randomly selected to receive the program in a randomly selected subset of villages a number of municipalities are tightly controlled by political dynasties and thus i can test whether the effects are dependent upon the political environment in a competitive political environment incumbent vote share is 26 percentage points higher in municipalities where the program was implemented in all villages than in municipalities where the program was implemented in half of them the program had no impact in municipalities with low levels of political competition further there is evidence consistent with the argument that incumbents compensated households in control villages by redistributing their own budget there

income concentration in british india 1885 1946 we use a novel income tax data set to present evidence on the evolution of income concentration in the last 60 years of colonial rule in india these data allow us to study the evolution of income concentration at the country level as well as the location of top income earners across provinces we identify three key facts 1 the evolution of income concentration in british india was nonlinear following a u shape 2 the majority of top income earners were non europeans and 3 the geographical location of top income earners changed over time with the province of bombay gaining in importance in the early xxth century we provide an interpretation of these results in the light of the economic and political changes in british india over the period

factor endowments inequality and paths of development among new world economies whereas traditional explanations of differences in long run paths of development across the americas generally point to the significance of differences in national heritage or religion we highlight the relevance of stark contrasts in the degree of inequality in wealth human capital and political power in accounting for how fundamental economic institutions evolved over time we argue moreover that the roots of these disparities in the extent of inequality lay in differences in the initial factor endowments dating back to the era of european colonization we document through comparative studies of suffrage public land and schooling policies systematic patterns by which societies in the americas that began with more extreme inequality or heterogeneity in the population were more likely to develop institutional structures that greatly advantaged members of elite classes and disadvantaging the bulk of the population by providing them with more political influence and access to economic opportunities the clear implication is that institutions should not be presumed to be exogenous economists need to learn more about where they come from to understand their relation to economic development our findings not only contribute to our knowledge of why extreme differences in the extent of inequality across new world economies have persisted for centuries but also to the study of processes of long run economic growth past and present

nuclear energy policy in the united states 1990 2010 a federal or state responsibility this paper examines from a policy perspective nuclear energy policy in the united states us from 1990 to 2010 and questions whether it is or has become a federal or state responsibility the present study as befits policy research engages with many disciplines for example in particular law and politics and hence the contributions move beyond that of nuclear energy policy literature and in particular to that on nuclear new build and other assessments of large infrastructure projects several examples at the federal level are identified that demonstrate that the nuclear industry has evolved to a stage where it requires a focus on the power of actions at a more localised state level in order to re ignite the industry the research concludes that there remains a misunderstanding of the issue of project management for complex construction projects and it is highly arguable whether many of its issues have been resolved further the research asserts that the economics of nuclear energy are not the most influential reason for no nuclear new build in the us

the great crash of 2008 and the reform of economics the 2008 economic crash led to remarkable shifts of opinion among world leaders does this crisis create favourable conditions for the reform and revitalisation of economics itself from a subject dominated by mathematical techniques to a discipline more oriented to understanding real world institutions and actors and why were warnings of financial collapse not heeded recent shortcomings are partly related to the global triumph of market individualist ideology and partly to the exaggerated roles of modelling and quantification these failures of economics are partly peculiar to the discipline and also a result of other wider institutional and cultural forces

why don t the bailouts work design of a new financial system versus a return to normalcy the innovative support measures introduced by the us central bank and treasury in response to the current crisis to bolster bank balance sheets have had little success in restoring liquidity to financial markets these policies mirror similar policies employed in the 1930s in the usa and the 1990s in japan in both cases with little impact this paper identifies three policies impacting incomes rather than prices the assessment of system failure and proposals for system design that were employed in dealing with prior financial crises that they have not been introduced in response to the present crisis may explain why current measures have not yet had their intended impact of restoring bank lending to the productive economy

how credible is trade union research forty years of evidence on the monopoly voice trade off this article is the second in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ilr review the series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes this journal has featured over many years of publication in this article the authors assess the credibility of research that has tested the theoretical contests between the monopoly and the collective voice model of unions developed by freeman and medoff in what do unions do the authors go beyond prior analyses by examining more than 2 000 estimates that consider the effects of unions on a broad range of organizational and individual outcomes including productivity productivity growth capital investment profits and job satisfaction they advance our understanding of the current empirical findings and credibility of this research by using meta statistical analysis to evaluate research quality publication selection bias statistical power and heterogeneity the authors conclude that compared to other ar

the evolution of income concentration in japan 1886 2005 evidence from income tax statistics abstract this paper studies the evolution of income concentration in japan from 1886 to 2005 by constructing long run series of top income shares and top wage income shares using income tax statistics we find that i income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre wwii period during which the nation underwent rapid industrialization ii a drastic de concentration of income at the top took place in 1938 1945 iii income concentration remained low during the rest of the century but shows some sign of increase in the last decade and iv top income composition in japan has shifted dramatically from capital income to employment income over the course of the twentieth century we attribute the precipitous fall in income concentration during wwii primarily to the collapse of capital income due to wartime regulations and inflation we argue that the change in the institutional structure under the occupational reforms made the one time income de concentration difficult to reverse in contrast t

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth a critique of reinhart and rogoff we replicate reinhart and rogoff 2010a and 2010b and find that selective exclusion of available data coding errors and inappropriate weighting of summary statistics lead to serious miscalculations that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and gdp growth among 20 advanced economies over 1946 2009 countries with public debt gdp ratios above 90 averaged 2 2 real annual gdp growth not 0 1 as published the published results for i median gdp growth rates for the 1946 2009 period and ii mean and median gdp growth figures over 1790 2009 are all distorted by similar methodological errors although the magnitudes of the distortions are somewhat smaller than with the mean figures for 1946 2009 contrary to reinhart and rogoff s broader contentions both mean and median gdp growth when public debt levels exceed 90 of gdp are not dramatically different from when the public debt gdp ratios are lower the relationship between public debt and gdp growth varies significantly by period and country our overall evidence refutes rr s claim that public debt gdp ratios above 90 consistently reduce a country s gdp growth

a bibliometric account of the evolution of ee in the last two decades is ecological economics becoming a post normal science abstract in ecological economics the debate on formalism and formalization has been addressed in the context of a lively discussion on ecological economics as a post normal versus normal science using ecological economics ee as a seed journal and applying bibliometric techniques to all 2533 the articles published in ee from january 1989 to december 2009 we analyze the evolution of the field of ecological economics aiming to shed light on this debate we observe the predominance and increased relevance of certain research topics methodological issues policies governance and institutions and valuation moreover collective action technical change and the environment and values stand as emergent themes of research finally we note that ecological economics experienced an empirical turn reflected in a shift away from exclusively formalized papers towards exclusively empirical and to a larger extent formal and empirical ones the combination of the prominent and emergent topics and the empirical turn mirrors the increasing awareness among researchers in the field of the need to address a key specificity of ecological economics the interdependence of the economic biophysical and social spheres on this basis we argue that at least through the lens of ee ecological economics has evolved towards a post normal science

electric vehicles the future we made and the problem of unmaking it the uptake of battery electric vehicles bevs subject to bottlenecks seems to have reached a tipping point in the uk and this mirrors a general trend globally bevs are being positioned as one significant strand in the web of policy intended to translate the good intentions of article 2 of the conference of the parties 21 paris agreement into reality governments and municipalities are anticipating that a widespread shift to bevs will significantly reduce transport related carbon emissions and therefore augment their nationally determined contributions to emissions reduction within the paris agreement however matters are more complicated than they may appear there is a difference between thinking we can just keep relying on human ingenuity to solve problems after they emerge and engaging in fundamental social redesign to prevent the trajectories of harm bevs illustrate this the contribution to emissions reduction per vehicle unit may be less than the public initially perceive since the important issue here is the lifecycle of the bev and this is in no sense zero emission furthermore even though one can make the case that bevs are a superior alternative to the fossil fuel powered internal combustion engine the transition to bevs may actually facilitate exceeding the carbon budget on which the paris agreement ultimately rests whether in fact it does depends on the nature of the policy that shapes the transition if the transition is a form of substitution that conforms to rather than shifts against current global scales and trends in private transportation then it is highly likely that bevs will be a successful failure for this not to be the case then the transition to bevs must be coordinated with a transformation of the current scales and trends in private transportation that is a significant reduction in dependence on and individual ownership of powered vehicles a radical reimagining of the nature of private conveyance and of public transportation

the contemporary relevance of a cambridge tradition economics as political economy political economy as social theory and ethical theory in this review essay i set out key aspects of nuno martins the cambridge revival of political economy in so doing i also provide some comments on the current state of economics since these provide some context for an appreciation of what martins is trying to achieve martins is focused on making the positive case for classical political economy cpe as a form of theory that is quite different from the modern mainstream for martins that difference is based on its approach to the distribution of a surplus expressed through a social ontology that is based on historical open systems and in which the key aspect of open systems is the institutional and hence deliberative activity by which the surplus is decided which is ultimately an issue for ethics it is through a cambridge tradition focusing on sraffa keynes lawson and sen that cpe a classical social theory and ethical deliberation are brought together bringing them together is an act of synthesis and i conclude by providing a constructive critique of the terms of this synthesis

the application of contrast explanation to energy policy research uk nuclear energy policy 2002 2012 abstract this paper advances the application of the methodology contrast explanation to energy policy research research in energy policy is complex and often involves inter disciplinary work which traditional economic methodologies fail to capture consequently the more encompassing methodology of contrast explanation is assessed and its use in other social science disciplines explored in brief it is then applied to an energy policy research topic in this case nuclear energy policy research in the uk contrast explanation facilitates research into policy and decision making processes in energy studies and offers an alternative to the traditional economic methods used in energy research further contrast explanation is extended by the addition of contested and uncontested hypotheses analyses this research focuses on the methods employed to deliver the new nuclear programme of the uk government in order to achieve a sustainable nuclear energy policy three issues are of major importance 1 law policy and development 2 public administration and 3 project management further the research identifies that policy in the area remains to be resolved in particular at an institutional and legal level however contrary to the literature in some areas the research identifies a change of course as the uk concentrates on delivering a long term policy for the nuclear energy sector and the overall energy sector

better late than nothing some comments on deaton 2009 and heckman and urzua 2009 two recent papers deaton 2009 and heckman and urzua 2009 argue against what they see as an excessive and inappropriate use of experimental and quasi experimental methods in empirical work in economics in the last decade they specifically question the increased use of instrumental variables and natural experiments in labor economics and of randomized experiments in development economics in these comments i will make the case that this move towards shoring up the internal validity of estimates and towards clarifying the description of the population these estimates are relevant for has been important and beneficial in increasing the credibility of empirical work in economics i also address some other concerns raised by the deaton and heckman urzua papers

the neo ricardians focuses on the neoclassical theory of economics in great britain calculation for the standard commodity assumptions of piedro sraffa on the cycle of production functions of the rate of return ebsco

a history of post keynesian economics john king in his a history of post keynesian economics since 1936 raises the question of whether there exists a body of work which can be called collectively post keynesian this paper presents some criteria for addressing this question beginning with the vision and the origins of some of the post keynesian ideas leading to an examination of certain features of the various groups including their methodology and their approaches to uncertainty their pricing theories and their growth theories it is concluded that although there is much diversity in the various groups they are reconcilable when seen as referring to different aspects of the economic process and at differing levels of abstraction copyright 2005 oxford university press

a model intervenes the many faces of moral hazard this article builds on advances in social ontology to develop a new understanding of how mainstream economic modelling affects reality we propose a new framework for analysing and describing how models intervene in the social sphere this framework allows us to identify and articulate three key epistemic features of models as interventions specificity portability and formal precision the second part of the article uses our framework to demonstrate how specificity portability and formal precision explain the use of moral hazard models in a variety of different policy contexts including worker compensation schemes bank regulation and the euro sovereign debt crisis

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

on sraffa s standard commodity the necessity of expressing the relative price of a commodity in terms of another commodity makes it impossible to distinguish that part of any change that can be ascribed to the characteristics of the commodity itself from the part of that change that is to be ascribed to the characteristics of the commodity of reference i e the numeraire ricardo 1817 was the first to point out this problem and the need to find an invariable measure of value but he was not able to solve the problem in 1960 sraffa suggested using a bundle of commodities that he called standard commodity to accomplish this function claiming that it was a standard of value invariant with respect to changes in the distribution of income but in sraffa s book there is no explicit proof of this claim this gave rise to many misunderstandings about the standard commodity and its role as invariable measure of value this paper proposes a proper definition of an invariable measure of value and then proves that the sraffa standard commodity does fulfil the requirements of this definition copyright 2004 oxford university press

the journals of economics we examine the principal journals of economics with particular attention to the communication between journals as reflected by the network of interjournal citations during 1987 90 and the changes over the past century in the characteristics of the authors and the techniques they have used the numerical results and those of the statistical modeling of these results reinforce the importance of economic theory as an exporter of intellectual influence to applied economics the study includes an examination of the degree of specialization among different subfields of economics a statistical model is presented for measuring the flow of intellectual influence as measured by citations in terms of simple univariate scores

cautionary notes on the use of field experiments to address policy issues field experiments are popular again in policy circles there are various types of field experi ments with complementary strengths and weaknesses for different policy questions there is also a lot of needless hype about what field experiments can do more balance in our use of field experiments is called for

the nature of heterodox economics heterodoxy serves as an umbrella term to cover the coming together of separate projects or traditions in answering the question what distinguishes heterodoxy from the orthodoxy the author argues that matters of ontology are central in answering the question how are the various traditions that make up the modern heterodoxy to be distinguished from each other the author defends criteria other than varying commitments to specific substantive theories policy measures or techniques or basic units of analysis

mainstream economic methodology what might reasonably be expected of a survey of mainstream economic methodology would be a statement as to the nature and role of methodology and a discussion of how it impinged on economic practice however the mainstream understanding of the nature and role of methodology has been in a state of transition further mainstream economics has evolved virtually independently of explicit methodological analysis nevertheless the outcome of current thinking among methodologists could well be the development of a closer bond between methodology and practice theorists too are contemplating potentially profound methodological changes this is therefore a particularly good time to take stock and identify the direction of change and its implications for the future of mainstream economics 1