bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Human Quality’ Preserved into Files
Authors: Bakken Børge
Published: October 2023

‘The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (“the files”)’, Max Weber once remarked.1 In China, the file or dang’an characterizes the whole of society, with the discipline of regulation channelled through it. The file is an institution in China, representing both the result and the continuation of the evaluation process.
Manifestations of Deviance and Modern Dangers
Authors: Bakken Børge
Published: October 2023

The character liu which I have used to illustrate this part of the discussion implies ‘drift’ or ‘flow’; ‘to move’, ‘to wander’. These connotations of movement can be interpreted both in the positive and in the negative (as ‘changing for the worse’ or ‘degenerating’). The character illustrates the movement of modernity, in which there is both hope and danger.
‘Never for the First Time’: ‘Premature Love’ and Social Control
Authors: Bakken Børge
Published: October 2023

In China, the initial transgression of social boundaries, ‘the first time’ (or in this connection ‘the first love’ (chulian) ), is seen as vastly important, the first link in the chain narrative of danger. ‘Sexual disorder’ has increasingly come to be seen as a social problem. One phenomenon that has led to a veritable obsession is that of ‘early love’ or ‘premature love’ (zaolian).
‘Ways of Lying’: Concluding Remarks on the Erosion of Control
Authors: Bakken Børge
Published: October 2023

We have seen an exemplary society of a segmentary character embedded in a bureaucratic face-to-face structure of control. The system is intended to give optimal visibility over the population, and the exemplary norm is further meant to form the foundation of a ‘building’ order of transformation and improvement of the populace.
Introduction
Authors: Granville Brigitte , Oppenheimer Peter
Published: October 2023

The present volume offers a multi-author survey and analysis of economic developments in the Russian Federation since the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union, in 1989-91. This introduction sets out the international and historical context and focuses on key aspects, including some involving insights from a number of chapters without being specifically emphasized in any of them.
The Political and Societal Environment of Economic Policy
Authors: Granville Christopher
Published: October 2023

The Russian Federation began its existence as a new fully sovereign state on 31 December 1991. By then it had obtained international recognition as the continuing state of the former Soviet Union; and it had a government in place poised to carry out radical measures designed to transform on market lines the country’s stricken centrally planned economy. These developments flowed directly from the failure of the coup attempt staged in Moscow in August 1991 by Party and KGB conservatives.
The Problem of Monetary Stabilization
Authors: Granville Brigitte
Published: October 2023

The Russian financial crisis of 1998 was a bitter setback to stabilization efforts after nearly three years of low inflation (crowned by a redenomination of the rouble on 1 January 1998 with the division of money values by 1,000). Events were precipitated by the international situation. The East Asian financial turmoil combined with the large drop in oil prices after early 1997 and high financial returns in the United States and Europe created an explosive mixture which Russia was ill-prepared to confront. There was also an element of self-fulfilling prophecy by external investors, doubtless including many Russians with funds channelled through foreign institutions. Yet the crisis would not have erupted without serious underlying weaknesses in the domestic financial situation.
The Banking Sector
Authors: Dmitriev Mikhail , Matovnikov Mikhail , Mikhailov Leonid , Sycheva, Ludmila , Timofeyev Eugene
Published: October 2023

At the end of the 1980s the Soviet Union had barely emerged from the monobank system of the Communist era, when effectively one single banking institution-Gosbank-handled the full range of banking ser vices required in the command-administrative system. In the subsequent decade the banking sector followed a turbulent and unpredictable path, remote from the broad infrastructural position characteristic of banking in stable market economies. In line with its Soviet ancestry, however, it continued to play an important part in relation to public-sector bud gets, both in channelling government expenditure and in assisting tax collection.
The Development of Small Enterprises
Authors: Aslund Anders
Published: October 2023

An outstanding peculiarity of the Soviet economy was the dearth of small enterprises. Therefore, the development of small private enterprises is a sine qua non for the post-Communist economy becoming a normal market economy. The issues arc both private ownership and size of enterprises. East-central Europe, notably the four Visegrad countries, saw a tremendous growth in small private enterprises with the transition to a market economy from 1990. In Russia, as in most of the former Soviet Union, however, the expansion of small enterprises has been subdued.
Housing and Utility Services
Authors: Starodubrovskaya Irina
Published: October 2023

From the beginning of reforms in post-Communist countries there has been continuous debate about the relative merits and demerits of two possible approaches to change: relatively slow and step-by-step; or radical and fast. The former has been termed ‘gradualist’. The second is increasingly referred to as ‘shock therapy’, a term traditionally applied only to anti-inflation programmes in the macroeconomic sphere.
Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Identity: Contemporary Dilemmas and Policy Agendas*
Authors: Solomos John , Schuster Liza K
Published: October 2023

European debates about immigration, race and ethnicity have become increasingly focused on questions about citizenship and multiculturalism. In many ways this is not surprising, given the reality that the patterns of migration and settlement that have shaped many countries in Western Europe since the Second World War have had an important impact on their social, political, and cultural institutions (Wrench and Solomos 1993; Soysal 1994; Freeman 1995; Castles and Davidson forthcoming).
Anti-racist Responses to European Integration
Authors: Lloyd Cathie
Published: October 2023

Since the early 1980s social and political movements have attempted to address an increasingly global agenda while also drawing their strength from local grassroots social protests. How effective can they be in the new circumstances? We have become accustomed to hearing from political analysts that the forces of what is widely known as globalization, coupled with social fragmentation, are reducing the capacity for democratic intervention in the issues which concern our lives.
On the Rate of Return of Unfunded Pension Systems
Authors: Bravo Jorge
Published: October 2023

It has been long recognized that demographic growth is a key factor in rates of return of such transfers as unfunded pension systems. In his seminal paper, Samuelson (1958) showed that in a stationary consumption-loan economy the implicit rate of return (p) of a ‘pay-as-you-go’ transfer system is equal to the population growth rate (n). A new research field, now well developed, sprang from Samuelson’s work and that of Diamond (1965) on the basis of overlapping generations models and the study of the associated intergenerational transfers. (See Chapter 2 by R. D. Lee in this volume for a broad, up-to-date assessment of the field.) It is now well known from that research that any upward transfer system, in which resources flow from the young to the older members of a population, benefits from greater demographic growth. In expanding economies, the rate of return of this kind of transfer system should increase in direct proportion to the rate of productivity growth; in fact, it is straightforward to show that, in the context of an equilibrium consumption-loan economy or transfer system, p is equal to n plus the annual earnings growth rate.
Demographic Uncertainty and the OASDI Trust Funds of the United States
Authors: Tuljapurkar Shripad , Lee Ronald D
Published: October 2023

Concern over the future of the US Social Security system is aptly summarized in the title of the book Can America Afford to Grow Old? by Aaron, Bosworth, and Burtless (1989). This question lies at the interface of economics, demography, and policy, and it has stimulated studies in each of those disciplines. Support of the elderly retired population depends ultimately on transfers from the population of working age, whether the transfers are organized through the public sector, the family, or the market. The relative numbers of workers and retired persons profoundly affect the terms on which these transfers take place. This is a main reason why the global phenomenon of current and prospective population ageing is so important.
Self-enforcing Family Constitutions: Implications for Saving, Fertility, and Social Security
Authors: Cigno Alessandro
Published: October 2023

The analysis of the economic implications of social security programmes and other forms of public intervention is based largely on the assumption that individuals interact through the market only. Much of the discussion about saving, growth, and generational accounting is based, for example, on some version of Modigliani’s life-cycle theory of saving, in which each person is assumed to be selfishly concerned about his or her own lifetime consumption stream only. It has long been realized, however, that various important aspects of reality cannot be explained by that theory.
Wealth Accumulation, Fertility, and Transfers to Elderly Household Heads in Peru
Authors: Bhaumik Sumon Kumar , Nugent Jeffrey B
Published: October 2023

Much of the rapidly growing literature on interhousehold transfers has focused upon the basic motivation for such transfers, be it altruism, exchange, or some other motive (Barro 1974; Becker 1974; Kotlikoff and Spivak 1981; Bernheim, Shleifer, and Summers 1985; Cox 1987; Cox and Rank 1992; Cox and Jimenez 1992, 1993; Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994). For this reason, much of it has concentrated upon bequests and inter-vivas transfers from older to younger persons and family members. Initially at least, those transfers seemed hard to explain without recourse to altruism. The literature has given considerably less attention to transfers from young to old that are of importance to the quality of life in old age, especially in rural areas of developing countries, where reliable alternatives to children as sources of old-age security are often lacking. It is in such circumstances that old-age security is often said to be one of the major reasons or even the major reason for having children, and indeed for having many children (Leibenstein 1957, 1975; Cain 1981, 1985, 1986; Nugent 1985).
Housing Inheritance: An Empirical Analysis of French Data
Authors: Laferrère Anne
Published: October 2023

Home ownership is at the heart of most households’ wealth. According to the Enquete Actifs financiers, a recent survey of financial assets among French households, 60 per cent of French households own at least one dwelling. Between 1970 and 1992 the proportion of French households owning a primary home rose from 45 to 54 per cent. Nearly 10 per cent of French households own a second (vacation) home, and 13 per cent own dwellings for rental and investment purposes. Because transaction taxes are high, homes do not change hands often and the housing market tends to be sluggish. Moreover, home owners cannot draw upon housing equity before death-for instance, through a market of reverse annuity mortgages-as easily as they can draw upon other, more liquid assets (Bernheim 1991), and it seems that a majority of elderly people would not want to move from their homes (Venti and Wise 1990). As a result, much of the housing market is fuelled instead by divorce and inheritance, according to the real estate profession. Housing accounts, on average, for 42 per cent of estates’ value (Laferrere and Monteil 1994).
The Unavoidable Importance of Nuclear Weapons
Authors: Quester George H
Published: October 2023

Can nuclear weapons be eliminated, or will nations still find them desirable and important? Can we eliminate such weapons by refusing to assign any importance to them? It may be that Americans, and the citizens of most other democracies, will now indeed wish that nuclear weapons had never been invented. But, for all the years of the cold war, citizens of the NATO countries obviously had more mixed feelings on this question. Nuclear weapons could produce a Third World War that would mean the end of life as we know it. But the threat of such a thermonuclear holocaust might also be harnessed as the ‘great equalizer’, when the Soviet Union had the geopolitical advantages of being based at the centre of Eurasia, able to strike in so many different directions, when the Soviet Union had acquired so many conventional forces to exploit this geopolitical position, possessing more than 80,000 tanks at the end of the cold war. The United States, in its policies of extended nuclear deterrence and ‘flexible response’, was thus over some four decades attempting to harness the threat of nuclear escalation (an escalation that would be a disaster for all concerned if it ever had to be executed) as the means to deterring Moscow from exploiting its military advantage in conventional weapons.
Nuclear Weapons, Prudence, and Morality: The Search for a ‘Third Way’
Authors: Baylis John
Published: October 2023

One of the most interesting and encouraging things about the post-cold-war era is the way the rigid debate about nuclear weapons which characterized the cold-war period has given way to a more tolerant and less ideological discussion. There are still those who adopt ‘traditionalist’ and ‘abolitionist’ positions, as a number of the chapters in this book demonstrate, but there is also a wide ranging discussion about what might be described as a ‘third way’.
Nuclear Weapons and the Post-Cold-War Middle East: Business as Usual
Authors: Karsh Efraim
Published: October 2023

The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in the spring of 1998 dealt yet another blow to the expectations that the end of the cold war would usher in an era of international peace and stability in general, and real progress towards non-conventional arms control and disarmament in particular. Such expectations were particularly high with regard to the Middle East, where local conflicts had often been viewed as corollaries of superpower rivalry, destined to wither away in its absence. It was also reasoned that if during the cold war local players could exploit the global polarization to their advantage, the dis solution of the Soviet empire would leave them at the mercy of the ‘only remaining superpower’, the United States, which would be readily able to impose a Pax Americana, with its attendant arms control regimes, on the Middle East.
Introduction
Authors: Bengtsson Tommy , Saito Osamu
Published: October 2023

When, immediately following the Second World War, the United Nations commissioned a study of living conditions in every country in the world, it was not population growth that was of interest, but rather hunger and poverty. The reason for this focus was the UN’s interest in the current decolonization and the development process in poor countries throughout the world. At that time there was no great concern about population growth, despite the efforts of a few demographers to introduce the topic. The general understanding then was that the world’s population was growing at a rate of approximately 1 per cent per year. The discussions of the time were far more concerned with how to supply developing countries with capital and know-how, and on human development and governance (Ohlin 1992). The study showed that many of the countries with the lowest standards of living also had the highest rates of population growth—nearly 3 per cent per year.
Determinants of Mortality Variability in Historical Populations and its Behavioural and Aggregate Consequences
Authors: Antonio Jose , Osona Ortega
Published: October 2023

Hunger, and the suffering associated with it, are certainly present in large parts of the contemporary world, and occasional famines occur which call worldwide attention to unacceptable situations of poverty and deprivation (see Dreze and Sen 1989, 1990). On the whole, however, the intensity and frequency of mortality crises connected with hunger have largely diminished in most regions of the world compared with the historical experience. We do not need to go farther back than two or three hundred years to find large and frequent famines causing widespread mortality in western Europe.1 In other parts of the world, such as South Asia, very intense and recurrent famines were still present in some regions during the first half of this century (McAlpin 1983; Dreze 1990).
Determinants of Livelihood Diversification
Authors: Ellis Frank
Published: October 2023

The purpose of this part of the book is to explore different dimensions of the livelihoods approach to rural poverty reduction, and of diversification as a key theme within the livelihoods framework. This chapter takes a disaggregated view of the reasons individuals and households pursue diversification as a livelihood strategy. Subsequent chapters examine poverty, agriculture, environment and gender aspects of the livelihood approach, in each case relating the diversification theme to the current body of livelihood-oriented knowledge in the area concerned. In some instances, it is found convenient to rehearse fairly standard concepts and debates in these areas, in order to place the livelihoods approach in an established context.
Agriculture and Farm Productivity
Authors: Ellis Frank
Published: October 2023

It was observed earlier that by far the most dominant approach to rural development of the last three decades of the twentieth century was what has been referred to as the ‘agriculture first’ strategy (e.g. Saith, 1992). This consisted of a variety of supports, some direct and some indirect, to small, poor, farmers in order to achieve simultaneously both growth and poverty reduction objectives.
Introduction
Authors: Aoki Masahiko , Saxonhouse Gary R
Published: October 2023

When Hugh Patrick commenced graduate work at the University of Michigan in 1954, the academic study of and interest in the Japanese economy in the United States was almost non-existent. In the forty-five years since that time the scholarly terrain has changed almost beyond recognion. A significant group of American-based academic specialists on the Japanese economy has emerged. With improvements in transportation and communications technology, and in funding, there has been increasingly intense, complex, and beneficial interaction between these American specialists and their Japan-based counterparts. In most important respects, both groups are now part of the same transnational community. In recent years this community has been augmented by a significant number of outstanding American and European economists, who are not specialists on the Japanese economy but who have been drawn into doing important and illuminating comparative research.
Explaining the Low Litigation Rate in Japan
Authors: Hamada Koichi
Published: October 2023

In any country, the economic, social, and legal systems can be regarded as the product of adaptation of human behaviour to the outside environment. In order to cope with the forces of nature, human beings are compelled to cooperate and to organize their production and consumption activities. The process of adaptation is generally guided by some kind of rationality. Even ‘culture’ is often the product of human adaptation to nature.Tetsuro Watsuji, in his classic Fudo (A Climate) (1935), classified the patterns of human interactions with nature into three categories: Monsoon, Desert, and Meadow. Asians in the monsoon adapt rather passively, with possible abrupt eruptions of emotions, to humidity and typhoons; the Middle Eastern people struggle with nature to survive in harsh dryness; and Europeans, situated in a relatively lenient climate, can afford to try to control nature in som’ewhat rational ways. If you live in a densely populated village, as in Japan, and can hardly defect from it, cooperation is necesitated by economic rationality.
Strategies for Overcoming Japan’s Economic Crisis
Authors: Suzuki Yoshio
Published: October 2023

It is my great pleasure to participate in this effort to honour my friend Hugh Patrick. Foreign scholars who understand Japan’s economic experience are a very scarce resource, and Hugh’s contributions are admired throughout the world. Indeed, Hugh was among the first to appreciate that the macroeconomic policies being pursued by the Hashimoto Government in 1996 and 1997 would very likely lead to an economic crisis. It is this crisis that I now want to address.The economic crisis that Japan remains caught up in has been caused by the failure of not only short-term but also medium-term and long-term policies. First, as for the short term, the original budget plan of 1997 had a deflationary impact of ¥12 trillion. ¥9 trillion was from an increase in the tax burden on households (¥5 trillion from the 2 per cent increase in consumption tax, ¥2 trillion from the stoppage of a special income tax reduction, and ¥2 trillion from the increase in the individual’s share in the health insurance premium), while ¥3 trillion was from the decrease in public investment. Because of this, an economic slowdown began in April 1997.
The Sources of Industrial Leadership
Authors: Nelson Richard R
Published: October 2023

The heart of this essay is a report on a large research project, just recently completed, which studied how seven major high-tech industries evolved in the USA, Japan, and Western Europe: machine tools, organic chemical products, pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostic equipment, computers, semiconductors, and software.1 The history of each of these industries is intimately intertwined with technological advance. In several cases, the birth of the industry was associated with the opening of a major new technology. Technological advance has been rapid in all of them, and competition has involved innovation in a central way.
Empowering Women through the Policy Process: The Making of Health Policy in South Africa
Authors: Klugmana Barbara
Published: October 2023

Since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) there has been increased interest in the nature and role of both advocacy for policy and programme change and women’s participation and empowerment in the population field. This resulted from issues of both process and content. In relation to the advocacy process, the major impact of the human rights and women’s health lobbies at ICPD itself provided a powerful example of how effective a well-strategized advocacy programme can be. Their work played a key role in shifting the discourse and final content of the ICPD Programme of Action.
International Trade in Hazardous Waste
Authors: Rauscher Michael
Published: October 2023

In an internal memo, which was later published by the Economist magazine (Economist 1992), the chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, posed the question whether it would be advisable to dump toxic waste in countries with low wages and low population densities. Low population den sity implies that the number of people affected by environmental risks is small. Low incomes result in a low willingness to pay for environmental quality or - to put it the other way around - high degree of tolerance to environmental hazard. Moreover, low wages are said to indicate a low economic value of human life and health and, therefore, relatively small costs of health-impairing pollution. This memo evocated a public outcry because of its immoral or cynical line of arguing. Nonetheless, the memo was an attempt to address an important issue: the measurement of environmental damages, which are often considered to be unmeasurable. The drastic example of low wages being an indicator of low impacts of environmental disruption was a way to make the implicit value judgments contained in the neoclassical view on comparative advantage more explicit.
Summary and Discussion
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: October 2023

Following the introduction of the euro, the European Union (EU) has started to debate the desirability and feasibility of more co-ordination in the field of capital income taxation. In contrast with product taxes, the EU Treaty does not provide for explicit authority to harmonize income taxes. So far, little co-ordination has taken place, even though the capital income tax base is much more mobile and hence more difficult to tax than is, for instance, consumption (and labour). There is much discussion on a minimum withholding tax on interest and on a code of conduct for business income taxes, but in practice little real progress is being made in aligning the various capital income taxes. More fundamentally, a broad, tax-policy type of discussion on whether, where, and how capital income should be taxed is lacking. The papers in this volume try to fill this void. Roger Gordon addresses the question of whether or not capital income should be taxed. Subsequently, Peggy Musgrave and Richard Bird/Scott Wilkie try to come to grips with the question of where capital income should be taxed—in the member state of source or the member state of residence. Michael Devereux and Harry Huizinga/Søren Bo Nielsen then analyse various issues that arise in taxing equity income and imposing a withholding tax on interest. Next, Stephen Bond and Sijbren Cnossen discuss specific comprehensive proposals for taxing capital income in open economies. Finally, Scott Newlon and Charles McLure/ Joann Weiner look at the difficulties of and alternatives to maintaining separate corporate income taxes in the EU. This introductory chapter summarizes the various papers and briefly discusses the basic issues and solutions.
Interjurisdictional Equity in Company Taxation: Principles and Applications to the European Union
Authors: Musgrave Peggy B
Published: October 2023

The issue of internation or interjurisdictional equity (hereinafter referred to as IJE) in the context of company taxation (CT) arises when a company carries out its profit-generating activities across two or more jurisdictions. The question then arises as to how the entitlement to tax those profits is to be assigned between the jurisdictions and, further, what tax share of the assigned base each jurisdiction should claim. The answer to these questions involves the principle of UE, or fair tax shares in the profits of multijurisdictional companies. This is a matter of particular importance and complexity as groups of economies become more closely integrated, or as devolution occurs in once unitary countries. In these circumstances, a process of fiscal co-ordination has to take place founded on the following principal objectives: (1) tax neutrality with respect to investment among the member jurisdictions; (2) the attainment of IJE; (3) administrative feasibility and integrity; and, depending on the degree of cohesion among member states, (4) consideration for the principle of subsidiarity. The same issues arise, but with different priorities and degrees of difficulty, in shaping tax agreements between independent nation states.
Developing the provisions of the Vienna Document
Authors: Lachowski Zdzislaw
Published: October 2023

The efforts made by the CSCE/OSCE states since the watershed of 1989-90 have been twofold: to build on past experience; and to look for new measures, solutions, procedures and mechanisms to better cope with the qualitatively new risks and challenges. This chapter documents the general evolution of the individual sections of the Vienna documents on confidence- and security-building measures in the post-cold war period, assesses what they have achieved in practice, and illustrates the response of the C:SHM regime to the new tendencies and developments. Both the work of the FSC and the AlAMs have enabled thorough discussion of all aspects of implementation and have provided numerous proposals and suggestions for improvement of the C:SHMs and the effectiveness of the Vienna Document.
Open Skies
Authors: Lachowski Zdzislaw
Published: October 2023

The open skies proposal was first advanced by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955 and relaunched in an expanded version by President George Bush in 1989 with the aim of allowing flights by unarmed reconnaissance aircraft over the territories of the Soviet Union, the USA and their allies.399 Although not the breakthrough it might have been at the apogee of the cold war period, the proposal offered several considerable military and political security benefits, such as enhancing verification of arms control agreements; increasing openness and transparency, including through access by many countries to the information provided by open skies overflights; risk reduction; and a conflict prevention and crisis-management potential.400
Introduction to volume 1
Authors: Burnside Craig , Eichenbaum Martin , Fisher Jonas D M
Published: October 2023

Macroeconomics poses important, and difficult methodological questions, some of which do not arise in microeconomics. These are important for practising macro economists because there is widespread disagreement in macroeconomics, both over policy and over how data should be analysed. It may be the case that there is more of a consensus over macroeconomic theory than in the days when the ‘monetarist Keynesian’ controversy was at its height, with widespread agreement that theories should be based on individual optimization and rational expectations, but differences remain.
Models and relations in economics and econometrics
Authors: Juselius Kat Arin A
Published: October 2023

Empirical macroeconomic models based on a probability approach (Haavelmo 1943) explicitly start from a stochastic formulation of the chosen data. Because most macroeconomic data exhibit strong time dependence, it is natural to formulate the empirical model in terms of time-dependent stochastic processes. Within this family the vector autoregressive (VAR) process based on Gaussian errors has proved to be a popular choice. There are many reasons for this: the VAR model is flexible, easy to estimate, and it usually gives a good fit to macroeconomic data.
Models all the way down: comments on Smith and Juselius
Authors: Hoover Kevin D
Published: October 2023

Before the Bergamo Conference, I had never met Katarina Juselius or Ron Smith. So, when I was reading their papers for this volume, I amused myself trying to guess from the tone and style of their papers something about their ages, temperaments, and life experiences. For though their papers are in many ways similar and derive from what I imagine to be a common intellectual background, their tone and ambitions are different. I found much to admire in both papers and, indeed, much to agree with.
Introduction to volume 2
Authors: Backhouse Roger E , salanti Andrea
Published: October 2023

Macroeconomics poses important and difficult methodological questions, some of which do not arise in microeconomics. These are important for practising macroeconomists because there is widespread disagreement in macroeconomics, both over policy and over how data should be analysed. It may be the case that there is more of a consensus over macroeconomic theory than in the days when the ‘monetarist-Keynesian’ controversy was at its height, with widespread agreement that theories should be based on individual optimization and rational expectations, but differences remain. On top of this are differences over the type of evidence that should be used and how it should be used. What, for example, should be the relationship between the assumption of individual rationality, microeconomic evidence, historical studies, and statistics? Even if we confine our attention to statistical evidence, there remain acute divisions over how such evidence should be used.
Whither IS-LM
Authors: Sims Christopher A
Published: October 2023

Keynes considered expectations a central factor in macroeconomic dynamics. Much of his discussion of them treats them as volatile but exogenous (‘animal spirits’), but in places he elaborates on the importance of particular types of endogenous expectations. Since the equations he wrote down did not include an explicit role for expectations, the IS-LM codification of Keynesian orthodoxy could plausibly ignore them, and did so. This not only distorted Keynes’s thinking, it ironically weakened Keynesian orthodoxy in the face of the rational expectations critique. The standard Keynesian position came to be that expectations, or at least endogenous expectations, were not as important as the RE critics made them out to be. This was a substantively weak position in itself, and it had the further weakening effect of keeping Keynesian attention away from developing a strong response to Keynes’s new classical critics.
Wage dynamics and the Phillips curve
Authors: Ferri Piero
Published: October 2023

When dealing with the theory of wage dynamics, one must state at the beginning whether nominal or real magnitudes are at the centre of the analysis. Even though in the current literature the emphasis is almost exclusively put on real variables, nominal wages are the object of the present analysis. Of course, one cannot neglect the interrelationships between the two concepts but we think that in a monetary economy an inquiry on nominal wages is worth pursuing.
What can recent labour research teach us about macroeconomics?
Authors: Oswald Andrew j. , Trostel philip A
Published: October 2023

Perhaps more than any other sub-discipline, research in labour economics is empirical. The content of the most recent issue of the Journal of Labor Economics (JOLE) is indicative.1 This issue has eight papers. Only one of these contains no empirical evidence. The other seven articles are primarily empirical: they employ data and report various kinds of regression equations. All seven use micro-data, that is, information on individual units like randomly sampled workers. Only one uses nonUS data. Before presenting their empirical work, most of the papers construct a theoretical model that would be too technical to be understood by most graduating economics majors. This issue of JOLE is representative of modern labour economics. It is dominated by empirical reasoning and US-based evidence, but is not devoid of theory.
Equity finance, internal funds, and involuntary unemployment
Authors: Blaug Mark
Published: October 2023

There is one and only one thing wrong with the paper by Delli Gatti and Tamborini: there is too much in it, being in fact two or even three papers in one. It has a grand theme, namely that asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers in loan markets and between issuing companies and shareholders in equity markets gives rise to both equilibrium credit-rationing and equilibrium equity-rationing; in short, capital markets are inherently imperfect. Following Bernard Greenwald and Joseph Stiglitz, who invented this type of New Keynesian Economics (NKE) in the 1970s, Delli Gatti and Tamborini systematically explore the macroeconomic impact of these capitalmarket imperfections on aggregate income determination, on the possibilities of demand management, on economic growth, and finally on the business cycle.
Official documents: general discussion
Authors: Hausman Daniel M
Published: October 2023

Andrew Oswald: Have economists’ ideas been very expensive, for good or ill, in the European Commission? Have new theories of unemployment, for example, led to large quantities of taxpayers’ money being spent, whether for benefit or cost? Adrian Pagan: I have a quotation relating to central banks that Mayer might like to use. One of our ex-research directors once said, regarding changes in opinion within the bank, that the bank was often wrong but never in doubt.
Ibsen and the Ascription of Blame in Law
Authors: Stanton-Ife John
Published: October 2023

In the name of the criminal law people are fined and imprisoned; in the name of tort law people are held liable to pay damages in compensation. The consequences to those punished or held liable in these ways can be serious and even devastating. Thus, it has always been thought that these legal practices must meet certain ethical conditions if they are to be considered legitimate: it cannot but be a matter of serious moral concern that they cause distress which is sometimes extreme. From the fact that justification is required in these contexts, however, it does not follow that it is clear what shape the justification should take. Since these practices are practices of blaming people, the most obvious suggestion is that people should be the subject of blame only over things that are in their power. Blame should not be ascribed where the putative defendant was powerless, where for example she was unlucky. So there seems to be an important principle at work: ‘Ascribe blame only for what is in an agent’s power, not for matters that are subject to luck.’ Slightly more specifically one might say, ‘blame someone only for what they have tried to do’ not for what they succeeded or failed to do with the intervention of luck.
‘How Can Ye Criticise What’S Plain Law, Man?’: The Lawyer, The Novelist, and the Discourse of Authority
Authors: Smith Marie Hockenhull
Published: October 2023

Scott’s novel of 1818, The Heart of Midlothian centres on historical events in 1736 and draws in the development of Scottish society within the whole of the long eighteenth century. How Scott’s nineteenth-century representations of eighteenth-century law relate to what cultural and legal historians would expect to find is a rich subject in itself. What I wish to examine here is what those representations communicate about the perennial matter of the relation between legal agents and the structure of authority: how far they are incorporated, how much power the agents embody, and how much they evade. This, which involves the matter of personal ethical responsibility, is continually problematized by the novel in a way which connects with the concerns of jurisprudence in postmodernity.
The ‘Final Struggle’: A Discoursal, Rhetorical, and Social Analysis of Two Closing Arguments
Authors: Goodwin Jill Tomasson
Published: October 2023

In her book, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Barbara Herrnstein Smith distinguishes between things that stop or cease—like a ringing telephone or the blowing of the wind—and other things, like music or poetry, that seem to conclude or end. She defines closure, then, in these terms: We tend to speak of conclusions when a sequence of events has a relatively high degree of structure, when, in other words, we can perceive these events as related to one another by some principle of organization or design that implies the existence of a definite termination point. Under these circumstances, the occurrence of their terminal event is a confirmation of the sequence, and is usually distinctly gratifying. The sense of stable conclusiveness, finality, or ‘clinch’ which we experience at that point is what is referred to here as closure.
Defamation and Fiction
Authors: Barendt Eric
Published: October 2023

The application of defamation (or libel) law to fiction is one aspect of the law of literature. Recently, a prominent English writer on law and literature has implied it is a minor issue, hardly worthy of attention even in a book as comprehensive in its treatment of the field as Richard Posner’s Law and Literature. Certainly, it seems of little interest to most members of the law and literature movement, concerned as they are with larger ques¬ tions of the interpretation of legal and literary texts and of the treatment in literature of legal issues. Libel lawyers too pay little attention to the topic. Admittedly, there were a number of US law review articles in the 1980s, but there have been few of note in the last ten years. Nor have I found any academic study of this topic in English legal literature.
Capturing Childhood: The Indian Child in the European Imagination
Authors: McGillivray Anne
Published: October 2023

The child of Rousseau’s noble savage was also his untutored Emile. Residential schooling, a tutorial regime for Indian childhood, was installed by Canada in the late nineteenth century. The schools were to eradicate Indian culture by pressing the child into Christian citizenship, in the larger moral commodification of childhood in which children were culturally severable and transformable. Assimilation did not succeed. Many children were abused sexually and physically. Canada apologized in 1997 and by 1998, 1,200 former pupils had filed lawsuits.
Legalizing Violence: Fanon, Romance, Colonial Law
Authors: Boire Gary
Published: October 2023

In his ‘Critique of Violence,’ written in the early 1920s, Walter Benjamin remarks that ‘all violence as a means is either lawmaking or lawpreserving’ (my emphasis)1 He cautions, however, that this ‘lawpreserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it, through the suppression of hostile counter-violence’. In more ways than one Benjamin’s concept of a paradoxical violence—law-making, law-preserving, yet law-destroying—inflects Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical deconstructions of imperial power and, by extension, that power’s embodiment within colonial law.
Law as Performance
Authors: Balkin J M , Levinson Sanford
Published: October 2023

The analogy between law and the literary text has been central to the law-as-literature movement since its inception. Both of us have contributed to the development of this analogy, and both of us have learned much from it. Yet every analogy has its limitations, and we think it is time to move on. We believe that the comparison between law and the literary text interpreted by an individual reader is inadequate in important respects. A much better analogy, we think, is to the performing arts-music and drama-and to the collectivities and institutions that are charged with the responsibilities and duties of public performance. In other words, we think it is time to replace the study of law as literature with the more general study of law as a performing art.
European union exchange rate policy?
Authors: Hugo J Hahn
Published: October 2023

In mid-January 1999, shortly after the birth of European monetary union and the 10.01 simultaneous introduction of the single European currency, a Hamburg weekly newspaper and a Paris daily published a statement by the French Finance Minister and his then counterpart in the German Finance Ministry in the form of a ‘memorandum’ arguing inter alia against ‘excessive appreciation of the Euro’ and, with reference to Article 111(2) of the EC Treaty (ex Article 109(2)), in favour of the formulation of ‘general guidelines for exchange rates’ (in the German version), whereas the same passage in the French version followed the text of the Treaty and referred to ‘general orientations for exchange rate policy’.
Central Bank Reform: The Reserve Bank Of New Zealand
Authors: Flint David E
Published: October 2023

In 1989, the New Zealand Parliament enacted legislation to reform its central 14.01 bank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989 (the ‘Act’). This was part of a programme of wider economic reform involving deregulation, privatization and other economic changes.
Foreign Currency Obligations In Domestic Law
Authors: Dolinger”“ Jacob
Published: October 2023

Brazil has had a series of statutes on obligations in foreign currency, starting with 22.01 the Decree of 1933,1 which declared null and void any stipulation of payment in gold or any particular currency or by any means tending towards a refusal or restriction of the compulsory legal tender of the paper mil reis.
The Nobel Prize and Sweden
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

A Swedish professor, who is deeply interested in Nobel affairs but annoyed by the criticism about some omissions among the Nobel laureates, exclaimed recently: ‘The Academy could get rid of all criticism by forgetting about the prizes. But then little Sweden in a dark corner of Northern Europe would lose the unique contact with the world events in science.’1For us outsiders it is hard to imagine how emotional the cold Swedes may become about the Nobel Prize. It is a national affair in Sweden. Come October even the cab drivers seem to participate in the guessing game. Of course, the Nobel Prize is the only science award, worldwide, that is appreciated by the general public, not just the scientists.
What turned you to science?
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

A wide variety of factors have drawn future Nobel laureates to science. My observations come mostly from my conversations with Nobel prize winners of the last decades of the twentieth century, and some readings. The most frequent sources of inspiration were a book, a chemistry set1(and not only for future chemists) or other experimentation at home, and a teacher, especially a high school teacher. The home environment, family members, or a family friend are also important sources of inspiration. In many cases the various sources blended. Many future laureates took up science when they were in their early teenage years, while others first completed medical school, during or after which they were exposed to scientific research and changed from medicine to research. Music and some humanities were great competitors and what tipped the balance in most cases were a taste for research and a good mentor.
Venue
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

A decisive influence for a research career is for it to be launched in a strong environment. The adviser counts the most, but the whole atmosphere is important, the other professors and fellow students, the technological level of the institution, the visitors, and so on. The research seminar is probably the single most critical ingredient in shaping the young researcher’s career. It broadens his horizon, introduces him to new fields and outside scientists, with different styles and approaches, and teaches him how to conduct scientific discussions. The beginner sees how questions are asked and answered, witnesses the debates, and gradually becomes part of the process. A diverse selection of examples, of both great venues and lesser known ones, will come up in our discussion, often as seen through the eyes of the Nobel laureates, looking back.
Mentor
Authors: Hargittai István
Published: October 2023

One of the most common features about the research careers of Nobel laureates is that many have worked at some point under a former or future Nobel laureate or with someone closely associated with a laureate. Hans Krebs (M53) constructed a genealogy of Nobel laureate biochemists and all, without exception, came from laboratories of Nobel laureates or future Nobel laureates. When John Walker (C97) finished chemistry studies, he became a PhD student of Edward Abraham in Oxford. Abraham had been part of the penicillin team during the Second World War, and a PhD student of Robert Robinson (C47), before he went to work with Boris Chain (M45). When Walker visited the Justus von Liebig Museum in Giessen, Germany, he realized that through Abraham and Robinson he descended from the great German chemists in a scientific genealogy. Walker appreciates how Abraham guided him in reading appropriate literature, like the paper by Jacob (M65) and Monod (M65). Such guidance was crucial as there were no formal requirements or mandatory course work; it was only the opportunity that was provided. Edward M. Purcell (P52) is another good example of a Nobel lineage member. John Van Vleck (P77), who was one of his teachers in graduate school, had been involved in developing microwave radar during the Second World War, heading a group of researchers in which he succeeded Norman Ramsey (P89). The division head to whom Purcell reported was I. I. Rabi (P44). Later, at Harvard, Nicolaas Bloembergen (P81) was one of Purcell’s graduate students.