nep-his 2013-05-11, 12 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
Business, Economic and Financial History

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-his

In this issue we have:

1. Why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive Schwarzkopf, Stefan
2. Fiscal Discriminations in Three Wars George J. Hall; Thomas J. Sargent
3. The international mercury cartel, 1928-1949 López-Morell, Miguel A.; Segreto, Luciano
4. Child Labour and Height in the early Spanish industrialization José M. Martínez-Carrión; Javier Puche-Gil; José Cañabate-Cabezuelos
5. Varieties of Home Ownership: Ireland’s transition from a socialised to a marketised policy regime Michelle Norris
6. Does cutting back the public sector improve efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries Sabrina Auci; Laura Castellucci; Manuela Coromaldi
7. Why Marx Still Matters Jon D. Wisman
8. Achieving development success: Strategies and lessons from the developing world Fosu, Augustin Kwasi
9. Marc Barbut au pays des médianes. Bernard Monjardet
10. Markets for Development Rights: Lessons Learned from Three Decades of a TDR Program Walls, Margaret
11. Houshold Aggregate Wealth In The Main OECD Countries From 1980 To 2011: What Do The Data Tell Us? Riccardo De Bonis; Daniele Fano; Teresa Sbano
12. If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why has Income Diverged? Diego A. Comin; Martí Mestieri Ferrer

Contents.

1. Why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive
   

   Date:	2013-01
   By:	Schwarzkopf, Stefan
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46650&r=his
   Archival records are a constitutive element of business historical research, and such research, in turn, is fundamental for a holistic understanding of the role of enterprise in modern capitalist societies. Despite an increasing debate within business history circles about the need to theorize the historian as author and creator of narratives, a fuller reflection on the uses and limitations of the archive in business historical research has not yet taken place. This article takes its lead from theories of organisational epistemology, and asks to what extent business historians are trapped by an outdated, realist methodology and epistemology which is in danger of ignoring the multiple roles that archives play in their knowledge production.
   Keywords:	Business History; Methodology; Epistemology; Archives; Organizational Epistemology; Sociology of Knowledge
   JEL:	B00

2. Fiscal Discriminations in Three Wars
   

   Date:	2013-05
   By:	George J. Hall Thomas J. Sargent
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19008&r=his
   In 1790, a U.S. paper dollar was widely held in disrepute (something shoddy was not ‘worth a Continental’). By 1879, a U.S. paper dollar had become ‘as good as gold.’ These outcomes emerged from how the U.S. federal government financed three wars: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. In the beginning, the U.S. government discriminated greatly in the returns it paid to different classes of creditors; but that pattern of discrimination diminished over time in ways that eventually rehabilitated the reputation of federal paper money as a store of value.
   JEL:	E4

3. The international mercury cartel, 1928-1949
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	López-Morell, Miguel A. Segreto, Luciano
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46772&r=his
   Mercury has been one of the most persistent cases in contemporary history of international market regulations and this in spite of its having been affected by important technological changes and the regular discovery of new deposits. This paper offers an approach to the least known period, although perhaps the one in which the greatest rises in process and production occurred as a consequence of market manipulation. The period coincides with a series of agreements between the Spanish and the Italian producers and the outcome was a worldwide cartel known as “Mercurio Europeo” which came into being in 1928. The aims of this work will, therefore, be first to describe the features of the various stages of development of the international mercury market during the first half of the twentieth century, with emphasis on the characteristics and conditioning factors in each period. Secondly, the objective is to analyze the various market agreements that came about, the effectiveness of the clauses therein, the construction of distribution networks and the influence that the increase in production had on other mines and on certain technological developments.
   Keywords:	Mercury, Cartels, International trade, history
   JEL:	D43

4. Child Labour and Height in the early Spanish industrialization
   

   Date:	2013-05
   By:	José M. Martínez-Carrión (Universidad de Murcia, Madrid, Spain) Javier Puche-Gil (Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain) José Cañabate-Cabezuelos (Universidad de Murcia, Madrid, Spain)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1306&r=his
   Child labour has been considered a health risk affecting physical growth. Together with income, diets, diseases and environmental hygiene, child labour is one of the determinants of height. This paper examines whether child labour affected the stature of young workers during the spread of industrialization. With military recruitment heights it is analyzed the impact that child labour might have on physical health and nutritional status. After reporting on what happened during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, France and other industrialized countries, it is highlighted the contribution made by Spanish hygienists, whose importance has increased since the 1880´s. The following sections provide results of height evolution at the beginning of Spanish industrialization in major industrial and mining districts. Our findings emphasize the stature deterioration resulting from child labour, and the remarkable role that anthropometric history plays within economic and social history, and labour history too.
   Keywords:	Child labour, height, health, nutrition, labour productivity
   JEL:	I18

5. Varieties of Home Ownership: Ireland’s transition from a socialised to a marketised policy regime
   

   Date:	2013-04-30
   By:	Michelle Norris (School of Applied Social Science University College Dublin)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucd:wpaper:201306&r=his
   This paper examines government subsidisation of home ownership in Ireland since the start of the 20th Century. It argues that during the first two thirds of this period, Ireland slowly assembled government home ownership supports of such scale – in terms of the generosity of subsidies, their universal availability and the variety of policy instruments employed in the promotion this tenure – that they equated to a socialised home ownership regime. This helped to raise home ownership to ‘super normal’ levels, initially in the countryside and then in urban areas, by enabling the vast majority of all income groups, even the poorest, to purchase a home. During the 1970s and particularly the 1980s this socialised home ownership system was marketised as universal government subsidies were initially targeted and then abolished, government’s role as a developer/enabler of home owner housing was ended and the mortgage lending system was privatised and then deregulated. The implications of this policy redirection were is guised for a period by low real house price inflation compared to wages. However when the economy started to recover during the late 1990s these implications became clear – the ‘super normal’ home ownership rates underpinned by the socialised regime declined and reverted to ‘normal’ market rates
   Keywords:	housing policy regimes, home ownership, Ireland
   JEL:	H2

6. Does cutting back the public sector improve efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries
   

   Date:	2013-04-30
   By:	Sabrina Auci (University of Palermo) Laura Castellucci (University of Rome "Tor Vergata") Manuela Coromaldi (University of Rome “Niccolò Cusano)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:274&r=his
   The successful development of the welfare state that transpired for three decades after WWII in the developed countries, came to a halt around the end of the 1980s. Since then, the number of articles and books dedicated to the crisis of the welfare state has increased. We can now assert that at the turn of the century, almost all industrialized countries had cut at least “some” entitlements in their welfare program along with other expenditure items, and the trend continued in the first decade of this century. To defend the cuts and possibly to justify continuing cuts, several economic reasons, both theoretical and empirical, have been highlighted. From mention of Baumol’s disease to the fiscal crisis, the support for making such decisions by governments gained momentum, with their political inspiration changing during the same period in favor of more conservative, right-wing positions. The low productivity of the public sector and the high level of tax burden were the substantial arguments used to support cuts. The aim of this paper is to provide an empirical investigation into the impact of retrenchment of the public sector on the performance of 15 European countries. In particular, we aim to empirically test the view that “big government” reduces a country’s efficiency. We have found that no such empirical support exists. We have also included analysis of the distribution of income through the Gini index and have found the standard trade-off relation between inequality and efficiency.
   Keywords:	Stochastic frontier production function, public sector productivity, welfare
   JEL:	H11

7. Why Marx Still Matters
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Jon D. Wisman
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2013-06&r=his
   This article explores why a deep understanding of Marx’s project is essential for developing an adequate science of society. The imperative to re-examine Marx’s project has been made evident not only by the incapacity of the fragmented contemporary social sciences to grasp the causes and necessary responses to capitalism’s current crises, but more urgently what is arguably humanity’s greatest challenge — avoiding ecological devastation and perhaps even ecocide. Due to space limitations, this article cannot address these pressing issues directly. Instead, it focuses on how Marx’s approach offers the most promising scope and method for addressing challenges such as these. Marx viewed humanity’s struggle to overcome nature’s scarcity as causally and dynamically related to social organization and social consciousness. Critical to this breadth, and what is yet more alien to the Anglo-American social science tradition, Marx unfolded a theory of our self-creation, the manner in which products of our manual and intellectual labor act back upon us to create us socially and intellectually. To the extent that we lose consciousness of this authorship, we are unfree. We are controlled by our own creations, frequently in harmful manners. Our full freedom, and therefore our capacity to come to terms with contemporary challenges requires a social science with the breadth of Marx’s that enables us to recover awareness of our authorship of our social creations and thereby be empowered to control them, as opposed to being their victims.
   Keywords:	freedom, dialectics, materialist history, methodology
   JEL:	B3

8. Achieving development success: Strategies and lessons from the developing world
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Fosu, Augustin Kwasi
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp2013-027&r=his
   This paper provides a synthesis of successful strategies and implied lessons for development success, employing at least six themes on in-depth case studies of a large number of developing countries around the world. The coverage includes East Asia and th
   Keywords:	development success, strategies and lessons, developing world

9. Marc Barbut au pays des médianes.
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Bernard Monjardet (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne et CAMS-EHESS)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:13039&r=his
   The notion of median originally appeared in Statistics was introduced more later in Algebra and Combinatorics. Marc Barbut was the first to develop the link between these two notions of median. I present his precursory works linking the metric medians and the algebraic medians of a distributive lattice and using these links within the framework of the "median procedure" in data analysis. I also give a short survey on the development of the – more general – theory of "median spaces" and I mention some problems about the median procedure.
   Keywords:	Distributive lattice, majority relation, median graph, median procedure, median semilattice, metric space.

10. Markets for Development Rights: Lessons Learned from Three Decades of a TDR Program
    

    Date:	2012-12-06
    By:	Walls, Margaret (Resources for the Future)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-12-49&r=his
    Transferable development rights (TDRs) are a market-based approach to land conservation. They allow the development rights from one property to be transferred to another, with the first “sending” property placed under a development restriction or conservation easement and the “receiving” property permitted more dense development than would otherwise be allowed by baseline zoning regulations. This paper summarizes the economics literature on TDRs and describes a long-running program in a county in Maryland, one of the few programs with an active TDR market. It updates previously published results from the program and describes some problems that have arisen in recent years as the program has matured. The paper offers some observations as to why these problems have occurred and suggestions for other communities considering TDR programs.
    Keywords:	TDRs, zoning, sprawl, farmland preservation, easements
    JEL:	Q24

11. Houshold Aggregate Wealth In The Main OECD Countries From 1980 To 2011: What Do The Data Tell Us?
    

    Date:	2013-05
    By:	Riccardo De Bonis (Banca d’Italia, Economics and International Relations Area) Daniele Fano (Universit… Tor Vergata di Roma) Teresa Sbano (Pioneer Investments)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anc:wmofir:82&r=his
    This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries, the tendency towards convergence, the economic interpretation of breaks in time series and the effects of the recent financial crisis. We also comment on the evolution of household debt and real assets. In discussing the empirical evidence, the paper summarises some of the recent literature on household wealth.
    Keywords:	financial systems, household wealth and debt
    JEL:	E0

12. If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why has Income Diverged?
    

    Date:	2013-05
    By:	Diego A. Comin Martí Mestieri Ferrer
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19010&r=his
    We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted. Using data from the last two centuries, we document two new facts: there has been convergence in adoption lags between rich and poor countries, while there has been divergence in penetration rates. Using a model of adoption and growth, we show that these changes in the pattern of technology diffusion account for 80% of the Great Income Divergence between rich and poor countries since 1820.
    JEL:	E23

nep-hpe 2013-05-11, 9 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
History and Philosophy of Economics

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-hpe

In this issue we have:

1. Why Marx Still Matters Jon D. Wisman
2. On pure strategy equilibria in large generalized games Riascos Villegas, Alvaro; Torres-Martínez, Juan Pablo
3. Equilibrium Theory under Ambiguity Wei He; Nicholas C. Yannelis
4. Quantile Kernel Regression for Identifying Excellent Economists Richard S.J. Tol
5. Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? Stevenson, Betsey; Wolfers, Justin
6. Why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive Schwarzkopf, Stefan
7. Marc Barbut au pays des médianes. Bernard Monjardet
8. Fairness norms can explain the emergence of specific cooperation norms in the Battle of the Prisoners Dilemma Fabian Winter
9. Delusions of Success: Comment on Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman Bent Flyvbjerg

Contents.

1. Why Marx Still Matters
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Jon D. Wisman
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amu:wpaper:2013-06&r=hpe
   This article explores why a deep understanding of Marx’s project is essential for developing an adequate science of society. The imperative to re-examine Marx’s project has been made evident not only by the incapacity of the fragmented contemporary social sciences to grasp the causes and necessary responses to capitalism’s current crises, but more urgently what is arguably humanity’s greatest challenge — avoiding ecological devastation and perhaps even ecocide. Due to space limitations, this article cannot address these pressing issues directly. Instead, it focuses on how Marx’s approach offers the most promising scope and method for addressing challenges such as these. Marx viewed humanity’s struggle to overcome nature’s scarcity as causally and dynamically related to social organization and social consciousness. Critical to this breadth, and what is yet more alien to the Anglo-American social science tradition, Marx unfolded a theory of our self-creation, the manner in which products of our manual and intellectual labor act back upon us to create us socially and intellectually. To the extent that we lose consciousness of this authorship, we are unfree. We are controlled by our own creations, frequently in harmful manners. Our full freedom, and therefore our capacity to come to terms with contemporary challenges requires a social science with the breadth of Marx’s that enables us to recover awareness of our authorship of our social creations and thereby be empowered to control them, as opposed to being their victims.
   Keywords:	freedom, dialectics, materialist history, methodology
   JEL:	B3

2. On pure strategy equilibria in large generalized games
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Riascos Villegas, Alvaro Torres-Martínez, Juan Pablo
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46840&r=hpe
   We consider a game with a continuum of players where at most a finite number of them are atomic. Objective functions are continuous and admissible strategies may depend on the actions chosen by atomic players and on aggregate information about the actions chosen by non-atomic players. When atomic players have convex sets of admissible strategies and quasi-concave objective functions, a pure strategy Nash equilibria always exists.
   Keywords:	Generalized games; Non-convexities; Pure-strategy Nash equilibrium
   JEL:	C72

3. Equilibrium Theory under Ambiguity
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Wei He Nicholas C. Yannelis
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:man:sespap:1307&r=hpe

4. Quantile Kernel Regression for Identifying Excellent Economists
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Richard S.J. Tol (Department of Economics, University of Sussex)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sus:susewp:6013&r=hpe
   Quantile kernel regression is a flexible way to estimate the percentile of a scholar’s quality stratified by a measurable characteristic, without imposing inappropriate assumption about functional form or population distribution. Quantile kernel regression is here applied to identifying the one-in-a-hundred economist per age cohort according to the Hirsch number.
   Keywords:	quantile kernel regression; Hirsch number; economics
   JEL:	A11

5. Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Stevenson, Betsey (University of Michigan) Wolfers, Justin (University of Michigan)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7353&r=hpe
   Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple datasets, multiple definitions of "basic needs" and multiple questions about well-being, we find no support for this claim. The relationship between well-being and income is roughly linear-log and does not diminish as incomes rise. If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.
   Keywords:	subjective well-being, happiness, satiation, basic needs, Easterlin paradox
   JEL:	D6

6. Why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive
   

   Date:	2013-01
   By:	Schwarzkopf, Stefan
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46650&r=hpe
   Archival records are a constitutive element of business historical research, and such research, in turn, is fundamental for a holistic understanding of the role of enterprise in modern capitalist societies. Despite an increasing debate within business history circles about the need to theorize the historian as author and creator of narratives, a fuller reflection on the uses and limitations of the archive in business historical research has not yet taken place. This article takes its lead from theories of organisational epistemology, and asks to what extent business historians are trapped by an outdated, realist methodology and epistemology which is in danger of ignoring the multiple roles that archives play in their knowledge production.
   Keywords:	Business History; Methodology; Epistemology; Archives; Organizational Epistemology; Sociology of Knowledge
   JEL:	B00

7. Marc Barbut au pays des médianes.
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Bernard Monjardet (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne et CAMS-EHESS)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:13039&r=hpe
   The notion of median originally appeared in Statistics was introduced more later in Algebra and Combinatorics. Marc Barbut was the first to develop the link between these two notions of median. I present his precursory works linking the metric medians and the algebraic medians of a distributive lattice and using these links within the framework of the "median procedure" in data analysis. I also give a short survey on the development of the – more general – theory of "median spaces" and I mention some problems about the median procedure.
   Keywords:	Distributive lattice, majority relation, median graph, median procedure, median semilattice, metric space.

8. Fairness norms can explain the emergence of specific cooperation norms in the Battle of the Prisoners Dilemma
   

   Date:	2013-04-24
   By:	Fabian Winter (Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2013-016&r=hpe
   Cooperation norms often emerge in situations, where the long term collective benefits help to overcome short run individual interests, for instance in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. Often, however, there are different paths to cooperation, benefiting different kinds of actors to different degrees. This leads to payoff asymmetries even in the state of cooperation, and consequently can give rise to normative conflicts about which norms should be in place. This norm-coordination problem will be modeled as a Battle of the Sexes game (BoS) with different degrees of asymmetry in payoffs. We combine the PD and the BoS to the 3×3 Battle of the Prisoners Dilemma (BOPD) with several asymmetric cooperative and one non-cooperative equilibria. Bame theoretical and "behavioral" predictions are derived about the kind of norms that are likely to emerge under different shadows of the future and degrees of asymmetry and tested in a lab-experiment. Our experimental data show that game theory fairly well predicts the basic main effects of our experimental manipulations, but "behavioral" predictions perform better in describing the equilibrium selection process of emerging norms.
   Keywords:	Social norms, normative conflict, Prisoner’s Dilemma, coordination, experiment
   JEL:	Z13

9. Delusions of Success: Comment on Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Bent Flyvbjerg
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1305.0741&r=hpe
   Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman must be commended for their clear identification of causes and cures to the planning fallacy in "Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives’ Decisions" (HBR July 2003). Their look at overoptimism, anchoring, competitor neglect, and the outside view in forecasting is highly useful to executives and forecasters. However, Lovallo and Kahneman underrate one source of bias in forecasting – the deliberate "cooking" of forecasts to get ventures started.

nep-hpe 2013-04-27, 11 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
History and Philosophy of Economics

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-hpe

In this issue we have:

1. State neutrality Kis, János
2. Compressed Equilibrium in Large Repeated Games of Incomplete Information Ehud Kalai; Eran Shmaya
3. Delineating deception in experimental economics: Researchers’ and subjects’ views Michał Krawczyk
4. Implementation of Communication Equilibria by Correlated Cheap Talk : the Two-Player Case. Forges, Françoise; Vida, Péter
5. Subjective Well-being Capabilities: Bridging the Gap between the Capability Approach and Subjective Well-Being Research Martin Binder
6. A Testable Theory of Imperfect Perception Andrew Caplin; Daniel Martin
7. Conflict, Evolution, Hegemony and the Power of the State David K Levine; Salvatore Modica
8. Robust Predictions in Games with Incomplete Information Dirk Bergemann; Stephen Morris
9. De l’usage social aux pratiques marchandes de l’argent. Une brève histoire des origines du microcrédit social Guillaume PASTUREAU
10. A Political Theory of Populism Daron Acemoglu; Georgy Egorov; Konstantin Sonin
11. Learning, teaching and sophistication in a strategic game Emmanuel Malsch

Contents.

1. State neutrality
   

   Date:	2012
   By:	Kis, János
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wzbrlc:spiv2012801&r=hpe
   There is a widespread agreement in modern democracies that a state should not force its citizens to lead lives they do not endorse themselves. It is also generally agreed that state acts should not be justified by appealing to the authority of religious books. Such claims are often reformulated as holding that state action should be neutral with respect to the ideals of the good life, or that the justification of state acts should be neutral with respect to basic beliefs. But does the use of the term neutral add anything important to the original wording? Does it point to a common principle – a principle of state neutrality (PSN) – that unites such judgments? If it does, what normative work PSN is supposed to do? What is its basis? What are the things towards which it requires the acts of the relevant type to be neutral? Such questions call for a theory of neutrality. The theory of neutrality has its natural home in the liberal tradition. Liberalism had a neutralist bent since its beginnings. But a systematic account of PSN was not laid out before the 1970s and ’80s when John Rawls and others restated the foundations of liberal theory. While particular neutrality judgments are widely accepted, the general conception of liberal neutrality elicited strong critical reactions. Some of the critiques took liberalism’s commitment to neutrality as evidence that the liberal view of the individual, society, and politics is deeply flawed. Others attacked liberal neutrality as reflecting a mistaken interpretation of what liberalism really is about. The debate subsided in the last decade or so, without settling, however, on a standard view. State neutrality remains a controversial idea. This article tries to spell out its main tenets and to explain how they hang together. It examines the central objections, and explores revisions that may enhance the theory’s defensibility. –
   Keywords:	state action,principle of state neutrality,liberal neutrality,liberalism,theory of neutrality

2. Compressed Equilibrium in Large Repeated Games of Incomplete Information
   

   Date:	2013-04-01
   By:	Ehud Kalai Eran Shmaya
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nwu:cmsems:1562&r=hpe
   Due to their many applications, large Bayesian games have been a subject of growing interest in game theory and related fields. But to a large extent, models (1) have been restricted to one-shot interaction, (2) are based on an assumption that player types are independent and (3) assume that the number of players is known. The current paper develops a general theory of Bayesian repeated large games that avoids some of these difficulties. To make the analysis more robust, it develops a concept of compressed equilibrium which is applicable to a general class of Bayesian repeated large anonymous games. JEL Classification Numbers: C72, C72
   Keywords:	Nash Anonymous games, Nash equilibrium, Repeated games, Large games, Bayesian equilibrium, Price taking, Rational expectations

3. Delineating deception in experimental economics: Researchers’ and subjects’ views
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Michał Krawczyk (Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2013-11&r=hpe
   I report the results of a large survey of experimental subjects and researchers concerning the use of deception. I conclude that members of these two groups largely agree on the extent to which various specific techniques are deceptive. I identify the main dimensions that determine this judgment. I also find that the attitude towards deception among subjects tends to be more favorable than among researchers, although even the latter do not readily conform with the common view that deception is taboo in experimental economics.
   Keywords:	experimental methodology, deception
   JEL:	C90

4. Implementation of Communication Equilibria by Correlated Cheap Talk : the Two-Player Case.
   

   Date:	2013-01
   By:	Forges, Françoise Vida, Péter
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ner:dauphi:urn:hdl:123456789/8159&r=hpe
   We show that essentially every communication equilibrium of any finite Bayesian game with two players can be implemented as a strategic form correlated equilibrium of an extended game, in which before choosing actions as in the Bayesian game, the players engage in a possibly fin nitely long (but in equilibrium almost surely fi nite), direct, cheap talk.
   Keywords:	Bayesian game; pre-play communication; cheap talk; communication equilibrium; correlated equilibrium; Two Player;
   JEL:	C72

5. Subjective Well-being Capabilities: Bridging the Gap between the Capability Approach and Subjective Well-Being Research
   

   Date:	2013-04-12
   By:	Martin Binder
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esi:evopap:2013-02&r=hpe
   As a result of the disenchantment with traditional income-based measures of welfare, alternative welfare measures have gained increasing attention in recent years. Two of the most prominent measures of well-being come from subjective well-being research and the (objective) capability approach. Despite their promising features, both approaches have a number of weaknesses when considered on their own. This paper sets out to examine to what extent a fusion between both approaches can overcome the weaknesses of both individual approaches. It uses features of the capability framework to enrich what is basically a subjective well-being perspective. Key drawbacks of normative subjective well-being views can be overcome by focussing welfare assessments on "Subjective Well-being Capabilities" (SWC), i.e. focussing on the substantive opportunities of individuals to pursue and achieve happiness.
   Keywords:	subjective well-being, capability approach, policy-making, normative economics

6. A Testable Theory of Imperfect Perception
   

   Date:	2013-04-11
   By:	Andrew Caplin Daniel Martin
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levarc:786969000000000649&r=hpe

7. Conflict, Evolution, Hegemony and the Power of the State
   

   Date:	2013-04-15
   By:	David K Levine Salvatore Modica
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levarc:786969000000000692&r=hpe

8. Robust Predictions in Games with Incomplete Information
   

   Date:	2013-04-11
   By:	Dirk Bergemann Stephen Morris
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levarc:786969000000000666&r=hpe

9. De l’usage social aux pratiques marchandes de l’argent. Une brève histoire des origines du microcrédit social
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Guillaume PASTUREAU
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2013-14&r=hpe
   Le Mont-de-Piété est à l’origine du microcrédit social. Il s’oppose au dogme économique de l’Eglise, qui refuse et combat le commerce de l’argent. En prêtant à intérêt des petites sommes aux populations pauvres, le Mont-de-Piété participe à un double phénomène. Il met au centre des préoccupations le rôle social de l’argent ; il introduit une forme d’aide financière considérée comme plus efficace que la charité. La modernisation économique et sociale des sociétés européennes entre en contradiction avec les structures traditionnelles et pré-capitalistes. Notre objectif est de montrer dans quelle mesure le Mont-de-Piété est véritablement une innovation sociale majeure.
   Keywords:	microcrédit social, argent secours, économie et religion, innovation sociale.
   JEL:	A13

10. A Political Theory of Populism
    

    Date:	2013-04-11
    By:	Daron Acemoglu Georgy Egorov Konstantin Sonin
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levarc:786969000000000654&r=hpe

11. Learning, teaching and sophistication in a strategic game
    

    Date:	2012-06-12
    By:	Emmanuel Malsch (UP1 UFR02 – Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne – UFR d’Économie – Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne – PRES HESAM)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:dumas-00813551&r=hpe
    The present study would like to show – among other things – in the spirit of Hyndman, Terracol and Vaksmann (2009), that learning and teaching are still observed in an environment where there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium (but still, as in any finite game, a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium), which is the case in the majority of real-life situations. The main objective in this paper is to test experimentally the following hypotheses: – First, we want to know if players believe that their opponents can be learners and that their actions might influence their opponent’s beliefs. – Second, we would like to investigate the idea that players do use this awareness of their opponent’s ability to learn to manipulate their opponents’ beliefs. – Third, we want to know if there are other explanations we can provide for the way players behave in our game: "cyclic behaviour", "learning of correlated strategies"? – Last, we think that Inequity and Risk aversion might play a role but that doesn’t undermine our teaching strategy hypothesis mentioned above. The paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces our game and experimental procedure. Section III gives some preliminary results and descriptive statistics. Section IV-V and VI shows that subjects might be more sophisticated than the standard theories predict. Section VII-VIII-IX explore the possibility of "cyclic playing behaviours", the existence of a learning of "correlated strategy" and examines the effect of "inequity and risk aversion". Section X concludes the paper.
    Keywords:	théorie des jeux, apprentissage

nep-his Does Africa need Business History?

In her debut as a contributor to the nep-his blog, Stephanie Decker (Aston), departs from the usual norm of commenting in one article to discuss a forthcoming panel on African business history in the forthcoming annual meeting of the Association of Business Historians (June 28 – Preston, Lancashire).

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nep-his 2013-05-05, 12 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
Business, Economic and Financial History

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-his

In this issue we have:

1. The ripples of the Industrial revolution: exports, economic growth and regional integration in Italy in the early 19th century Giovanni Federico; Antonio Tena Junguito
2. Beyond Thomas Mun: the economic ideas of Edward Coke, Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
3. A Bibliometric Based Review on Social Entrepreneurship and its Establishment as a Field of Research Sean Patrick Sassmannshausen; Christine Volkmann
4. World System Energetics Ternyik, Stephen I.
5. Why did Switzerland succeed? An analysis of Swiss specializations (1885-1905) Léo CHARLES
6. INSTITUTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH IN THE VERY LONG RUN Konstantin Yanovsky; Sergey Shulgin
7. Railroad expansion and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Meiji Japan John Tang
8. Raison collective et progrès économique : la théorie du cycle de François Simiand Fabien Vayssière
9. Outsourcing and the Rise in Services Giuseppe Berlingieri
10. The characteristics and evolution of the Brazilian spatial urban system: empirical evidences for the long-run, 1970-2010 Sueli Moro; Reginaldo J. Santos
11. What Does Evolutionary Economic Geography Bring To The Policy Table? Reconceptualising regional innovation systems Asheim, Bjørn; M. Bugge, Markus; Coenen, Lars; Herstad, Sverre
12. Women’s emancipation through education: a macroeconomic analysis Fatih Guvenen; Michelle Rendall

Contents.

1. The ripples of the Industrial revolution: exports, economic growth and regional integration in Italy in the early 19th century
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Giovanni Federico Antonio Tena Junguito
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:whrepe:wp13-02&r=his
   The conventional wisdom about the early stages of modern economic growth in Italy is still heavily influenced by the work of L.Cafagna (1989). He argued that exports of primary products to industrializing North Western countries were the main source of growth and that exports of silk stimulated the industrialization of the North-West (the “industrial triangle”). However, the benefits did not extend to the rest of the country. In this paper we argue that this view is not supported by the trade data. Italian exports grew slowly relative to European and world trade and exports from the North grew less than the total. This view tallies well with some recent estimates of GDP per capita, which show no increase before the Unification (1861)
   Keywords:	Industrial revolutionpPeriphery, Pre-unitary Italy, Foreign trade and integration, Growth
   JEL:	F14

2. Beyond Thomas Mun: the economic ideas of Edward Coke, Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td473&r=his
   This paper proposes to approach the economic ideas which prevailed in England during the early 17th century by moving beyond the historical and analytical exegesis of the printed pamphlets of the time, and focusing instead on the intellectual perspectives brought to bear upon economic matters by three of the most prominent public figures of late Jacobean England: Lionel Cranfield, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke. As civil servants, all three of them were directly involved in the formulation of public policies aimed at economic regulation. Bacon and Coke, however, approached this problem as part of a larger system of public policy whose purpose was to promote order and stability in the commonwealth at large. Cranfield, on the other hand, brought a mercantile perspective to bear on the matter, emphasizing the importance of a favorable balance of trade, and stressing the usefulness of quantitative data in the assessment of economic phenomena. It is concluded that while Tudor political and social philosophy still dominated the way in which the English crown dealt with problems of an economic nature, the new perspective introduced by Cranfield exerted a perceptible influence within official circles.
   Keywords:	Stuart England; Lionel Cranfield; Francis Bacon; Edward Coke; public policy.
   JEL:	B11

3. A Bibliometric Based Review on Social Entrepreneurship and its Establishment as a Field of Research
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Sean Patrick Sassmannshausen (Schumpeter School of Business and Economics Wuppertal University, Germany) Christine Volkmann (Schumpeter School of Business and Economics Wuppertal University, Germany)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bwu:schdps:sdp13003&r=his
   This paper provides an overview on the state of art of research on social entrepreneurship and the establishment of this topic in the academic world. It uses scientometric methods, especially bibliometrics, in measuring the maturity of social entrepreneurship research. The empirical part reveals the increasing number of literature, the institutionalization of social entrepreneurship in seven dimensions, the emergence of thematic clusters, and methodological issue. The paper makes concrete suggestions on how to overcome methodological challenges at the boarder of advanced qualitative and early quantitative research designs. Using Harzing’s “Publish or Perish” software this article furthermore provides a ranking of the 20 most cited academic contributions in social entrepreneurship. Surprisingly, almost half of the most cited papers have not been published in journals but in books, rising doubts on the current (over-)rating of journal publications.
   Keywords:	Social entrepreneurship, bibliometric study, citations, review, organizational establishment, academic institutionalization, development of empirical measurement scales

4. World System Energetics
   

   Date:	2013-04-26
   By:	Ternyik, Stephen I.
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46579&r=his
   The Snooks/Panov curve is discussed, concerning the economic history of human societies as energy transduction systems. A first formalization and mathematization of world system energetics proposed.
   Keywords:	transduction; energetics; economic history; quantization
   JEL:	B41

5. Why did Switzerland succeed? An analysis of Swiss specializations (1885-1905)
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Léo CHARLES
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2013-15&r=his
   The singularity of the Swiss economy during the first globalization is a well-known subject in historiography. Many authors highlight the role of institutions, the size of the country or the weak influence of the lobbies on economic decisions to explain the high economic growth from the 1880’s. Using an original and highly disaggregated database, this article takes into account the Swiss choices in terms of industrial specializations. We found out that the development of modern specializations as well as a move upmarket in the “old” specializations can be one of the explanations of the Swiss ‘miracle’.
   Keywords:	economic growth, specialization, Swiss economy
   JEL:	N13

6. INSTITUTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH IN THE VERY LONG RUN
   

   Date:	2012
   By:	Konstantin Yanovsky (Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy) Sergey Shulgin (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gai:wpaper:0058&r=his
   In this paper we tested the hypothesis of the "political" basis for the "economic" rights. We constructed our own variables of political regimes’ classification for years 1820-2000. We found significant positive interdependencies between the Democracy’s indicators and Economic Growth. Protection of the Private property rights requires, first and foremost, due guaranties for the personal immunity as a key precondition. Power to arrest discretionary undermines any formal guaranties of private property, low taxation benefits etc. Personal immunity should be defended even for "unpleasant" person (say, H. Ford or W. Gates) or for the chieftains’ challengers (to make "rights of the meanest … respectable to the greatest"). It means the free speech; religious freedom and other "political rights" should be respected. Democracy, as political competition system weakens governments’ power to break personal freedoms and property rights.
   Keywords:	Rule of Law, Rule of Force, Personal Rights, Private Property Protection, Economic Growth
   JEL:	P16

7. Railroad expansion and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Meiji Japan
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	John Tang
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csg:ajrcwp:1302&r=his
   Railroads in Meiji Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but the impact on firms is unclear. Using a newly developed firm-level dataset and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of railroad expansion, I assess the relationship between railways and firm activity across Japan. Results indicate that railroad expansion corresponded with increased firm activity, particularly in manufacturing, although this effect is mitigated in less populous regions. These findings are consistent with industrial agglomeration in areas with larger markets and earlier development among both new and existing establishments.
   Keywords:	agglomeration, entrepreneurship, firm genealogy, late development
   JEL:	L26

8. Raison collective et progrès économique : la théorie du cycle de François Simiand
   

   Date:	2012
   By:	Fabien Vayssière (UP1 UFR02 – Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne – UFR d’Économie – Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne – PRES HESAM)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:dumas-00817854&r=his
   La science économique doit dégager des lois pour Simiand, elle a pour but de fournir une explication des relations entre les différents faits ou "catégories de faits". Simiand critique les théories sans faits (l’économie conceptuelle qui fabrique des "systèmes hypothétiques de relations entre éléments conçus par l’esprit") mais il ne veut pas non plus une accumulation de faits sans théorie (à laquelle aboutit la démarche historique). Cette double critique permet de situer Simiand, il se base sur les faits mais tente de dégager des relations entre ces derniers une "liaison rationnelle". C’est le statut de cette rationalité qui doit être questionné. La démarche de Simiand est intéressante de par les perspectives qu’elle offre à la science économique. La volonté de "connaître et expliquer la réalité économique" semble être un objectif au moins louable, sinon indispensable à une science économique bien constituée. Mais il s’agit de voir si dans l’application de cette méthode, Simiand respecte bien ses propres principes. Pour vérifier cela, nous étudierons sa théorie du cycle, travail théorique essentiel du sociologue. De la même manière que Durkheim a employé les principes de sa méthode pour la première fois dans son étude du suicide, c’est à travers son étude des fluctuations longues que Simiand a éprouvé la sienne. Son attachement à la méthode est tel qu’il revient sans cesse aux préceptes qu’il a fourni, rendant parfois la lecture de ses ouvrages fastidieuse. Mais cette volonté de respecter scrupuleusement une méthode établie et d’expliquer précisément au lecteur la démarche suivie doit être soulignée et saluée. Cette théorie du cycle est particulièrement originale par rapport à celles de ses contemporains en ce sens qu’elle utilise de manière systématique une méthode bien précise. Le résultat auquel elle aboutit est celui d’un progrès économique spontané, non voulu de manière consciente par les individus, mais bien réel. En réalité, si l’on parcours l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Simiand, on comprend mieux comment on aboutit à ce progrès économique. La conception de la monnaie et de la psychologie des individus sont au fondement de ce que Simiand appelle une "raison collective", laquelle entraîne "providentiellement" le progrès. On reconnaît ici le rationalisme de Simiand mais on perçoit aussi, et surtout, une dérive possible de la méthode positive. La question est donc de savoir s’il n’existe pas une contradiction entre la méthode prescrite par Simiand et son application concrète. Plus concrètement, Simiand respecte-il bien sa philosophie dans la construction de sa théorie du cycle ? Le terme "philosophie" ne nous semble pas usurpé, la question du rejet du finalisme dépasse la simple question de l’application d’une méthode, il s’agit bien d’une certaine conception de la science. Si nous en arrivons au dégagement d’une "dérive" au sens d’un "rationalisme forcé" de la théorie, d’une volonté de "faire comprendre coûte que coûte", alors il faudra se poser la question du pourquoi de cette dérive. Nous verrons qu’il est possible de voir en l’appartenance de Simiand à l’école durkheimienne une explication de cette dernière. En creux se trouve bien la question de la possibilité d’une science économique positive. Ou, plus précisément, la question de la possibilité de lois économiques tirées des faits, sans prénotions, comme l’entend Simiand. C’est pour cela que l’étude de l’application de sa méthode est si importante : s’il a échoué cela est aussi porteur d’enseignements. Afin de répondre aux questionnements de ce mémoire, il nous faudra d’abord passer par un détour. Il est essentiel de voir comment Simiand a appliqué sa méthode à l’étude des fluctuations longues. Nous relèverons ainsi les éléments qu’il faudra questionner plus loin. Cela nous permettra également de saisir sa mécanique du cycle (Chapitre 1). Mais, comme nous l’avons évoqué plus haut, les déterminants du cycle chez Simiand sont bien singuliers et conduisent l’auteur à dégager une "raison collective". Il est très important d’étudier ces déterminants et cette "raison collective" à la source du progrès économique, car son statut est bien particulier et devra être questionné (Chapitre 2). Une fois passé par ce détour, nous aurons les éléments pour mettre en perspective de manière sérieuse Simiand et sa méthode, évaluer les contradictions et les dérives de cette "science économique positive" (Chapitre 3).
   Keywords:	François Simiand, développement économique, cycles économiques

9. Outsourcing and the Rise in Services
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Giuseppe Berlingieri
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1199&r=his
   This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007, and on the rise in services in particular. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an unusual industry as more than 90% of its output is an intermediate input to other firms, and it is where most of the service outsourcing activity is concentrated. These facts are essential to understanding the structure of the economy: professional and business services have experienced an almost fourfold increase in their forward linkage, the largest change in input-output linkages over the past 60 years. Using a simple gross output accounting framework, I calculate the contribution of the change in the composition of intermediates and their sourcing mode to the reallocation of employment across sectors. I find that the evolution of the input-output structure accounts for up to 33% of the increase in service employment, and professional and business services outsourcing alone contributes almost half of that amount.
   Keywords:	Structural transformation, outsourcing, professional and business services, input-output tables, intermediates
   JEL:	D57

10. The characteristics and evolution of the Brazilian spatial urban system: empirical evidences for the long-run, 1970-2010
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Sueli Moro (Cedeplar-UFMG) Reginaldo J. Santos (Cedeplar-UFMG)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td474&r=his
    In this paper we use spatial analysis and spatial econometrics methods to assess some empirical issues on the size distribution of the Brazilian Urban System. The main novelty is the long historical period of analysis which includes all the demographic censuses from 1940. More specifically, we describe the spatial distribution of the Brazilian cities, as well as its temporal evolution; we test test Zipf’s Law in its original and spatial version, and we use Markov Chains analysis in order to shed some light on the dynamics of the cities within the urban system. We introduce spatial dependence in both Zipf’s law estimation and Markov chain framework in order to capture the influence of the geographical environment on the relative position and mobility of the cities within the urban system. Our estimates for the Pareto coefficient were quite different for OLS and spatial models suggesting the inconsistency of OLS estimates in the non-spatial models. For the full sample of municipalities the Pareto coefficient is much smaller than 1, which features a polarized urban structure. Municipalities with urban population above the average show a less concentrated urban structure and seem to confirm Zipf law. Traditional Markov chain analysis indicates a high stability and low mobility inter-class over time confirming that, with rare exceptions, radical changes in urban population size are uncommon. Results for the Spatial Markov matrix show that municipalities with more populous neighbors are more likely to grow.
    Keywords:	Brazilian Urban System, Zipf’s Law, Markov Chains, Spatial Econometrics.
    JEL:	R11

11. What Does Evolutionary Economic Geography Bring To The Policy Table? Reconceptualising regional innovation systems
    

    Date:	2013-02-10
    By:	Asheim, Bjørn (CIRCLE and the Department of Human Geography, Lund University; Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Norway) M. Bugge, Markus (Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway) Coenen, Lars (CIRCLE, Lund University; Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Norway) Herstad, Sverre (NIFU, Oslo Norway)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2013_005&r=his
    The article discusses the strategic roles of public policy and institutions and the way this effect to the efficiency of regional innovation systems in the landscape of evolutionary economic geography. It argues that the current emphasis on path dependency historically contingent preconditions has provided important insights into the interdependencies between industrial knowledge bases and routines, regional system dynamics and long-term development paths. Yet, it falls short of capturing the scope of policy intervention which follows logically from the evolutionary framework itself. Anchored in a renewed regional innovation systems approach, the article presents a policy intervention framework for constructing regional advantage in different contexts.
    Keywords:	evolutionary economic geography; institutions; regional innovation policy; clusters; regional innovation systems
    JEL:	B52

12. Women’s emancipation through education: a macroeconomic analysis
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Fatih Guvenen Michelle Rendall
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedmwp:704&r=his
    In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.
    Keywords:	Marriage ; Women – Education

nep-hpe 2013-05-05, 17 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
History and Philosophy of Economics

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-hpe

In this issue we have:

1. Bubbles are rational Pierre Lescanne
2. Learning in a Black Box Heinrich H. Nax; Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew; Stuart A. West; H. Peyton Young
3. The evolution of mixed conjectures in the rent-extraction game Brito, Paulo; Datta, Bipasa; Dixon, Huw
4. The mutual gains from trade moderate the parent-offspring conflict Da Silva, Sergio
5. Toolism! A Critique of Econophysics Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont
6. World System Energetics Ternyik, Stephen I.
7. Do happiness indexes truly reveal happiness? : measurin happiness using revealed preferences from migration flows Helena Marques; Gabriel Pino; Juan de Dios Tena
8. MODERN ANTI-CAPITALISTIC IDEOLOGIES Konstantin Yanovsky; Ilia Zatcovetzky; Sergei Zhavoronkov; Ekaterina Reva
9. Beyond Thomas Mun: the economic ideas of Edward Coke, Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
10. The sources of profits and their sustainability: A survey of basic theoretical issues Skouras, Thanos
11. Extending the Original Position: Revisiting the Pattanaik Critique of Vickrey/Harsanyi Utilitarianism Peter J. Hammond
12. Raison collective et progrès économique : la théorie du cycle de François Simiand Fabien Vayssière
13. Conscience Accounting: Emotional Dynamics and Social Behavior Uri Gneezy; Alex Imas; Kristóf Madarász
14. Optimal Inequality behind the Veil of Ignorance Liang, Che-Yuan
15. Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? Betsey Stevenson; Justin Wolfers
16. Is Giving Equivalent to Not Taking in Dictator Games? Korenok Oleg; Edward L. Millner; Laura Razzolini
17. INSTITUTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH IN THE VERY LONG RUN Konstantin Yanovsky; Sergey Shulgin

Contents.

1. Bubbles are rational
   

   Date:	2013-04-30
   By:	Pierre Lescanne (LIP – Laboratoire de l’Informatique du Parallélisme – Université de Lyon – CNRS : UMR5668 – INRIA – École Normale Supérieure – Lyon – Université Claude Bernard – Lyon I)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:ensl-00819188&r=hpe
   As we show using the notion of equilibrium in the theory of infinite sequential games, bubbles and escalations are rational for economic and environmental agents, who believe in an infinite world. This goes against a vision of a self regulating, wise and pacific economy in equilibrium. In other words, in this context, equilibrium is not a synonymous of stability. We attempt to draw from this statement methodological consequences and a new approach to economics. To the mindware of economic agents (a concept due to cognitive psychology) we propose to add coinduction to properly reason on infinite games. This way we refine the notion of rationality.
   Keywords:	economic game; infinite game;sequential game;bubble; escalation; microeconomics;speculative bubble; induction;coinduction.

2. Learning in a Black Box
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Heinrich H. Nax (PSE – Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques – CNRS : UMR8545 – École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS] – Ecole des Ponts ParisTech – Ecole normale supérieure de Paris – ENS Paris – Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA), EEP-PSE – Ecole d’Économie de Paris – Paris School of Economics – Ecole d’Économie de Paris) Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew (Department of Zoology – University of Oxford (UK)) Stuart A. West (Department of Zoology – University of Oxford (UK)) H. Peyton Young (Department of Economics – University of Oxford (UK))
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:hal-00817201&r=hpe
   Many interactive environments can be represented as games, but they are so large and complex that individual players are in the dark about what others are doing and how their own payo s are a ected. This paper analyzes learning behavior in such ‘black box’ environments, where players’ only source of information is their own history of actions taken and payoff s received. Speci fically we study repeated public goods games, where players must decide how much to contribute at each stage, but they do not know how much others have contributed or how others’ contributions a effect their own payoff s. We identify two key features of the players’ learning dynamics. First, if a player’s realized payoff increases he is less inclined to change his strategy, whereas if his realized payo ff decreases he is more inclined to change his strategy. Second, if increasing his own contribution results in higher payoff s he will tend to increase his contribution still further, whereas the reverse holds if an increase in contribution leads to lower payo ffs. These two e ffects are clearly present when players have no information about the game; moreover they are still present even when players have full information. Convergence to Nash equilibrium occurs at about the same rate in both situations.
   Keywords:	Learning ; Information ; Public goods games

3. The evolution of mixed conjectures in the rent-extraction game
   

   Date:	2012-12
   By:	Brito, Paulo Datta, Bipasa Dixon, Huw (Cardiff Business School)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdf:wpaper:2012/23&r=hpe
   This paper adopts an evolutionary perspective on the rent-extraction model with conjectural variations (CV). We analyze the global dynamics of the model with three CVs under the replicator equation. We find that the end points of the evolutionary dynamics include the pure-strategy consistent CVs. However, there are also mixed-strategy equilibria that occur. These are on the boundaries between the basins of attraction of the pure-strategy sinks. We develop a more general notion of consistency which applies to mixed-strategy equilibria. In a three conjecture example, we find that in contrast to the pure-strategy equilibria, the mixed-strategy equilibria are not ESS: under the replicator dynamics, there are three or four mixed equilibria that may either be totally unstable, or saddle-stable. There also exist heteroclinic orbits that link equilibria together.
   Keywords:	Rent-extraction; evolutionary dynamics; consistent conjectures; global dynamics; mixed-strategy
   JEL:	D03

4. The mutual gains from trade moderate the parent-offspring conflict
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Da Silva, Sergio
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46627&r=hpe
   By combining basic concepts from economics and genetic economics, I elaborate a rationale for the mutual gains from the exchange of goods between siblings to moderate the famous parent-offspring conflict, an issue of interest for evolutionary psychology. The rationale also fills in the gaps of standard economic theory by justifying why trade (ultimately a cooperative endeavor) is made possible starting from egoistic utility-maximizers.
   Keywords:	parent-offspring conflict
   JEL:	A20

5. Toolism! A Critique of Econophysics
   

   Date:	2013-04-30
   By:	Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46630&r=hpe
   Economists are fond of the physicists’ powerful tools. As a popular mindset Toolism is as old as economics but the transplants failed to produce the same successes as in their aboriginal environment. Economists therefore looked more and more to the math department for inspiration. Now the tide turns again. The ongoing crisis discredits standard economics and offers the chance for a comeback. Modern econophysics commands the most powerful tools and argues that there are many occasions for their application. The present paper argues that it is not a change of tools that is most urgently needed but a paradigm change.
   Keywords:	new framework of concepts; structure-centric; axiom set; paradigm; income; profit; money; invariance principle
   JEL:	A12

6. World System Energetics
   

   Date:	2013-04-26
   By:	Ternyik, Stephen I.
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46579&r=hpe
   The Snooks/Panov curve is discussed, concerning the economic history of human societies as energy transduction systems. A first formalization and mathematization of world system energetics proposed.
   Keywords:	transduction; energetics; economic history; quantization
   JEL:	B41

7. Do happiness indexes truly reveal happiness? : measurin happiness using revealed preferences from migration flows
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Helena Marques Gabriel Pino Juan de Dios Tena
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:wsrepe:ws130908&r=hpe
   n this paper we attempt to establish a nexus between migration decisions and selfassessed happiness, where migration is taken as a mechanism for revealing preferences. The happiness literature has proposed both economic and non-economic determinants of happiness which are very similar to the factors that may be thought of as determinants of migration: absolute income, relative income, demographic and social characteristics, social development, relationship with others and characteristics of the place where we live. To these we add bilateral gravity variables, migration policies, and two survey-based happiness indexes. First, these two indexes are negatively correlated to net migration flows. Second, almost all the other explanatory variables are significant and as such survey-based happiness indexes fail to account for them. Third, we show how an international happiness ranking changes by taking into account those omitted factors. Finally, our migration-based ranking shows that, although many countries "truthfully" reveal happiness levels, in fact 19 countries are net migration senders even though they are self-proclaimed happy in surveys, whereas 23 countries are net migration recipients, even though in surveys they are self-proclaimed unhappy. We identify the sources of this mismatch and suggest where action could be taken to bring people’s self-assessment of happiness in line with revealed preferences
   Keywords:	Happiness, Subjective wellbeing, Revealed preferences, Migration, Gravity models, FEVD
   JEL:	F22

8. MODERN ANTI-CAPITALISTIC IDEOLOGIES
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Konstantin Yanovsky (Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy) Ilia Zatcovetzky (Samuel Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, Technion (Israel)) Sergei Zhavoronkov (Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy) Ekaterina Reva (Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gai:wpaper:0059&r=hpe
   Ideology is pretty efficient machinery to decrease collective action’s costs. People not need to communicate or even to be familiar one another to participate the joint action, to support the policy or resist the same. The chapter studies the impact which new ideologies of the 21st century (feminism, multiculturalism, and so on) have had on those institutions, through which the Western world has become wealthy and free.
   Keywords:	ideology, collective actions, coordination costs, religion; ideologies’ competition
   JEL:	D74

9. Beyond Thomas Mun: the economic ideas of Edward Coke, Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td473&r=hpe
   This paper proposes to approach the economic ideas which prevailed in England during the early 17th century by moving beyond the historical and analytical exegesis of the printed pamphlets of the time, and focusing instead on the intellectual perspectives brought to bear upon economic matters by three of the most prominent public figures of late Jacobean England: Lionel Cranfield, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke. As civil servants, all three of them were directly involved in the formulation of public policies aimed at economic regulation. Bacon and Coke, however, approached this problem as part of a larger system of public policy whose purpose was to promote order and stability in the commonwealth at large. Cranfield, on the other hand, brought a mercantile perspective to bear on the matter, emphasizing the importance of a favorable balance of trade, and stressing the usefulness of quantitative data in the assessment of economic phenomena. It is concluded that while Tudor political and social philosophy still dominated the way in which the English crown dealt with problems of an economic nature, the new perspective introduced by Cranfield exerted a perceptible influence within official circles.
   Keywords:	Stuart England; Lionel Cranfield; Francis Bacon; Edward Coke; public policy.
   JEL:	B11

10. The sources of profits and their sustainability: A survey of basic theoretical issues
    

    Date:	2013-04-26
    By:	Skouras, Thanos
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46567&r=hpe
    The volume of profits in an economy is a magnitude, which is out of sight of orthodox macroeconomics textbooks and effectively ignored by neoclassical economics. In contrast, Kalecki’s approach brings to the forefront the sources of profits and makes possible their further analysis. The sources of profits are examined one by one and their impacts, as well as the inter-relations among them are studied in some detail. The sustainability of the profits’ sources tends to have inevitable limits, which are discussed and elucidated. On the basis of these limits, two phases in the operation of the sources may be distinguished. The beneficial phase is transformed into a pathological one, as the limits are approached. Consequently, profits may be distinguished according to the source from which they flow, as well as the phase in which they arise. Taking into account both source and phase, a terminology is proposed to highlight the distinctive character of the different kinds of profits.
    Keywords:	profits, investment, export surplus, budget deficit, consumption out of profits, saving out of wages, profits’ limits and sustainability
    JEL:	B5

11. Extending the Original Position: Revisiting the Pattanaik Critique of Vickrey/Harsanyi Utilitarianism
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Peter J. Hammond
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hst:ghsdps:gd12-298&r=hpe
    Harsanyi’s original position treats personal identity, upon which each individual’s utility depends, as risky. Pattanaik’s critique is related to the problem of scaling "state-dependent" von Neumann-Morgenstern utility when determining subjective probabilities. But a unique social welfare functional, incorporating both level and unit interpersonal comparisons, emerges from contemplating an "extended" original position allowing the probability of becoming each person to be chosen. Moreover, the paper suggests the relevance of a "Harsanyi ethical type space", with types as both causes and objects of preference.

12. Raison collective et progrès économique : la théorie du cycle de François Simiand
    

    Date:	2012
    By:	Fabien Vayssière (UP1 UFR02 – Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne – UFR d’Économie – Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne – PRES HESAM)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:dumas-00817854&r=hpe
    La science économique doit dégager des lois pour Simiand, elle a pour but de fournir une explication des relations entre les différents faits ou "catégories de faits". Simiand critique les théories sans faits (l’économie conceptuelle qui fabrique des "systèmes hypothétiques de relations entre éléments conçus par l’esprit") mais il ne veut pas non plus une accumulation de faits sans théorie (à laquelle aboutit la démarche historique). Cette double critique permet de situer Simiand, il se base sur les faits mais tente de dégager des relations entre ces derniers une "liaison rationnelle". C’est le statut de cette rationalité qui doit être questionné. La démarche de Simiand est intéressante de par les perspectives qu’elle offre à la science économique. La volonté de "connaître et expliquer la réalité économique" semble être un objectif au moins louable, sinon indispensable à une science économique bien constituée. Mais il s’agit de voir si dans l’application de cette méthode, Simiand respecte bien ses propres principes. Pour vérifier cela, nous étudierons sa théorie du cycle, travail théorique essentiel du sociologue. De la même manière que Durkheim a employé les principes de sa méthode pour la première fois dans son étude du suicide, c’est à travers son étude des fluctuations longues que Simiand a éprouvé la sienne. Son attachement à la méthode est tel qu’il revient sans cesse aux préceptes qu’il a fourni, rendant parfois la lecture de ses ouvrages fastidieuse. Mais cette volonté de respecter scrupuleusement une méthode établie et d’expliquer précisément au lecteur la démarche suivie doit être soulignée et saluée. Cette théorie du cycle est particulièrement originale par rapport à celles de ses contemporains en ce sens qu’elle utilise de manière systématique une méthode bien précise. Le résultat auquel elle aboutit est celui d’un progrès économique spontané, non voulu de manière consciente par les individus, mais bien réel. En réalité, si l’on parcours l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Simiand, on comprend mieux comment on aboutit à ce progrès économique. La conception de la monnaie et de la psychologie des individus sont au fondement de ce que Simiand appelle une "raison collective", laquelle entraîne "providentiellement" le progrès. On reconnaît ici le rationalisme de Simiand mais on perçoit aussi, et surtout, une dérive possible de la méthode positive. La question est donc de savoir s’il n’existe pas une contradiction entre la méthode prescrite par Simiand et son application concrète. Plus concrètement, Simiand respecte-il bien sa philosophie dans la construction de sa théorie du cycle ? Le terme "philosophie" ne nous semble pas usurpé, la question du rejet du finalisme dépasse la simple question de l’application d’une méthode, il s’agit bien d’une certaine conception de la science. Si nous en arrivons au dégagement d’une "dérive" au sens d’un "rationalisme forcé" de la théorie, d’une volonté de "faire comprendre coûte que coûte", alors il faudra se poser la question du pourquoi de cette dérive. Nous verrons qu’il est possible de voir en l’appartenance de Simiand à l’école durkheimienne une explication de cette dernière. En creux se trouve bien la question de la possibilité d’une science économique positive. Ou, plus précisément, la question de la possibilité de lois économiques tirées des faits, sans prénotions, comme l’entend Simiand. C’est pour cela que l’étude de l’application de sa méthode est si importante : s’il a échoué cela est aussi porteur d’enseignements. Afin de répondre aux questionnements de ce mémoire, il nous faudra d’abord passer par un détour. Il est essentiel de voir comment Simiand a appliqué sa méthode à l’étude des fluctuations longues. Nous relèverons ainsi les éléments qu’il faudra questionner plus loin. Cela nous permettra également de saisir sa mécanique du cycle (Chapitre 1). Mais, comme nous l’avons évoqué plus haut, les déterminants du cycle chez Simiand sont bien singuliers et conduisent l’auteur à dégager une "raison collective". Il est très important d’étudier ces déterminants et cette "raison collective" à la source du progrès économique, car son statut est bien particulier et devra être questionné (Chapitre 2). Une fois passé par ce détour, nous aurons les éléments pour mettre en perspective de manière sérieuse Simiand et sa méthode, évaluer les contradictions et les dérives de cette "science économique positive" (Chapitre 3).
    Keywords:	François Simiand, développement économique, cycles économiques

13. Conscience Accounting: Emotional Dynamics and Social Behavior
    

    Date:	2012-02
    By:	Uri Gneezy Alex Imas Kristóf Madarász
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:stitep:/2012/563&r=hpe
    We develop a dynamic model where people decide in the presence of moral constraints and test the predictions of the model through two experiments. Norm violations induce a temporal feeling of guilt that depreciates with time. Due to such fluctuations of guilt, people exhibit an endogenous temporal inconsistency in social preferences—a behavior we term conscience accounting. In our experiments people first have to make an ethical decision, and subsequently decide whether to donate to charity. We find that those who chose unethically were more likely to donate than those who did not. As predicted, donation rates were higher when the opportunity to donate came sooner after the unethical choice than later. Combined, our theoretical and empirical findings suggest a mechanism by which prosocial behavior is likely to occur within temporal brackets following an unethical choice.
    Keywords:	Emotions, Temporal Brackets, Deception, Prosocial Behavior
    JEL:	D03

14. Optimal Inequality behind the Veil of Ignorance
    

    Date:	2013-04-29
    By:	Liang, Che-Yuan (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2013_004&r=hpe
    In Rawls’ (1971) influential social contract approach to distributive justice, the fair income distribution is the one that an individual would choose behind a veil of ignorance. Harsanyi (1953, 1955, 1975) treats this situation as a decision under risk and arrives at utilitarianism using expected utility theory. This paper investigates the implications of applying prospect theory instead, which better describes behavior under risk. I find that the specific type of inequality in bottom-heavy right-skewed income distributions, which includes the log-normal income distribution, could be socially desirable. The optimal inequality result contrasts the implications of other social welfare criteria.
    Keywords:	veil of ignorance; prospect theory; social welfare function; income inequality
    JEL:	D03

15. Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Betsey Stevenson Justin Wolfers
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18992&r=hpe
    Many scholars have argued that once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple datasets, multiple definitions of “basic needs” and multiple questions about well-being, we find no support for this claim. The relationship between well-being and income is roughly linear-log and does not diminish as incomes rise. If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.
    JEL:	D6

16. Is Giving Equivalent to Not Taking in Dictator Games?
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Korenok Oleg (Department of Economics, VCU School of Business) Edward L. Millner (Department of Economics, VCU School of Business) Laura Razzolini (Department of Economics, VCU School of Business)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vcu:wpaper:1301&r=hpe
    We answer the question: Is giving equivalent to not taking? We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List’s (2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent final payoffs. We find that the recipients tend to earn more as the amount the dictator must take to achieve a given final payoff increases. We conclude that not taking is not equivalent to giving and agree with List (2007) that the current social preference models fail to rationalize the observed data.
    Keywords:	Dictator Game; Impure Altruism; Taking
    JEL:	C91

17. INSTITUTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH IN THE VERY LONG RUN
    

    Date:	2012
    By:	Konstantin Yanovsky (Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy) Sergey Shulgin (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gai:wpaper:0058&r=hpe
    In this paper we tested the hypothesis of the "political" basis for the "economic" rights. We constructed our own variables of political regimes’ classification for years 1820-2000. We found significant positive interdependencies between the Democracy’s indicators and Economic Growth. Protection of the Private property rights requires, first and foremost, due guaranties for the personal immunity as a key precondition. Power to arrest discretionary undermines any formal guaranties of private property, low taxation benefits etc. Personal immunity should be defended even for "unpleasant" person (say, H. Ford or W. Gates) or for the chieftains’ challengers (to make "rights of the meanest … respectable to the greatest"). It means the free speech; religious freedom and other "political rights" should be respected. Democracy, as political competition system weakens governments’ power to break personal freedoms and property rights.
    Keywords:	Rule of Law, Rule of Force, Personal Rights, Private Property Protection, Economic Growth
    JEL:	P16

nep-his 2013-04-27, 18 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
Business, Economic and Financial History

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-his

In this issue we have:

1. The Persistence of de Facto Power: Elites and Economic Development in the US South, 1840-1960 Philipp Ager
2. North and South: Social Mobility and Welfare Spending in Preindustrial England Nina Boberg-Fazlic; Paul Sharp
3. Nominal Shocks and Real Exchange Rates: Evidence from Two Centuries William D. Craighead; Pao-Lin Tien
4. Stockholm – from ugly duckling to Europe’s first green capital Hårsman, Björn; Wijkmark, Bo
5. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the English Corn Returns as a data source in economic history, 1770-1914. Brunt, Liam; Cannon, Edmund
6. The Role of Public Employment Services in a Developing Country: The Case of Japan in the Twentieth Century Kambayashi, Ryo
7. Housing and the Great Depression Mehmet Balcilar; Rangan Gupta; Stephen M. Miller
8. European migration, national origin and long-term economic development in the US Andrés Rodríguez-Pose; Viola von Berlepsch
9. Cost and Benefit of Globalization:Lesson Learned from Indonesian History Maddaremmeng A. Panennungi
10. Inequality and growth in the very long run: Inferring inequality from data on social groups Jørgen Modalsli
11. Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: an analysis of U.S. state-level patenting Carolina Castaldi; Koen Frenken; Bart Los
12. Cross Sections Are History Easterlin, Richard A.
13. Average Marginal Income Tax Rates for New Zealand, 1907-2009 Fiona McAlister; Debasis Bandyopadhyay; Robert Barro; Jeremy Couchman; Norman Gemmell; Gordon Liao
14. Share Portfolios and Risk Management in the Early Years of Financial Capitalism: London 1690-1730 Carlos, Ann M.; Fletcher, Erin; Neal, Larry
15. The butterfly and the elephant: local social innovation, the welfare state and new poverty dynamics Stijn Oosterlynck; Yuri Kazepov; Andreas Novy; Pieter Cools; Eduardo Barberis; Florian Wukovitsch; Tatiana Saruis; Bernhard Leubolt
16. Financial accounting and reporting in Germany: A case study on German accounting tradition and experiences with the IFRS adoption Fülbier, Rolf Uwe; Klein, Malte
17. Interrogating Protective Space: Shielding, Nurturing and Empowering Dutch Solar PV Bram Verhees; Rob Raven; Frank Veraart; Adrian Smith; Florian Kern
18. Exploring mobile pricing strategies and innovations in the Thai mobile communications market Srinuan, Chalita; Srinuan, Pratompong; Bohlin, Erik

Contents.

1. The Persistence of de Facto Power: Elites and Economic Development in the US South, 1840-1960
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Philipp Ager (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0038&r=his
   Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic development at the county level between 1840 and 1960. To capture the planter elite’s potential to exercise de facto power, I construct a new dataset on the personal wealth of the richest Southern planters before the American Civil War. I find that counties with a relatively wealthier planter elite before the Civil War performed significantly worse in the post-war decades and even after World War II. I argue that this is the likely consequence of the planter elite’s lack of support for mass schooling. My results suggest that when during Reconstruction the US government abolished slavery and enfranchised the freedmen, the planter elite used their de facto power to maintain their influence over the political system and preserve a plantation economy based on low-skilled labor. In fact, I find that the planter elite was better able to sustain land prices and the production of plantation crops during Reconstruction in counties where they had more de facto power.
   Keywords:	Long-Run Economic Development, Wealth Inequality, Elites and Development, de Facto and de Jure Power, US South

2. North and South: Social Mobility and Welfare Spending in Preindustrial England
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Nina Boberg-Fazlic (University of Copenhagen) Paul Sharp (University of Southern Denmark)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0037&r=his
   In a recent paper Ferrie and Long (2012) argue that historically high levels of social mobility can lead to a culture of non-acceptance of redistribution and welfare provision. We apply this hypothesis to England, where it has been noted that, at least historically speaking, the North and the South of England were culturally very different. King (2000) argues that the North exhibited a ‘harsh culture of making do’ whereas the South exhibited a ‘culture of dependency’. We put these two propositions together and study occupational mobility in North- and South-England using the Cambridge Group data from the years 1550-1850. We find that, in the North, lower poor relief expenditures go hand-in-hand with higher levels of social mobility. In the South, on the other hand, occupational status is heavily determined by the father’s occupation. We also study intergenerational inheritance of pauperism, showing that the probability of becoming a pauper was heavily determined by a family history of pauperism in the South. We add to the literature by providing further evidence for a link between historical social mobility and the development of a welfare state.
   Keywords:	England, Poor Laws, social mobility, welfare
   JEL:	J62

3. Nominal Shocks and Real Exchange Rates: Evidence from Two Centuries
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	William D. Craighead (Department of Economics, Wesleyan University) Pao-Lin Tien (Department of Economics, Wesleyan University)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wes:weswpa:2013-002&r=his
   This paper employs structural vector autoregression methods to examine the contribution of real and nominal shocks to real exchange rate movements using two hundred and seventeen years of data from Britain and the United States. Shocks are identified with long-run restrictions. The long time series makes possible an investigation of how the role of nominal shocks has evolved over time due to changes in the shock processes or to structural changes in the economy which might alter how a shock is transmitted to the real exchange rate. The sample is split at 1913, which is the end of the classical gold standard period, the last of the monetary regimes of the 19th century. The earlier subsample (1795-1913) shows a much stronger role for nominal shocks in explaining real exchange rate movements than the later subsample (1914-2010). Counterfactual analysis shows that the difference between the two periods is mainly due to the size of the nominal shocks rather than structural changes in the economy.
   Keywords:	ector autoregression; monetary shocks, exchange rate movements, longrun identifying restrictions
   JEL:	F31

4. Stockholm – from ugly duckling to Europe’s first green capital
   

   Date:	2013-04-16
   By:	Hårsman, Björn (CESIS – Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology) Wijkmark, Bo (Office of Regional Planning and Metropolitan Transport)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0307&r=his
   The European Commission named Stockholm Europe’s first Green Capital City in 2010. Important reasons for the award were: a reduction of CO2 emissions by 25 percent per capita since 1990 and the establishment of an administrative system integrating environmental aspects in the planning, budgeting and management of all the various activities governed by the city. This paper describes the main features of the economic, environmental and political development in Stockholm since 1850. The main idea is simply to provide a historical perspective on the city´s environmental policy but we also want to shed light on the extent to which historical decisions and processes exert an influence on current ambitions and measures to strengthen Stockholm´s sustainability. In addition to pointing at the long-lasting influence of earlier infrastructure investments we also indicate the importance of the political pragmatism and social-engineering attitude developed since the 1930´s. However, Stockholm´s recently adopted action plan for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases indicates that this institutional capital might have eroded somewhat. If this is true, Stockholm might face more difficulties in becoming greener than usually expected considering its current ranking as a leading European capital in terms of intellectual capital and rate of innovation.
   Keywords:	Urban sustainability; Stockholm; history; environment; urban planning
   JEL:	Q01

5. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the English Corn Returns as a data source in economic history, 1770-1914.
   

   Date:	2013-04-18
   By:	Brunt, Liam (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) Cannon, Edmund (University of Bristol)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2013_009&r=his
   From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these ‘Corn Returns’ were published in the London Gazette. We computerised the data published 1770-1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we describe the nature of these data; discuss why, when and how they were collected; consider their accuracy and biases; describe how we computerised them; and offer caveats in using these – and similar – data. We highlight the problem of drawing valid inferences in the face of price impact from fluctuating grain quality and rising imports.
   Keywords:	Grain prices; market institutions; data collection
   JEL:	N53

6. The Role of Public Employment Services in a Developing Country: The Case of Japan in the Twentieth Century
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Kambayashi, Ryo
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hit:primdp:40&r=his
   Like all developed and developing economies, Japan struggled with labor market issues in the process of industrialization. The Public Employment Service (PES) was probably the only countermeasure of the Japanese government before 1938, since other labor market policies such as minimum labor standard, unemployment insurance, and unionization were highly restricted by the political climate. In this article, we discuss the importance of the institutional arrangements of the PES by examining the developing stage of the Japanese labor market. In Japan, the PES was first institutionalized officially by the Employment Exchange Act in 1921. In the wake of the Kanto earthquake disaster in 1923, the PES played a substantial role in the recovery process, which implies the capacity of the PES to reduce unemployment even in a developing economy. However, under normal economic circumstances during the 1910s and 1920s, the institutional arrangement of the PES?namely, the financial backbone of the government and the nationwide network?was not effective as shown by anecdotes and ad hoc surveys. The statistical analysis of the matching function clearly shows that the PES, at least during the 1920s, had a fundamental problem?lacking long-term relations with other economic agents. Finally, improvements were made in the PES during the 1930s to cope with the economic crisis from the Great Depression. Such improvements were realized by incorporating already-existing networks of organizations that spontaneously emerged at the grassroots level. By 1938, when the Employment Exchange Act was revised to abolish private agencies, some PES centers had already absorbed nearby private networks and the matching technique of the PES was almost the same as that of private agencies. An ad hoc physical and financial investment by the government may not lead to the provision of efficient public services, and it is important to recognize that labor market policies are based on a long-term relationship among the PES, job seekers, and employers.
   Keywords:	public employment agency, private employment agencies, labor market intermediaries, matching function, Kanto earthquake
   JEL:	J68

7. Housing and the Great Depression
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Mehmet Balcilar (Department of Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University) Rangan Gupta (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria) Stephen M. Miller (Department of Economics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nlv:wpaper:1301&r=his
   This paper considers the role of the real housing price in the Great Depression. More specifically, we examine structural stability of the relationship between the real housing price and real GDP per capita. We test for structural change in parameter values, using a sample of annual US data from 1890 to 1952. The paper examines the long-run and short-run dynamic relationships between the real housing price and real GDP per capita to determine if these relationships experienced structural change over the sample period. We find that temporal Granger causality exists between these two variables only for sub-samples that include the Great Depression. For the other sub-sample periods as well as for the entire sample period no relationship exists between these variables.
   Keywords:	Great Depression, Real House Price, Real GDP per Capita, Structural change
   JEL:	C32

8. European migration, national origin and long-term economic development in the US
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Andrés Rodríguez-Pose Viola von Berlepsch
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1305&r=his
   Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This paper explores whether the distinct geographical settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across US counties. It uses micro-data from the 1880 and 1910 censuses in order to identify where migrants from different nationalities settled and then regresses these patterns on current levels of economic development, using both OLS and instrumental variable approaches. The analysis controls for a number of factors which would have determined both the attractiveness of different US counties at the time of migration, as well as current levels of development. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive impact associated with overall migration, the national origin of migrants does not make a difference for the current levels of economic development of US counties.
   Keywords:	Migration, National/Ethnic Origin, Institutions, Culture, Economic Development, Counties, USA
   JEL:	F22

9. Cost and Benefit of Globalization:Lesson Learned from Indonesian History
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Maddaremmeng A. Panennungi (Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics, University of Indonesia)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lpe:wpecbs:201303&r=his
   This paper is aimed at investigating the impact of globalization in Indonesia from long term recorded history. The methodology in this paper is focused on the literature survey with the qualitative analysis. The result shows that the presence of globalization in Indonesia tends to put the relationship between Indonesia (Nusantara or Netherland Indies) and the great power/globalizer as the Periphery-Centre (Core) relationship. It is shown that the globalizer influences Indonesia and not the other way around. The positive effect on Indonesia is globalization could increase people’s wealth and enrich Indonesia’s civilization without losing the real Indonesian culture. However, the presence of negative effect, could be very devastating, such as war and internal conflicts, in the time of clash among great powers/globalizers or in the time of changing time of influence from old great power to the new one.
   Keywords:	Globalization, Indonesia
   JEL:	F0

10. Inequality and growth in the very long run: Inferring inequality from data on social groups
    

    Date:	2013-02
    By:	Jørgen Modalsli (Statistics Norway)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssb:dispap:734&r=his
    This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables. Inequality indices generated from social tables are frequently calculated without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in the reporting of pre-industrial inequality. The correction method presented in this paper is applied to an existing collection of twenty-five social tables, from Rome in AD 1 to India in 1947. The corrections, using a variety of assumptions on within-group dispersion, lead to substantial increases in the Gini coefficients. Combining the inequality levels with data on GDP suggests a positive relationship between income inequality and economic growth. This supports earlier proposals, based on fewer data points, of a “super Kuznets curve” of increasing inequality over the entire pre-industrial period.
    Keywords:	Pre-industrial inequality; social tables; Kuznets curve; history
    JEL:	D31

11. Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: an analysis of U.S. state-level patenting
    

    Date:	2013-02
    By:	Carolina Castaldi Koen Frenken Bart Los
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:tuecis:wpaper:1303&r=his
    We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that unrelated variety enhances technological breakthroughs, since radical innovation often stems from connecting previously unrelated technologies opening up whole new functionalities and applications. Using patent data for US states in the period 1977-1999 and associated citation data, we find evidence for both hypotheses. Our study thus sheds a new and critical light on the related-variety hypothesis in economic geography.
    Keywords:	recombinant innovation, regional innovation, superstar patents, technological variety, evolutionary economic geography
    JEL:	O31

12. Cross Sections Are History
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Easterlin, Richard A. (University of Southern California)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7341&r=his
    Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally unrelated. Consider a number of major advances ("revolutions") in the human condition over the past four centuries – material living levels, life expectancy, universal schooling, political democracy, empowerment of women, and the like. Suppose that each has its own unique set of causes, and, as a result, a unique starting date and a unique rate of diffusion throughout the world. Suppose too that initially all countries are fairly closely bunched together on each variable in fairly similar circumstances. Suppose, finally, that the geographic pattern of diffusion is the same for each aspect of improvement in the human condition, that is, the same group of countries have a head start, and the follower countries in the various parts of the world fall in line in a similar geographic order. The result will be statistically significant international cross section relationships among the various phenomena, despite their being causally independent. The oft-reported significant cross-country relationships of many variables to economic growth may merely demonstrate that one set of countries got an early start in virtually every “revolution”, and another set, a late start.
    Keywords:	cross section, time series, economic growth, life expectancy, diffusion
    JEL:	C2

13. Average Marginal Income Tax Rates for New Zealand, 1907-2009
    

    Date:	2012-09
    By:	Fiona McAlister Debasis Bandyopadhyay Robert Barro Jeremy Couchman Norman Gemmell Gordon Liao (The Treasury)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nzt:nztwps:12/04&r=his
    Estimates of marginal tax rates (MTRs) faced by individual economic agents, and for various ggregates of taxpayers, are important for economists testing behavioural responses to changes in those tax rates. This paper reports estimates of a number of personal marginal income tax rate measures for New Zealand since 1907, focusing mainly on the aggregate income-weighted average MTRs proposed by Barro and Sahasakul (1983, 1986) and Barro and Redlick (2011). The paper describes the methodology used to derive the various MTRs from original data on incomes and taxes from Statistics New Zealand Official Yearbooks (NZOYB), and discusses the resulting estimates.
    Keywords:	Average marginal tax rates; New Zealand
    JEL:	H20

14. Share Portfolios and Risk Management in the Early Years of Financial Capitalism: London 1690-1730
    

    Date:	2012-09
    By:	Carlos, Ann M. Fletcher, Erin Neal, Larry
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hit:hitcei:2012-12&r=his
    The dramatic expansion of public and private financial markets in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution has received extensive attention. Despite interest in the operation of the capital market, much less is known about how ordinary individual investors managed risk within this framework. Using a newly constructed data set of share ownership for each company listed in the financial press of the day, we reconstruct individual portfolio holdings for every investor in these companies. We examine individual portfolio holdings first for the decade after the Glorious Revolution and then for the years around the South Sea Bubble of 1720. We also examine holdings over time. Despite a fivefold increase in the number of unique individuals in the market between the 1690s and the 1720s, we find that in each period roughly eighty per cent of those active in the equity market owned shares in only one company, even though most shareholders had the capacity or wealth to diversity their share portfolios. We also find some continuity in the market with forty per cent of those who owned stock in 1690 holding stock two decades later. This level of stock market activity suggests that individuals were diversifying against idiosyncratic liquidity risk. Overall, however, there is limited evidence that individuals were using their financial portfolios to increase return or reduce risk or to protect themselves against diversifiable shocks. Clearly some part of this behaviour can be explained by low levels of financial literacy, for many, however, company specific voting rules with their attendant effects on firm governance drove market activity.

15. The butterfly and the elephant: local social innovation, the welfare state and new poverty dynamics
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Stijn Oosterlynck Yuri Kazepov Andreas Novy Pieter Cools Eduardo Barberis Florian Wukovitsch Tatiana Saruis Bernhard Leubolt
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hdl:improv:1303&r=his
    This paper surveys the literature on localized socially innovative policies and actions aimed at overcoming poverty and social exclusion. The authors show how these local forms of social innovation emerged in the late 1970s against the backdrop of the crisis and transformation of the Western welfare state, the emergence of new social risks and the transition from the Fordist to the knowledge based economy. The paper aims to learn about new or older but as yet too often overlooked poverty and social exclusion dynamics from the locally embedded and collective responses to it by civil society associations, local state institutions and/or social entrepreneurs. The paper first develops a definition of social innovation as it applies to the fight against poverty and social exclusion. In a second part the authors put social innovation in its historical context by discussing three different strands of social innovation research and practice, namely: (1) social innovation as a critique of the territorial innovation model underlying the knowledge-based economy; (2) social innovation as a critique on the bureaucratic nature of the welfare state; and (3) socially innovative forms of neighbourhood development as a response to the urban crisis. The third section of the paper then zooms in on the process dimensions of social innovation for each of the three strands discussed in the second part. The authors propose the metaphor of ‘the elephant and the butterfly’ to think through the relationship between localized forms of socially innovative actions and initiatives on the one hand and the macro-level institutions of the welfare state and dialectical interplay between state institutions and civil society associations on the other. The paper concludes with a preliminary list of social needs, trends in poverty and the reconfiguration of welfare institutions and policies that are revealed by place-based socially innovative practices.
    Keywords:	Europe, Social innovation, welfare state, urban crisis, knowledge-based economy, poverty, social exclusion
    JEL:	D31

16. Financial accounting and reporting in Germany: A case study on German accounting tradition and experiences with the IFRS adoption
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Fülbier, Rolf Uwe Klein, Malte
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:bayfat:201301&r=his
    Financial accounting is rooted in national thoughts, traditions and institutional settings. As a consequence, accounting has developed heterogeneously over time and fulfilled contracting purposes in divergent national environments. Against this background, we argue that the ongoing process of accounting internationalization and imposed harmonization carries with it the danger of deforming country-specific balancing factors in the accounting systems, especially when the national environment for economic and contractual activities is not harmonized at all. In contrast to more evolutionary integration and adjustment processes of the past where spillover effects have always existed, the rapidity of the current process and coercive nature increases country-specific frictions. To support our argument and to substantiate the interplay of accounting as a contractual device and country-specific characteristics, we provide an in-depth case study of one country, Germany. We illustrate how the traditional German commercial law accounting system has evolved over time to meet specific contractual needs. We demonstrate how the current process of globalization and accounting internationalization has been attended by increasing frictions and challenges, especially on the contractual and regulatory level. We finally investigate the consequences on the German standard setting system, which also includes the changing role of German accounting research. — Als standardisierte Kommunikation zwischen Unternehmensbeteiligten wurzelt Rechnungslegung stets auch in nationalen Traditionen, Konzepten und institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen. Insofern verwundert es nicht, dass sich Rechnungslegung weltweit heterogen entwickelt hat und unter unterschiedlichen nationalen Bedingungen unterschiedlichen Zwecken folgt. Dabei birgt die seit Jahren zu beobachtende Internationalisierung und oktroyierte Harmonisierung der Rechnungslegung die Gefahr, landesspezifische (Ausgleichs-)Faktoren in der Rechnungslegung zu nivellieren, obwohl sonstige Rahmenbedingungen unternehmerischer Aktivität keineswegs harmonisiert sind. Im Gegensatz zu den eher evolutorischen Integrations- und Anpassungsprozessen der Vergangenheit, in denen Einflüsse anderer Systeme durchaus erkennbar waren, dürften die Schnelligkeit und der regulatorische Zwangscharakter des gegenwärtigen Prozesses landesspezifische Friktionen erzeugen. Um diese Argumentation zu untermauern und um das komplexe Zusammenspiel von Rechnungslegung als Vertragskoordinationsinstrument mit landesspezifischen Rahmenbedingungen zu verdeutlichen, wird eine detaillierte Fallstudie präsentiert, die auf ein einziges Land, Deutschland, zielt. Darin wird aufgezeigt wie sich handelsrechtliche, deutsche Bilanzierungstradition vor dem Hintergrund spezifischer Koordinationsbedürfnisse historisch entwickelt hat. Untersucht werden zudem die Friktionen und Herausforderungen auf unternehmensvertraglicher wie auch regulatorischer Ebene, die durch den gegenwärtigen Internationalisierungsprozess in der Rechnungslegung ausgelöst werden. Die Untersuchung schließt die dahingehenden Konsequenzen für das System der deutschen Rechnungslegungsregulierung und für die Rechnungslegungsforschung mit ein.
    Keywords:	German Accounting,Accounting Research,HGB,Code Law,Legal System,Socioeconomic-Environment,Institutional Settings,SME,Book-Tax-Conformity,Debt Financing,Accounting History
    JEL:	K22

17. Interrogating Protective Space: Shielding, Nurturing and Empowering Dutch Solar PV
    

    Date:	2012-09
    By:	Bram Verhees Rob Raven Frank Veraart Adrian Smith Florian Kern
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:tuecis:wpaper:1204&r=his
    This paper reviews the developments of solar photovoltaic technology in the Netherlands. Despite the recent boom in PV industries and deployment around the globe, the Dutch have until now not experienced major growth in the diffusion of PV electricity generation. But this is only part of the story. This paper focuses on the question why PV is still around in the Netherlands despite, at times, harsh policy and socio-economic contexts. It builds upon a recently developed framework from the field of transition studies that distinguishes between shielding, nurturing and empowerment of sustainable innovations. A historical description is combined with an analysis of niche space to show how PV advocates have been able to strategically secure and shape protective measures over four decades in the context of harsh regime selection environments. The paper suggests how further analysis with the shielding-nurturing-empowerment framework can learn from this exploratory study on PV innovation in the Netherlands.
    Keywords:	Strategic Niche Management, protective space, shielding, nurturing, empowering, solar PV.

18. Exploring mobile pricing strategies and innovations in the Thai mobile communications market
    

    Date:	2012
    By:	Srinuan, Chalita Srinuan, Pratompong Bohlin, Erik
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsb12:72522&r=his
    This paper aims to explore the price plans offered by Thai mobile operators and analyse the role of demand characteristics in the development of new price plans. The paper also shows how demand affects a firm’s degree of innovativeness in terms of the number of new price plans. The empirical qualitative analysis is based on an original data set from several secondary data sources and includes all the price plans offered in the history of the Thai mobile communications market between 2002 and 2010. The results show that mobile operators have introduced several innovative price plans to attract and retain their consumers. Although a greater number of price plans can increase competition among operators, some have complex combinations that may lead to confusion for consumers. A price comparison programme should therefore be implemented by the telecom regulator to ensure that consumers receive correct and complete information about the price plans. Most studies, by far, have not extensively discussed this mobile communications market in detail and the effect of innovation on competition between firms in the mobile communications industry, in particular the development of innovation in developing countries. –
    Keywords:	pricing strategies,mobile communications market,innovation,Thailand

nep-his 2013-04-20, 12 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
Business, Economic and Financial History

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-his

In this issue we have:

1. Dreams of order and freedom : debating trade management early 17th century England Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
2. Economic Thinking about Transnational Governance: Blind Spots and Historical Perspectives Hans-Michael Trautwein
3. Isaac I. Rubin e sua história do pensamento econômico João Antonio de Paula; Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira
4. A dinâmica do processo de urbanização no Brasil, 1940-2010 Fausto Alves de Brito; Breno Aloísio T. Duarte de Pinho
5. Large Block Shareholders, Institutional Investors, Boards of Directors and Bank Value in the Nineteenth Century Howard Bodenhorn
6. Transportes, modernização e formação regional: subsídios a história da era ferroviária em Minas Gerais Felipe de Alvarenga Batista; Lidiany Silva Barbosa; Marcelo Magalhães Godoy
7. ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND URBAN GROWTH:AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT WITH HISTORICAL MINES Edward L. Glaeser; Sari Pekkala Kerr; William R. Kerr
8. Fiscal sustainability in South Africa: Will history repeat itself? Estian Calitz; Stan du Plessis; Krige Siebrits
9. The development of private farms in Vietnam Kojin, Emi
10. Ingham and Keynes on the Nature of Money Mark Hayes
11. A New International Database on Education Quality: 1965-2010 Nadir Altinok; Claude Diebolt; Jean-Luc Demeulemeester
12. Capital social y desarrollo industrial. El caso de Prato, Italia Pablo Galaso Reca

Contents.

1. Dreams of order and freedom : debating trade management early 17th century England
   

   Date:	2012-04
   By:	Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td457&r=his
   The catharsis produced by the early 1620’s trade crisis had a significant impact on the way economic themes were regarded by public opinion in England. As a result, those who analyze the ideas put forward in the documents written during that period – be they printed pamphlets or official memoranda – are left with the impression that an adequate supply of money was the undisputed primary concern as regards economic administration. However, as already stressed by Barry Supple, monetary administration only occupied a prominent position in the political agenda of early 17th century England during times of crisis – that is, when the kingdom was faced with a perceived threat of demonetization. This paper tries to show that, during the first two decades of the 17th century, concern with an inflow of bullion and a positive balance of trade was only of secondary importance, being normally overshadowed by a more fundamental aim: promoting a well-ordered structure for the economic relations of the kingdom, according to specific views of what constituted proper trade management. This approach encompassed both foreign and domestic activities, and found its most evident manifestation in the debates about free trade and monopolies which permeated the whole of James I’s reign.
   Keywords:	free trade; monopoly; mercantilism; 17th century; Stuart England.
   JEL:	B14

2. Economic Thinking about Transnational Governance: Blind Spots and Historical Perspectives
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Hans-Michael Trautwein (University of Oldenburg – Department of Economics & ZenTra)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zen:wpaper:13&r=his
   The notion of ‘transnational governance’ refers to systems in which private actors and other non- state institutions participate in setting and enforcing norms for cross-border transactions in trade, finance and other business. While the term is modern, the co-evolution of world markets and hybrid regulation has been discussed since the times of pre-classical and classical political economy. Yet, while transnational governance is a hot issue in other disciplines, it is almost a non-theme in current economics. This paper explores the development of economic thinking about transnational governance in three steps. It starts with a description of transnationalization and a typology of transnational governance. Thereafter it relates the historical causes and analytical choices that make it difficult to deal with transnational governance in terms of modern economics. The blind spots in current frameworks of economic thinking raise the question whether more substantial reflections about transnational governance can be found in the history of economic thought, in the periods when economics as an academic discipline developed along with the emergence of nation states and the global system of markets. In the third step relevant ideas of Adam Smith, Friedrich List, Max Weber, John Hicks and many others are discussed and evaluated in the contexts of city states, trading companies, cross-border finance and self-regulation.
   Keywords:	transnational governance, private ordering, co-regulation, cross-border finance, city states, trading companies
   JEL:	B12

3. Isaac I. Rubin e sua história do pensamento econômico
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	João Antonio de Paula (Cedeplar-UFMG) Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td469&r=his
   This paper presents Isaak Rubin’s History of Economic Thought. After a brief description of his life and work, the paper discusses Karl Marx’s attempts to write a critical history of the political economy and, in connection with this, the paper analyses the meaning of Rubin’s History of Economic Thought.
   Keywords:	Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937), Karl Marx (1818-1883), history of economic thought, critique of political economy.
   JEL:	B14

4. A dinâmica do processo de urbanização no Brasil, 1940-2010
   

   Date:	2012-12
   By:	Fausto Alves de Brito (Cedeplar-UFMG) Breno Aloísio T. Duarte de Pinho (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td464&r=his
   The urbanization process in Brazil is crucial in the structural conformation of modern Brazilian society, especially from the second half of the twentieth century. Not only is the territory that accelerates the process of urbanization, but Brazilian society itself that becomes increasingly urban. The city becomes the privileged locus of economic activities more relevant and the vast majority of the population. The novelty of the urbanization process in Brazil was his tremendous speed, much higher than the developed countries, which did coincide in time, the processes of urbanization, urban population concentration in large cities and metropolises.
   Keywords:	urbanization process, system of cities
   JEL:	J6

5. Large Block Shareholders, Institutional Investors, Boards of Directors and Bank Value in the Nineteenth Century
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Howard Bodenhorn
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18955&r=his
   Share prices of modern corporations are influenced by the size and structure of boards of directors, large individual and institutional investors, and shareholder voting rights, among other governance features. It is not clear whether the same features mattered historically, given recent research suggesting that the principal concern in the nineteenth century was neither managerial self-dealing nor majority shareholder expropriation that might reduce the returns to common shareholders. Rather, at many nineteenth-century corporations, common shareholders were also customers and shareholding offered preferential access to the firms’ goods and services. Using modern empirical tools in a study of banks, this study finds evidence supporting the shareholder-as-customer model. Bank values responded positively to the presence of large-block individual shareholders (those more concerned with access to loans) and negatively to large-block institutional investors (those more concerned with dividend returns than access). Moreover, firm value declined as directors consumed larger fractions of a bank’s loans, which reduced the bank’s ability to extend credit to other shareholders.
   JEL:	G3

6. Transportes, modernização e formação regional: subsídios a história da era ferroviária em Minas Gerais
   

   Date:	2012-04
   By:	Felipe de Alvarenga Batista (UFRJ) Lidiany Silva Barbosa (Cedeplar-UFMG) Marcelo Magalhães Godoy (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td458&r=his
   This study examines the process of railway modernization in Minas Gerais. It uses theoretical classification that combines external variables, especially the expansion of the capital into the periphery, with internal variables, above all the hegemony of the raw material exporting model, marked by strong regional diversity. It was noted that the inappropriateness of the dominant standard of railway modernization in Brazil in relation to the structure of the economy of Minas did not prevent expansion of the tracks from reaching their greatest length in the territory of Minas Gerais. Political and financial factors presided over the Minas railway fever, which, in spite of being contemporary, underlined the irrational, onerous and dysfunctional nature of the system of concession, public subsidies and maintenance by the State of the regional network. On the ideological level, a supposedly legitimating association was mobilized between railways and modernity. On the substantive level, elements of the history of railway companies with activities in Minas Gerais were covered, were covered, and a time period is proposed for the Minas railway age, accompanied by systematization of the expansion process of the railway network based on.
   Keywords:	transportation, modernization, railway age, Minas Gerais, 1870-1940
   JEL:	N46

7. ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND URBAN GROWTH:AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT WITH HISTORICAL MINES
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Edward L. Glaeser Sari Pekkala Kerr William R. Kerr
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:13-15&r=his
   Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led that city to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growth of start- ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution.
   Keywords:	Entrepreneurship, Industrial Organization, Chinitz, Agglomeration, Clusters, Cities, Mines
   JEL:	L0

8. Fiscal sustainability in South Africa: Will history repeat itself?
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Estian Calitz (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch) Stan du Plessis (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch) Krige Siebrits (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers183&r=his
   Several empirical studies have found that fiscal policy has been sustainable in South Africa since 1960. This paper complements these studies by providing perspective on the manner in which fiscal sustainability was maintained. It discusses two episodes of significant increases and one period of substantial reduction in the public debt burden to show that periods of rising deficits and government debt in South Africa were followed by returns to sustainable levels, thereby preventing major domestic economic crises and external interventions. The paper also provides a projection of the fiscal outlook for South Africa based on a structural VAR model. The results suggest that the discretionary fiscal decisions of 2007 to 2010 might pose a serious threat to the sustainability of fiscal policy unless the authorities respond as they did in the past by checking large budget deficits and concomitant rapid increases in the public debt burden promptly.
   Keywords:	fiscal policy, fiscal sustainability, South Africa
   JEL:	H62

9. The development of private farms in Vietnam
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Kojin, Emi
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper408&r=his
   The objective of this paper is to explore the entities that have developed private farms (trang trai) in Vietnam. Various types of private farms have emerged in the last ten years. It is noteworthy that the owners of private farms are not necessarily agricultural households but also include government officials and the urban rich. Based on data collected from the author’s field surveys in Vietnam from 2006 to 2011, the paper attempts to categorize patterns in the development of private farms and analyze their differences. The paper argues that private farms developed by agricultural households are still limited because of the difficulty of consolidating land.
   Keywords:	Vietnam, Land tenure, Agriculture, Private farm, Trang trai, Business history, Agricultural household, Land market
   JEL:	O13

10. Ingham and Keynes on the Nature of Money
    

    Date:	2012-09
    By:	Mark Hayes (University of Cambridge)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pke:wpaper:pkwp1209&r=his
    This paper compares and contrasts the thinking of Keynes and Geoffrey Ingham, focussing mainly on The General Theory and Ingham’s The Nature of Money (2004). Two points in particular are addressed: first, the relevance of Ingham’s insistence (following Keynes, among others) on the primacy of money of account to an understanding of Keynes’s own insistence that income is intrinsically monetary and upon the importance of the wage unit as an analytical tool; and second, the subtle contrast between Keynes and Ingham in their understandings of the source of interest as a genuinely monetary and not a ‘real’ phenomenon. Where Keynes identifies uncertainty as the source of interest within a methodologically individualistic framework of analysis, Ingham offers a sociological case in terms of the struggle between the debtor and creditor interests that inevitably emerge as a result of the creation of bank money under capitalism. Taking both points together, Ingham’s work not only underpins the crucial distinction between money and ‘real’ wages for the theory of employment but also develops Keynes’s recognition of the potential opposition between the interests of finance and industry.
    Keywords:	nature of money – nature of income – theory of interest
    JEL:	B22

11. A New International Database on Education Quality: 1965-2010
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Nadir Altinok (BETA (University of Lorraine), IREDU (University of Bourgogne, France) Claude Diebolt (BETA (Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée), France) Jean-Luc Demeulemeester (DULBEA (University of Bruxelles), Bruxelles)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:03-13&r=his

12. Capital social y desarrollo industrial. El caso de Prato, Italia
    

    Date:	2013-12-04
    By:	Pablo Galaso Reca (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cjz:ca41cj:14&r=his
    Este artículo estudia los rasgos distintivos del capital social en la provincia de Prato (Italia), así como su papel en el nacimiento y posterior desarrollo de su distrito industrial. Para ello, se basa en múltiples investigaciones previas sobre dicha región, analizando sus resultados desde la óptica de las teorías del capital social. Las conclusiones muestran que el capital social desempeñó un rol fundamental en distintos momentos de la historia pratense, permitiendo que desarrollara con éxito el modelo característico de los distritos industriales.
    Keywords:	capital social, distritos industriales, desarrollo local, industria textil.
    JEL:	L67

nep-his 2013-04-13, 38 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
Business, Economic and Financial History

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-his

In this issue we have:

1. Did Muhammad Ali Foster Industrialization in Early 19th Century Egypt? Panza, Laura; Williamson, Jeffrey G
2. Literacy at South African Mission Stations Johan Fourie; Robert Ross; Russel Viljoen
3. Competing Bimetallic Ratios: Amsterdam, London and Bullion Arbitrage in the Mid-18th Century Nogues-Marco, Pilar
4. The Commodity Export, Growth, and Distribution Connection in Southeast Asia 1500-1940 Williamson, Jeffrey G
5. World Human Development: 1870-2007 Prados de la Escosura, Leandro
6. Great Leap, Great Famine Cormac Ó Gráda
7. War, Conquest and Local Merchants: The Role of Credit in the Peripheral Military Administration of the Hispanic Monarchy during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century. Jose Miguel Escribano Paez
8. The entrepreneur in economic theory: from an invisible man toward a new research field Vera Catarina Rocha
9. Women, Medieval Commerce, and the Education Gender Gap Bertocchi, Graziella; Bozzano, Monica
10. Macroculture, Athletics and Democracy in ancient Greece Economou, Emmanouel/Marios/Lazaros; Kyriazis, Nicholas
11. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE ‘MODERN VIEW’ AS REFLECTED IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT Mário Graça Moura; António Almodovar
12. The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State Giuliano, Paola; Nunn, Nathan
13. In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1930 Olivetti, Claudia; Paserman, M. Daniele
14. Politics on the road to the U.S. monetary union Peter L. Rousseau
15. What is a civil war ? a critical review of its definition and (econometric) consequences Gersovitz, Mark; Kriger, Norma
16. Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy: Was There a ‘Free Lunch’ in 1930s’ Britain? Crafts, Nicholas; Mills, Terence C
17. How Cardinal Utility Entered Economic Analysis during the Ordinal Revolution Moscati Ivan
18. Does The John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity And Citation Success? Ho Fai Chan; Bruno S. Frey; Jana Gallus; Benno Torgler
19. The Alpha of a Survey of the Literature in Economic and Financial Literacy William T. Alpert; Oskar R. Harmon
20. The Trade Impact of the Zollverein Keller, Wolfgang; Shiue, Carol Hua
21. The history augmented Solow model Dalgaard, Carl-Johan; Strulik, Holger
22. Emerging Geopolitical Trends and Security in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the People’s Republic of China, and India (ACI) Region C. Raja Mohan
23. A Review of C.L.R. James and Marxism in the United States Conrad, Daren A.
24. Reallocation and Technology: Evidence from the U.S. Steel Industry Collard-Wexler, Allan; De Loecker, Jan
25. La reinvención de Medellín Andrés Sánchez Jabba
26. Pearls worth Rds4000 or less: Reinterpreting eighteenth century sumptuary laws at the Cape Stan Du Plessis
27. ¿Habrá una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra? Instituciones coloniales y disparidades económicas regionales en Colombia Laura Cepeda Emiliani; Adolfo Meisel Roca
28. Not the Opium of the People: Income and Secularization in a Panel of Prussian Counties Becker, Sascha O.; Woessmann, Ludger
29. 50 is the new 30: Long-run trends of schooling and retirement explained by human aging Strulik, Holger; Werner, Katharina
30. Like Father like Sons? The Cost of Sovereign Defaults In Reduced Credit to the Private Sector Esteves, Rui; Jalles, João Tovar
31. "The U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance after WWII" (in Japanese) Junko Watanabe
32. Growth and crisis in the Japanese economy Valli Vittorio
33. Comerciantes en economías de frontera: El caso de La Guajira Colombiana, 1870-1930 Joaquín Viloria de La Hoz
34. Persistent effects of empires: Evidence from the partitions of Poland Grosfeld, Irena; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
35. The Settlement of the United States, 1800 to 2000: The Long Transition towards Gibrat’s Law Desmet, Klaus; Rappaport, Jordan
36. Gravity Modeling: International Trade and Innovations Josheski, Dushko; Fotov, Risto
37. Agricultural Price Distortions: Trends and Volatility, Past and Prospective Anderson, Kym
38. Agricultural policy in the European Union: An overview Tangermann, Stefan; von Cramon-Taubadel, Stephan

Contents.

1. Did Muhammad Ali Foster Industrialization in Early 19th Century Egypt?
   

   Date:	2013-02
   By:	Panza, Laura Williamson, Jeffrey G
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9363&r=his
   Muhammad Ali, who ruled Egypt between 1805 and 1849, intervened in Egyptian markets in an attempt to foster industrialization, especially between 1812 and 1840. Like a modern marketing board, the state purchased agricultural commodities (cotton, wheat) at low prices and sold them on world markets at much higher prices, a policy equivalent to an export tax. Ali also replaced tax farming with his own land taxes. The revenues so derived were used in part to finance manufacturing investment and to build irrigation canals. In addition, Ali supplied flax and cotton at those cheap purchase prices to domestic textile manufacturing, thus subsidizing the industry. He also used non-tariff barriers to exclude foreign competition from domestic markets. Were Ali’s state-led policies successful in fostering industry? The answer is no easier to extract from this phase of Egyptian history than from other poor countries at that time since Egypt faced the same terms of trade boom typical of most poor commodity exporters – Egyptian export commodity prices soared relative to manufactured imports, forces that were causing de-industrialization everywhere else in the poor periphery. Ali picked a very difficult time to pursue his agenda, but we show that his policies were successful.
   Keywords:	19th century; de-industrialization; Egypt; industrial policy; trade
   JEL:	F1

2. Literacy at South African Mission Stations
   

   Date:	2013
   By:	Johan Fourie (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch) Robert Ross (Deapertments of History, Universities of Leiden and South Africa) Russel Viljoen (Department of History, University of South Africa)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers182&r=his
   Measures of education quality – primarily, years of schooling or literacy rates – are widely used to ascertain the contribution of human capital formation to long-run economic growth and development. This paper, using a census of 4,678 mission station residents, documents for the first time literacy and numeracy rates of non-white citizens in nineteenth-century South Africa. The 1849 census allows for an investigation into how the mission stations influenced the growth of literacy in the Cape Colony. We find that age, gender, duration of residence, whether the individual arrived at the station after the emancipation of slaves or was born there and, importantly, which missionary society was operating the station, matter for literacy performance. The results offer new insights into the comparative performance of missionary societies in South Africa and contribute to the debate about the role of missionary societies in the development of a colonial society.
   Keywords:	human capital, South Africa, missionary, literacy, age-heaping
   JEL:	N37

3. Competing Bimetallic Ratios: Amsterdam, London and Bullion Arbitrage in the Mid-18th Century
   

   Date:	2013-01
   By:	Nogues-Marco, Pilar
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9300&r=his
   This article analyzes the stability of bimetallism for countries operating in integrated bullion markets who enact different legal ratios. I articulate a new theoretical framework to demonstrate that two countries can both be bimetallic only if they coordinate their legal ratios. The theoretical framework is applied to the mid-18th century when London’s legal ratio was 3.8% higher than that of Amsterdam. I find that Amsterdam was effectively on the bimetallic standard, whereas London was on a de facto gold standard.
   Keywords:	arbitrage; bimetallic stability; bullion market integration; melting-minting points; monetary policy; specie-point mechanism
   JEL:	E42

4. The Commodity Export, Growth, and Distribution Connection in Southeast Asia 1500-1940
   

   Date:	2013-02
   By:	Williamson, Jeffrey G
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9364&r=his
   This paper explores Southeast Asia’s trade performance over the four and a half centuries from 1500 to 1940. It identifies the determinants of the commodity export performance – falling trade costs, income growth of its trading partners, and improved supply conditions at home. It also explores its impact on Southeast Asia’s growth performance: trade specialization generated more macro volatility, de-industrialization, rising colonial power, and greater inequality up to World War 1, but these forces turned around in the region thereafter, including some modest industrial Catch-up. Finally, the paper elaborates on the distributional impact and colonial profitability of commodity export booms and busts throughout the last century.
   Keywords:	commodities; development; distribution; southeast Asia; trade
   JEL:	F14

5. World Human Development: 1870-2007
   

   Date:	2013-01
   By:	Prados de la Escosura, Leandro
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9292&r=his
   How has wellbeing evolved over time and across regions? How does the West compare to the Rest? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing has taken place since 1870. The absolute gap between OECD and the Rest widened over time, but an incomplete catching up –largely explained by education- has occurred since 1913 but fading away after 1970, when the Rest fell behind the OECD in terms of longevity. As the health transition was achieved in the Rest, the contribution of life expectancy to human development improvement declined. Meanwhile, in the OECD, as longevity increased, healthy years expanded. A large variance in human development is noticeable in the Rest since 1970, with East Asia, Latin America and North Africa catching up to the OECD, while Central and Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa falling behind.
   Keywords:	Education; HDI; Human Development; Life Expectancy; Wellbeing
   JEL:	I00

6. Great Leap, Great Famine
   

   Date:	2013-03-28
   By:	Cormac Ó Gráda (University College Dublin)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201304&r=his
   The paper is an extended review of two recent books on the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61
   Keywords:	: famine, Maoism, development

7. War, Conquest and Local Merchants: The Role of Credit in the Peripheral Military Administration of the Hispanic Monarchy during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.
   

   Date:	2012-09-04
   By:	Jose Miguel Escribano Paez (European University Institute.)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cmh:wpaper:10&r=his
   During the early modern period the European Monarchies were expanding geographically and politically. Despite the importance of the military campaigns the challenge was, however, not in conquering independent polities but in keeping them. For that reason the mobilization of resources to maintain the war effort was especially important and the members of the different military administrations were frequently obliged to obtain loans from the local merchants and financiers of the recently conquered communities. The reputation or ‘credit’ (the term employed to designate the borrower’s trustworthiness) of these monarchical agents in charge of the organization and funding of the military campaigns played a key role in the mobilization of local resources to maintain these conquests. Through a micro-historical analysis of some local loans negotiated during this period, I will analyse the credit assessment around these loans as conditioned by information about past conducts, future rewards and individual credibility. In doing so, we can realise the complexity of this reputation-based credit-assessment and reconstruct the different meanings of reputation that they handled.
   Keywords:	Credit, reputation, finances, military administration, conquests, Hispanic Monarchy, Sixteenth-Century.
   JEL:	N73

8. The entrepreneur in economic theory: from an invisible man toward a new research field
   

   Date:	2012-05
   By:	Vera Catarina Rocha (CEF.UP, FEP; CIPES)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:por:fepwps:459&r=his
   Mainstream economics had great difficulty in fitting entrepreneurship into its theory and for long time the theoretical firm remained “entrepreneurless”. However, from the early 20th century onwards, we identify strong attempts of key economists to recognize the role of the entrepreneur as an explanatory force of several economic phenomena. This paper analyzes the evolution of economic thought on entrepreneurship, and in particular the path through which the entrepreneur (re)entered into economic theory over the 20th century, leading to the new and increasingly independent research field Economics of Entrepreneurship. The analysis goes through the main Economics fields where the (re)discover of the entrepreneur figure was most remarkable – namely Labor Economics, Microeconomics and Industrial Organization, and Economic Growth and Development – searching for the rationality to include the entrepreneur figure into the analyses of particular economic phenomena. The study is enriched by a brief bibliometric analysis, which helps to set forth a chronological trace of the entrepreneurship research within Economics literature.
   Keywords:	Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur, Economic Thought, Labor Economics, Industrial Organization, Economic Development and Growth
   JEL:	B00

9. Women, Medieval Commerce, and the Education Gender Gap
   

   Date:	2013-02
   By:	Bertocchi, Graziella Bozzano, Monica
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9359&r=his
   We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country’s Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We find robust evidence that female primary school attainment, relative to that of males, is positively associated with the medieval pattern of commerce, along the routes that connected Italian cities among themselves and with the rest of the world. The effect of medieval commerce is particularly strong at the non-compulsory upper-primary level and persists even after controlling for alternative long-term determinants reflecting the geographic, economic, political, and cultural differentiation of medieval Italy. The long-term influence of medieval commerce quickly dissipates after national compulsory primary schooling is imposed at Unification, suggesting that the channel of transmission was the larger provision of education for girls in commercial centers.
   Keywords:	Education gender gap; family types.; Italian Unification; medieval commerce; political institutions
   JEL:	E02

10. Macroculture, Athletics and Democracy in ancient Greece
    

    Date:	2012-05-08
    By:	Economou, Emmanouel/Marios/Lazaros Kyriazis, Nicholas
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:45903&r=his
    In the present essay we examine whether and how sports affected the emergence of democracy as a political phenomenon in Classical Greece. To achieve this we introduce in a model the concept of macroculture as a complex of mutually supporting values, norms and beliefs in various areas of human activity, like athletics, war, politics, etc. Then, we proceed through a historical review on the history of sports in Ancient Greece and we investigate various aspects of how and under which terms athletics performed during classical Greece, predominantly, in ancient Athens. We found that the values that gradually emerged through sports during an extended period that goes back as far as the Bronze Age times, led to the development of an environment of mutually supporting norms and values such as equality and trust, that by being correlated and coordinated each other, led to the creation of new values and norms, as the theory of macroculture proposes. We also found that these new values were “diffused” from athletics to the field of politics and played a key role to the emergence of democracy.
    Keywords:	Macroculture, sports, democracy, Classical Greece.
    JEL:	D71

11. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE ‘MODERN VIEW’ AS REFLECTED IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
    

    Date:	2012-12
    By:	Mário Graça Moura (FEP.UP) António Almodovar (FEP.UP)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:por:fepwps:476&r=his
    This paper focuses on the gradual decomposition of classical political economy and its transformation into ‘economics’, a process which was to culminate in the conception of ‘theory’ as a mere engine of analysis. Why exactly did modern ‘economics’ become accepted? What was meant to be achieved – and was it? And why did some writers reject both old political economy and modern economics? We intend to contribute to an understanding of these issues by analysing a set of representative histories of economic ideas from this period: those by Luigi Cossa (1880), John Kells Ingram (1915, originally published in 1888), and Charles Gide and Charles Rist (1915).
    Keywords:	: History of Economic Thought; Methodology; Classical Economics.
    JEL:	B1

12. The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Giuliano, Paola Nunn, Nathan
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9304&r=his
    We provide evidence that a history of democracy at the local level is associated with contemporary democracy at the national level. Auxiliary estimates show that a tradition of local democracy is also associated with attitudes that favor democracy, with better quality institutions, and higher level of economic development.
    Keywords:	democracy; historical persistence; local institutions
    JEL:	N30

13. In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1930
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Olivetti, Claudia Paserman, M. Daniele
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9372&r=his
    This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create a pseudo-link not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers and daughters. The latter is typically not possible with historical data. We find that the father-son elasticity in economic status grows throughout the sample period. Intergenerational elasticities for daughters follow a broadly similar trend, but with some differences in timing. We argue that most of the increase in the intergenerational elasticity estimate in the early part of the 20th Century can be accounted for by the vast regional disparities in economic development, with increasing returns to human capital contributing to explain the residual. Other mechanisms such as changes in fertility, migration, and investment in public schooling, appear to have had only a minor role in explaining the trends.
    Keywords:	Intergenerational Mobility; Marriage
    JEL:	J11

14. Politics on the road to the U.S. monetary union
    

    Date:	2013-03-25
    By:	Peter L. Rousseau (Vanderbilt University)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:van:wpaper:vuecon-sub-13-00006&r=his
    Is political unity a necessary condition for a successful monetary union? The early United States seems a leading example of this principle. But the view is misleadingly simple. I review the historical record and uncover signs that the United States did not achieve a stable monetary union, at least if measured by a uniform currency and adequate safeguards against systemic risk, until well after the Civil War and probably not until the founding of the Federal Reserve. Political change and shifting policy positions end up as key factors in shaping the monetary union that did ultimately emerge.
    Keywords:	colonial currency, Bank of the United States, Jacksonian monetary policy, free banking, National Banking System, Federal Reserve System
    JEL:	N1

15. What is a civil war ? a critical review of its definition and (econometric) consequences
    

    Date:	2013-04-01
    By:	Gersovitz, Mark Kriger, Norma
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6397&r=his
    The authors argue that the academic literature, both qualitative and quantitative, has mislabeled most episodes of large-scale violence in Africa as civil war; these episodes better fit their concept of regional war complexes. The paper seeks to highlight the fundamental flaws in the conception of civil war in the econometric literature and their implications for econometric specification and estimation, problems that this literature is inherently incapable of rectifying. The authors advocate the comparative study of regional war complexes in Africa based on historical narratives.
    Keywords:	Post Conflict Reconstruction,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reintegration,International Affairs,Hazard Risk Management

16. Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy: Was There a ‘Free Lunch’ in 1930s’ Britain?
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Crafts, Nicholas Mills, Terence C
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9273&r=his
    We report estimates of the fiscal multiplier for interwar Britain based on quarterly data and time-series econometrics. We find that the government-expenditure multiplier was in the range 0.3 to 0.9 even during the period when interest rates were at the lower bound. The scope for a ‘Keynesian solution’ to recession was much less than is generally supposed. In the later 1930s but not before Britain’s exit from the gold standard, there was a ‘fiscal free lunch’ in the sense that deficit-financed government spending would have improved public finances enough to pay for the interest onthe extra debt.
    Keywords:	defence news; Keynesian solution; multiplier; public works; self-defeating austerity
    JEL:	E62

17. How Cardinal Utility Entered Economic Analysis during the Ordinal Revolution
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Moscati Ivan (University of Turin)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:cesmep:201301&r=his
    The paper shows that cardinal utility entered economic analysis during the Ordinal Revolution initiated by Pareto and not, as many popular histories of utility theory assume, before it. Cardinal utility was the outcome of a discussion begun by Pareto about the capacity of ranking transitions among different combinations of goods. The discussion simmered away during the 1920s and early 1930s, underwent a decisive rise in temperature between 1934 and 1938, and continued with some final sparks until 1944. The paper illustrates the methodological and analytical issues and the measurement-theoretic problems, as well as the personal and institutional aspects that characterized this debate. Many eminent economists of the period contributed to it, with Samuelson in particular playing a pivotal role in defining and popularizing cardinal utility. Based on archival research in Samuelson’s papers at Duke University, the paper also addresses an issue of priority associated with the mathematical characterization of cardinal utility.

18. Does The John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity And Citation Success?
    

    Date:	2013-03-14
    By:	Ho Fai Chan Bruno S. Frey Jana Gallus Benno Torgler
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qut:qubewp:wp004&r=his
    Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients’ subsequent research activity and status compared to a synthetic control group of nonrecipient scholars with similar previous research performance. We find evidence of positive incentive and status effects that raise both productivity and citation levels.
    Keywords:	Awards, Incentives, Research, John Bates Clark Medal, Synthetic control method
    JEL:	A13

19. The Alpha of a Survey of the Literature in Economic and Financial Literacy
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	William T. Alpert (University of Connecticut) Oskar R. Harmon (University of Connecticut)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uct:uconnp:2013-06&r=his
    There is a century long history of economic and financial education laced with implications for both political civic education. It has been argued by some economists that since economics is based on rational self-interested “agents” we don’t need to teach economics at the undergraduate level all. This paper offers a brief review of the literature from the K- college results of economic and financial education extending the survey to the more recent attempts at public financial and economic education. In the review we try to highlight both the results and types of approaches. We then identify some of the areas in which the relatively new areas of behavioral and experimental economics are relevant to economic and financial literacy efforts. We speculate on how these findings may effect economic and financial literacy efforts in the future. JEL Classification: A20, A21, A22, A29
    Keywords:	Financial literacy, economic literacy, economic education, financial education

20. The Trade Impact of the Zollverein
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Keller, Wolfgang Shiue, Carol Hua
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9387&r=his
    The Zollverein was arguably the most important free-trade agreement of the 19th century. This paper investigates the economic impact of the Zollverein on trade in Germany. Although 1834 is the official date of the Zollverein’s establishment, member states in fact joined in a non-random sequence over several decades. This was because the benefits of becoming a member increased, both as the size of the union increased, and as membership in the union became increasingly important for accessing foreign markets. Our key innovation in this paper is to incorporate the endogenous effects of accession into an estimate of the economic impact of the Zollverein customs union. We find these effects are important–our estimated effects are several times larger than the simpler estimates that do not take these effects into account. The paper discusses the implications of this for Germany’s economic history as well as for other studies of trade liberalization.
    Keywords:	customs union; market integration; price convergence
    JEL:	N73

21. The history augmented Solow model
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Dalgaard, Carl-Johan Strulik, Holger
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cegedp:151&r=his
    Unified growth theory predicts that the timing of the fertility transition is a key determinant of contemporary comparative development, as it marks the onset of the take-off to sustained growth. Neoclassical growth theory presupposes a take-off, and explains comparative development by variations in (subsequent) investment rates. The present analysis integrates these two perspectives empirically, and shows that they together constitute a powerful predictive tool vis-a-vis contemporary income differences. –
    Keywords:	comparative development,unified growth theory,neoclassical growth theory
    JEL:	O11

22. Emerging Geopolitical Trends and Security in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the People’s Republic of China, and India (ACI) Region
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	C. Raja Mohan (Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI))
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eab:govern:23397&r=his
    The rapid economic growth in the region consisting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and India has begun to change the strategic landscape of the world. The accretion of military power that inevitably followed the region’s economic growth is altering the balance of power within the region and between Asia and the West. This background paper outlines the geopolitical trends in a region that has become the center stage of international politics in the 21st century. It begins with a review of the idea of Asia in the 20th century and identifies the inherited political legacy of Asia in the middle of the 20th century. The paper then provides an assessment of the region’s unfolding geopolitical transformation in recent years and asks if the regional structures in Asia can cope with it. The paper also explores the problems of integrating the two rising Asian powers, the PRC and India, into the structures of global governance. It concludes with a brief discussion on the strategic policy imperatives facing the ACI region.
    Keywords:	ASEAN, China, India, geopolitical trends, international politics, geopolitical transformation
    JEL:	F59

23. A Review of C.L.R. James and Marxism in the United States
    

    Date:	2013-04-09
    By:	Conrad, Daren A.
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46039&r=his
    The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence on the theoretical dimension of Marxism, advanced by Cyril Lionel Robert James, on the struggles in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and to explore the influence that this intellectual had in the development of an understanding of Marxism in the U.S. during this period. In order to do so, it is important to chronologically follow James’s life. For the purpose of this paper, I will discuss some of the aspects of James’s Marxism which will allow us to see how he shaped his thoughts as a Marxist and the extent to which he was able to put his theories into practice. A fragment of James’s autobiography serves as a useful illustration: I had been reading…But the people who had passion, human energy, anger, violence and generosity were the common people whom I saw around me. They shaped my political outlook and from that day to this day those are the people with who I am concerned the most. That’s why I was able to understand Marx very easily, and particularly Lenin. When I went into Marxism I was already well prepared…Even in my days of fiction I had the instinct which enable me to grasp the fundamentals of Marxism so easily and then to work at Marxism having the basic elements of a Marxist view – my concern with the common people. James’s method was more or less empirical and his observations formed the basis for his exploration of ideas.
    Keywords:	Marxism, CLR James
    JEL:	B0

24. Reallocation and Technology: Evidence from the U.S. Steel Industry
    

    Date:	2013-02
    By:	Collard-Wexler, Allan De Loecker, Jan
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9331&r=his
    We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel, the minimill, on the aggregate productivity of U.S. steel producers, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. We find that the sharp increase in the industry’s productivity is linked to this new technology, and operates through two distinct mechanisms. First, minimills displaced the older technology, called vertically integrated production, and this reallocation of output was responsible for a third of the increase in the industry’s productivity. Second, increased competition, due to the expansion of minimills, drove a substantial reallocation process within the group of vertically integrated producers, driving a resurgence in their productivity, and consequently of the industry’s productivity as a whole.
    Keywords:	competition; productivity; reallocation; technology
    JEL:	L1

25. La reinvención de Medellín
    

    Date:	2012-10-17
    By:	Andrés Sánchez Jabba
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000102:010058&r=his
    Medellin, the second most important amongst Colombian cities, was once the country’s main industrial hub. This success was based on the rise of its textile cluster, which constituted the primary source of urban economic growth during most of the twentieth century. However, excessive specialization in textile production generated a sharp industrial crisis associated to the commercial liberalization of the 1990’s. On the other hand, the emergence of organized drug trafficking significantly increased the levels of violence. The combination between these two factors triggered a profound urban crisis, characterized by institutional instability. Although this distressing scene seemed difficult to revert, Medellin figured out how to reinvent itself: violence decreased, social and economic indicators improved and the city decided to orient urban economic development towards the generation of knowledge and high tech products and services. This represents a new urban strategy which relies on the intensive use of technology and requires an increased level of innovation and human capital, aspects that favor economic growth and the generation of wealth. RESUMEN: En este trabajo se analiza la evolución reciente de la economía de Medellín, una de las principales ciudades colombianas. Con la adopción del modelo de industrialización por sustitución de importaciones esta urbe se convirtió en el centro industrial más importante del país. Esto se debió al surgimiento de su aglomerado textil, el cual fue la fuente de crecimiento económico urbano durante gran parte del siglo XX. Sin embargo, el excesivo grado de especialización en la producción textil generó una profunda crisis industrial cuando inició el proceso de liberalización comercial en la década de 1990. Adicionalmente, el surgimiento del narcotráfico incrementó considerablemente los niveles de violencia. La combinación de estos dos factores dejó a la ciudad sumida en una profunda crisis urbana hacia finales del siglo XX, caracterizada por la inestabilidad institucional. Aunque este desolador panorama parecía difícil de revertir, Medellín supo reinventarse: los niveles de violencia disminuyeron, los indicadores sociales y económicos mejoraron y la ciudad buscó el resurgimiento urbano orientando su economía hacia la generación de conocimiento apalancado en la innovación y el uso intensivo de la tecnología. Esta última representa una nueva estrategia urbana, consistente con las nuevas condiciones y que puede ayudar a generar una mayor riqueza y desarrollo económico.

26. Pearls worth Rds4000 or less: Reinterpreting eighteenth century sumptuary laws at the Cape
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Stan Du Plessis
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rza:wpaper:336&r=his
    Governor Ryk Tulbagh promulgated sumptuary laws at the Cape in 1755. Umbrellas could no longer be carried freely by all classes, silk dresses of a certain length could not be worn by ladies without regard to rank, and the value of pearl necklaces was strictly limited. These laws have often been interpreted as an attempt to maintain a social hierarchy (e.g. Ross 1990), a “defence against emulation†in the words of De Vries (2008). But the standard explanation leaves something to be desired: it does not engage with the economic motivation for sumptuary laws that influenced similar regulations in Europe and Asia at the time, nor does it explain why the VOC would legislate in the Cape what the Dutch never tolerated at home, and it seamlessly extrapolates the explanation for laws in Batavia to a different social and economic setting in the Cape. An alternative interpretation of Tulbagh’s sumptuary laws is developed in this paper, which draws on evidence from the Cape and from Batavia. Their economic causes are sought in the East, where the laws originated, while their social reception and their impact are sought in the records of the Cape. In this way the paper provides a new interpretation of the causes underlying the sumptuary laws of 1755 and their role as instruments of economic and social policy.
    Keywords:	Sumptuary laws, Cape colony in the 18th century, Dutch East India Company

27. ¿Habrá una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra? Instituciones coloniales y disparidades económicas regionales en Colombia
    

    Date:	2013-03-12
    By:	Laura Cepeda Emiliani Adolfo Meisel Roca
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000102:010628&r=his
    In this paper we analyze the colonial origins of the current economic inequalities among the regions of Colombia. The next section reviews the recent literature of the new institutional economic history on the intercountry and interregional economic inequalities observed in the Americas. The major geographical aspects of the Colombian territory are discussed, since together with institutions geography is considered to be a key determinant of economic prosperity in the long run. A simple model relating prosperity with a proxy for institutions and geographical variables was estimated for the cities with more than 100.000 inhabitants. In the final comments we discuss one of the main options for the advancement of regions which have a “bad colonial history” in comparison with other regions in the same country. RESUMEN: En este trabajo se analizan los orígenes coloniales de las desigualdades económicas entre las regiones de Colombia. Se hace una revisión de los estudios más recientes en la tradición de la nueva historia institucional para tratar de entender cómo las instituciones coloniales llevaron a las enormes desigualdades territoriales que hoy se observan en los países americanos. Se presentan los aspectos más sobresalientes de la geografía física colombiana, ya que la geografía y las instituciones son consideradas como las bases últimas de las desigualdades económicas entre las regiones. Se realiza un sencillo análisis econométrico para relacionar los niveles de pobreza observados en las ciudades colombianas de más de 100.000 habitantes con una proxy de instituciones coloniales y una medida de características geográficas. En las reflexiones finales se discute una de las opciones más claras que tienen las regiones de un país que tienen una “mala historia colonial” para poder superar esa situación: la inversión en capital humano.

28. Not the Opium of the People: Income and Secularization in a Panel of Prussian Counties
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Becker, Sascha O. Woessmann, Ludger
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9299&r=his
    The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing income. The cross-section also shows a negative association between income and church attendance. But the association disappears in panel analyses, including first- differenced models of the 1886-1911 change, panel models with county and time fixed effects, and panel Granger-causality tests. The results cast doubt on causal interpretations of the religion- economy nexus in Prussian secularization.
    Keywords:	Prussian economic history; Religion; secularization
    JEL:	N33

29. 50 is the new 30: Long-run trends of schooling and retirement explained by human aging
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Strulik, Holger Werner, Katharina
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cegedp:152&r=his
    Workers in the US and other developed countries retire no later than a century ago and spend a significantly longer part of their life in school, implying that they stay less years in the work force. The facts of longer schooling and simultaneously shorter working life are seemingly hard to square with the rationality of the standard economic life cycle model. In this paper we propose a novel theory, based on health and aging, that explains these long-run trends. Workers optimally respond to a longer stay in a healthy state of high productivity by obtaining more education and supplying less labor. Better health increases productivity and amplifies the return on education. The health accelerator allows workers to finance educational efforts with less forgone labor supply than in the previous state of shorter healthy life expectancy. When both life-span and healthy life expectancy increase, the health effect is dominating and the working life gets shorter if the preference for leisure is sufficiently strong or the return on education is sufficiently large. We calibrate an extended version of the model and show that it is capable to predict the historical trends of schooling and retirement. –
    Keywords:	healthy life expectancy,longevity,education,retirement,labor supply,compression of morbidity
    JEL:	E20

30. Like Father like Sons? The Cost of Sovereign Defaults In Reduced Credit to the Private Sector
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Esteves, Rui Jalles, João Tovar
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9303&r=his
    This paper investigates the impact of sovereign defaults on the ability of the corporate sector in emerging nations to finance itself abroad. The hypothesis here is that defaults have a negative spillover effect on the private sector through credit rationing. We explore a novel dataset covering the vast majority of corporates and municipals in emerging nations that received foreign capital between 1880 and 1913. The detailed nature of the data allows us to explore variation between countries and economic sectors. The results confirm that rationing existed, was very large, and persisted long beyond the solution of the original default problem. Therefore, the private sector in emerging countries paid a severe reputational cost for the debt intolerance of their governments, with possible implications for the growth prospects of these nations.
    Keywords:	Credit Rationing; Foreign Investment; Pre-1914; Sovereign Default
    JEL:	F32

31. "The U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance after WWII" (in Japanese)
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Junko Watanabe (Graduate School of Economics and Faculty of Economics, Kyoto University)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tky:jseres:2013cj245&r=his
    This study examines post war U.S. economic policies, focusing on industrial adjustment policies related to trade frictions. In particular, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) policies are reviewed from a historical perspective, from their introduction in 1962 through to the present. From the view of this study, TAA is interpreted as a sort of industrial adjustment policy since it became a means to cope with industrial decline, protectionism under the trade frictions, strengthening competitiveness and relocation of resources to other promising industries. TAA programs offered income support, job training and financial help for relocation to dislocated workers, and financial loan and technical assistance to firms, etc. The findings are as follows. Firstly, it is surprising that TAA policies continued over 50 years, while undergoing changes and transition, even if its legitimacy sometimes came into question. Its scope included not only the ‘injury’ (e.g. job loss) sustained by the surge in imports but also the ‘injury’ by the shifting of production abroad. Considering that the U.S. economy has been involved increasingly to the global economy in both trade and direct investment, this is understandable. In addition, the policies related to the TAA such as employment policies and trade policies were also incorporated within TAA. Secondly, although the TAA policies were established as a sort of industrial adjustment policies, the degree of government assistance was not so high in proportion to the U.S. economy. The Americans placed reliance rather on market mechanism and ‘self-help’ culture. TAA certifications peaked in the latter half of the 1970s and 1980 and the main industries were non-rubber shoes, textile and apparel, steel, automobile and electronics. But in aggregate, the budget scale and the number of users were not so considerable. Regarding the interaction between these economic policies and the market mechanism, further investigation should be conducted.

32. Growth and crisis in the Japanese economy
    

    Date:	2012-04
    By:	Valli Vittorio (University of Turin)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:dipeco:201207&r=his
    Japan’ economy has experienced a period of very rapid economic growth in the 1950-1973 years, a partial slowing down of the rate of growth up to the end of the 1980s and then a prolonged severe structural crisis in the last two decades. The paper gives an overview of Japan’s main economic trends and policies in the post-war period and tries explaining the period of rapid growth and the period of structural crisis with an interpretative framework that can in part account for both phases.

33. Comerciantes en economías de frontera: El caso de La Guajira Colombiana, 1870-1930
    

    Date:	2013-02-20
    By:	Joaquín Viloria de La Hoz
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000101:010486&r=his
    The main purpose of this article is to analyze the commercial activities in La Guajira, Colombia, as well as the in titutional and geographical constraints traders faced between 1870s and 1930s. The result that La Guajira developed a frontier economy, characterized by a weak institutional presence, economic practices with few state surveillance, wide presence of indigenous population, inhospitable zones for colonization and active trade with neighboring countries. The lack of institutions allowed the traders to grow without further controls. The entrepreneurs and regional leaders, linked to extractive activities such as: salt, pearls and logwood, as well as trade, could not create the adequate institutions and business environment to consolidate the departments economy with a production structure based on endogenous production, competitive companies and a job market adjusted to the national legislation. RESUMEN: El objetivo del presente documento es analizar las actividades comerciales en el territorio de La Guajira colombiana, así como las limitaciones institucionales y naturales a que se vieron sometidos sus comerciantes entre las décadas de 1870 y 1930. El estudio plantea que en La Guajira se desarrolló una economía de frontera, caracterizada por la escasa presencia institucional, prácticas económicas con escasa vigilancia estatal, amplia presencia de población indígena, zonas inhóspitas para la colonización y activo comercio con países vecinos. La falta de Estado permitió que los negociantes adelantaran sus actividades sin mayores controles. Los empresarios y dirigentes regionales vinculados a las actividades extractivas como sal, perlas, palo de tinte, así como al comercio, no pudieron crear las instituciones ni el ambiente empresarial propicio para que en la economía guajira se consolidara un tejido productivo basado en la producción endógena, con empresas competitivas y un mercado de trabajo ajustado a la legislación nacional.

34. Persistent effects of empires: Evidence from the partitions of Poland
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Grosfeld, Irena Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9371&r=his
    We use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires—Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the main difference in voting across Polish territories attributed by many observers to the legacy of empires is driven by omitted variables. However, empires do have a significant causal effect. The lands that belonged to Prussia (compared with those that belonged to Russia) vote more for anticommunist (post-Solidarity) parties. This difference is largely explained by the persistent effect of infrastructure built by Prussians at the time of industrialization. The former Austrian lands (compared with former Russian lands) votes more for religious conservatives and for liberals. The difference in the vote for religious conservatives is explained by persistent differences in church attendance driven by vastly different policies of the two empires toward the Catholic Church. Higher support for liberals on the Austrian side is partly explained by a persistent belief in democracy, which is a legacy of decentralized democratic governance of the Austrian empire.
    Keywords:	culture; empires; infrastructure; Partitions of Poland; persistence; Poland
    JEL:	O10

35. The Settlement of the United States, 1800 to 2000: The Long Transition towards Gibrat’s Law
    

    Date:	2013-02
    By:	Desmet, Klaus Rappaport, Jordan
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9353&r=his
    This paper studies the long run development of U.S. counties and metro areas from 1800 to 2000. In earlier periods smaller counties converge whereas larger counties diverge. Over time, due to changes in the age composition of locations and net congestion, convergence dissipates and divergence weakens. Gibrat’s law emerges gradually without fully attaining it. Our findings suggest that orthogonal growth is a consequence of reaching a steady state population distribution, rather than an explanation of that distribution. A simple one-sector model, with entry of new locations, a growth friction, and decreasing net congestion closely matches these and related dynamics.
    Keywords:	Gibrat’s law; growth across space; long-term development; settlement of US; spatial distribution of population
    JEL:	N91

36. Gravity Modeling: International Trade and Innovations
    

    Date:	2013-03-26
    By:	Josheski, Dushko Fotov, Risto
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:71060&r=his
    In this paper issue of gravity modeling in international trade has been investigated. Standard gravity equation augmented with other variables to control for transportation cost, whether trade partners are neighbors and whether country is landlocked, or countries participants in trade have had colonial history together. Also in our model we control whether traded commodities are homogenous, differentiated or high tech , as well referenced. Variable to denote technology are :TAI index, which stands for technological achievement index, also variables for creation and diffusion of technology , as measured by the number of patents from the residents and royalty and license fees receipts, by the foreign citizens. Results are as expected and the show that trade is highly dependent on the exporters and importers levels of technology –
    Keywords:	gravity model,bilateral trade
    JEL:	F11

37. Agricultural Price Distortions: Trends and Volatility, Past and Prospective
    

    Date:	2013-01
    By:	Anderson, Kym
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9286&r=his
    Historically, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduced global economic welfare and agricultural trade, and added to global inequality and poverty. Over the past three decades, much progress has been made in reducing agricultural protection in high-income countries and agricultural disincentives in developing countries. However, plenty of price distortions remain. As well, the propensity of governments to insulate their domestic food market from fluctuations in international prices has not waned. Such insulation contributes to the amplification of international food price fluctuations, yet it does little to advance national food security when food-importing and food-exporting countries equally engage in insulating behaviour. Thus there is still much scope to improve global economic welfare via multilateral agreement not only to remove remaining trade distortions but also to desist from varying trade barriers when international food prices gyrate. This paper summarizes indicators of trends and fluctuations in farm trade barriers before examining unilateral or multilateral trade arrangements, together with complementary domestic measures, that could lead to better global food security outcomes.
    Keywords:	export taxation; Farmer protection; food price spikes; trade policy history
    JEL:	F13

38. Agricultural policy in the European Union: An overview
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Tangermann, Stefan von Cramon-Taubadel, Stephan
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:daredp:1302&r=his
    [Conclusions] All policy making, including for the agricultural sector, is of idiosyncratic nature and differs widely from country to country. However, due to its supra-national dimension the EUs Common Agricultural Policy is a very special case that is in no way even vaguely comparable to the agricultural policy regime in any other part of the world. The specificity of the CAP relates to several factors, including the historical origin, the process of decision making, the financing regime, and the global significance of the EUs agricultural sector. [...] –

nep-hpe 2013-04-20, 19 papers

NEP: New Economics Papers
History and Philosophy of Economics

Note: Access to full contents may be restricted.
NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Victoria University of Wellington.
To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options/nep-hpe

In this issue we have:

1. Isomorphic Strategy Spaces in Game Theory Gagen, Michael
2. Economic Thinking about Transnational Governance: Blind Spots and Historical Perspectives Hans-Michael Trautwein
3. Isaac I. Rubin e sua história do pensamento econômico João Antonio de Paula; Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira
4. Occupy the System! Societal Constitutionalism and Transnational Corporate Accounting Moritz Renner
5. Effective Demand: Securing the Foundations – Symposium Olivier Allain; Jochen Hartwig; Mark Hayes
6. Ingham and Keynes on the Nature of Money Mark Hayes
7. Dreams of order and freedom : debating trade management early 17th century England Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
8. Inovação em Celso Furtado: criatividade humana e crítica ao capitalismo Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
9. The Use of Economics in WTO Appellate Body Decisions Thomas J. Prusa
10. Improving Nash by Coarse Correlation Herve Moulin; Indrajit Ray; Sonali Sen Gupta
11. Nouvelle économie institutionnelle ou socioéconomie des institutions ? Jérôme Maucourant
12. Discourse, power and governmentality: Social movement research with and beyond Foucault Baumgarten, Britta; Ullrich, Peter
13. On the Foundations of Well-Being Economics and Policy Giuseppe Munda
14. Cliométrie et Capital humain Charlotte Le Chapelain
15. A Concept of the Global to Conceive Global Governance. Four Metaphorical Proposals Daniel Innerarity
16. Do Control Questions Influence Behavior in Experiments? Catherine Roux; Christian Thöni
17. Understanding Determinants of Happiness under Uncertainty Peter Huxley; Tapas Mishra; Bazoumana Ouattara; Mamata Parhi
18. Les limites du capitalisme : penser la crise du néolibéralisme et les failles de la pensée économique avec Karl Polanyi Jérôme Maucourant
19. Quantitative Machtkonzepte in der Ökonomik Roland Kirstein; Matthias Peiss

Contents.

1. Isomorphic Strategy Spaces in Game Theory
   

   Date:	2013-04-10
   By:	Gagen, Michael
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46176&r=hpe
   This book summarizes ongoing research introducing probability space isomorphic mappings into the strategy spaces of game theory. This approach is motivated by discrepancies between probability theory and game theory when applied to the same strategic situation. In particular, probability theory and game theory can disagree on calculated values of the Fisher information, the log likelihood function, entropy gradients, the rank and Jacobian of variable transforms, and even the dimensionality and volume of the underlying probability parameter spaces. These differences arise as probability theory employs structure preserving isomorphic mappings when constructing strategy spaces to analyze games. In contrast, game theory uses weaker mappings which change some of the properties of the underlying probability distributions within the mixed strategy space. Here, we explore how using strong isomorphic mappings to define game strategy spaces can alter rational outcomes in simple games . Specific example games considered are the chain store paradox, the trust game, the ultimatum game, the public goods game, the centipede game, and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In general, our approach provides rational outcomes which are consistent with observed human play and might thereby resolve some of the paradoxes of game theory.
   Keywords:	non-cooperative game theory, isomorphic probability spaces
   JEL:	C02

2. Economic Thinking about Transnational Governance: Blind Spots and Historical Perspectives
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Hans-Michael Trautwein (University of Oldenburg – Department of Economics & ZenTra)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zen:wpaper:13&r=hpe
   The notion of ‘transnational governance’ refers to systems in which private actors and other non- state institutions participate in setting and enforcing norms for cross-border transactions in trade, finance and other business. While the term is modern, the co-evolution of world markets and hybrid regulation has been discussed since the times of pre-classical and classical political economy. Yet, while transnational governance is a hot issue in other disciplines, it is almost a non-theme in current economics. This paper explores the development of economic thinking about transnational governance in three steps. It starts with a description of transnationalization and a typology of transnational governance. Thereafter it relates the historical causes and analytical choices that make it difficult to deal with transnational governance in terms of modern economics. The blind spots in current frameworks of economic thinking raise the question whether more substantial reflections about transnational governance can be found in the history of economic thought, in the periods when economics as an academic discipline developed along with the emergence of nation states and the global system of markets. In the third step relevant ideas of Adam Smith, Friedrich List, Max Weber, John Hicks and many others are discussed and evaluated in the contexts of city states, trading companies, cross-border finance and self-regulation.
   Keywords:	transnational governance, private ordering, co-regulation, cross-border finance, city states, trading companies
   JEL:	B12

3. Isaac I. Rubin e sua história do pensamento econômico
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	João Antonio de Paula (Cedeplar-UFMG) Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td469&r=hpe
   This paper presents Isaak Rubin’s History of Economic Thought. After a brief description of his life and work, the paper discusses Karl Marx’s attempts to write a critical history of the political economy and, in connection with this, the paper analyses the meaning of Rubin’s History of Economic Thought.
   Keywords:	Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937), Karl Marx (1818-1883), history of economic thought, critique of political economy.
   JEL:	B14

4. Occupy the System! Societal Constitutionalism and Transnational Corporate Accounting
   

   Date:	2012-11
   By:	Moritz Renner (University of Bremen – Faculty of Law & ZenTra)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zen:wpaper:08&r=hpe
   Today’s most pressing constitutional question is posed by a global economic system whose expansive tendencies seem no longer controllable. The current financial/debt crisis has triggered diverse reactions in the political arena ranging from the reformist ordo-liberal approach followed by France and Germany in the context of Eurozone negotiations to the anarchist ideas of the Occupy Now movement. As different as these reactions may be, they can be clearly situated in an ideological coordinate system which has basically remained unchanged since the 1920ies. In the past century, two lines of thought have determined our conceptions of political economy: The German debate of the Weimar republic has labelled these lines of thought as Economic Democracy (Wirtschaftsdemokratie), on the one hand, and Economic Constitutionalism (Wirtschaftsverfassung), on the other. The Societal Constitutionalism approach apparently shifts the established ideological coordinates by developing a theory of self-constitutionalizating of social spheres. It seeks to combine the virtues of grassroots democracy with the sophistication of systemic social theory. Thus, its normative claim can be formulated as an oxymoron: ‘Occupy the System!’ The claim is an oxymoron, because it points to the apparent impossibility of critical social theory in a functionally differentiated society: How can a functional system such as the economy be ‘occupied’ or ‘democratized’? In my contribution, I try to find the grain of truth this oxymoron contains. With a view to the concrete example of transnational standard-setting procedures in the field of corporate accounting, I examine institutional and systemic processes which enable an emerging political discourse at the core of the global economy.
   Keywords:	Corporate accounting, financial reporting, IFRS, transnational law, transnational corporations, societal constitutionalism, economic constitutionalism, economic democracy
   JEL:	B15

5. Effective Demand: Securing the Foundations – Symposium
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Olivier Allain (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne) Jochen Hartwig (KOF Swiss Economic Institute) Mark Hayes (University of Cambridge)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pke:wpaper:pkwp1302&r=hpe
   This Symposium consists of individual comments by three authors on papers previously published by the other two (Allain, 2009, Hartwig, 2007 and Hayes, 2007) on the topic of Keynes’s principle of effective demand as set out in The General Theory. The Symposium includes updated versions of PKSG working papers 1210, 1211 and 1212 together with an introduction by all three authors. As Allain puts it, there is a closure problem, in our understanding if not in The General Theory itself. Allain’s solution is to redefine effective demand so that it becomes the end point of a process of convergence of expectations on outcomes. Hartwig (following Chick, 1992, in particular) requires entrepreneurs to form a view about aggregate demand rather than simply their own industry price. Hayes retains Keynes’s definition of effective demand and price-taking firms but introduces a division of entrepreneurs between employers and dealers which is not explicit in Keynes’s text.
   Keywords:	Keynes, effective demand, formation of expectations
   JEL:	E12

6. Ingham and Keynes on the Nature of Money
   

   Date:	2012-09
   By:	Mark Hayes (University of Cambridge)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pke:wpaper:pkwp1209&r=hpe
   This paper compares and contrasts the thinking of Keynes and Geoffrey Ingham, focussing mainly on The General Theory and Ingham’s The Nature of Money (2004). Two points in particular are addressed: first, the relevance of Ingham’s insistence (following Keynes, among others) on the primacy of money of account to an understanding of Keynes’s own insistence that income is intrinsically monetary and upon the importance of the wage unit as an analytical tool; and second, the subtle contrast between Keynes and Ingham in their understandings of the source of interest as a genuinely monetary and not a ‘real’ phenomenon. Where Keynes identifies uncertainty as the source of interest within a methodologically individualistic framework of analysis, Ingham offers a sociological case in terms of the struggle between the debtor and creditor interests that inevitably emerge as a result of the creation of bank money under capitalism. Taking both points together, Ingham’s work not only underpins the crucial distinction between money and ‘real’ wages for the theory of employment but also develops Keynes’s recognition of the potential opposition between the interests of finance and industry.
   Keywords:	nature of money – nature of income – theory of interest
   JEL:	B22

7. Dreams of order and freedom : debating trade management early 17th century England
   

   Date:	2012-04
   By:	Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td457&r=hpe
   The catharsis produced by the early 1620’s trade crisis had a significant impact on the way economic themes were regarded by public opinion in England. As a result, those who analyze the ideas put forward in the documents written during that period – be they printed pamphlets or official memoranda – are left with the impression that an adequate supply of money was the undisputed primary concern as regards economic administration. However, as already stressed by Barry Supple, monetary administration only occupied a prominent position in the political agenda of early 17th century England during times of crisis – that is, when the kingdom was faced with a perceived threat of demonetization. This paper tries to show that, during the first two decades of the 17th century, concern with an inflow of bullion and a positive balance of trade was only of secondary importance, being normally overshadowed by a more fundamental aim: promoting a well-ordered structure for the economic relations of the kingdom, according to specific views of what constituted proper trade management. This approach encompassed both foreign and domestic activities, and found its most evident manifestation in the debates about free trade and monopolies which permeated the whole of James I’s reign.
   Keywords:	free trade; monopoly; mercantilism; 17th century; Stuart England.
   JEL:	B14

8. Inovação em Celso Furtado: criatividade humana e crítica ao capitalismo
   

   Date:	2013-04
   By:	Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque (Cedeplar-UFMG)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td470&r=hpe
   This paper investigates Celso Furtado’s elaboration on innovation. His book Criatividade e dependência na civilização industrial is the reference for this investigation. Furtado’s approach on innovation is an opportunity to search his views about capitalism at the center of the system. Industrial civilization, led by the advanced capitalist countries, restraints creativity: this may be the starting point for Furtado’s criticism of advanced capitalist societies. Therefore, from this interpretation of Criatividade e dependência na civilização industrial emerges an author that criticizes capitalism at its center – and this criticism might illuminate how the overcoming of underdevelopment should proceed.
   Keywords:	innovation, capitalism, Celso Furtado
   JEL:	O30

9. The Use of Economics in WTO Appellate Body Decisions
   

   Date:	2013-03
   By:	Thomas J. Prusa
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rsc:rsceui:2013/12&r=hpe
   While WTO disputes involve legal rights and obligations, economics often can help the Appellate Body (AB) make sense of the dispute and the implications of ambiguous language in the Agreements. This paper reviews three examples of where the economics could have provided a clearer basis for the AB’s decision. I begin by looking at the question of whether countervailing duties can continue to be imposed subsequent to privatization of state-owned enterprises. I next review the question of how antidumping margins are calculated and whether the zeroing methodology is consistent with the fair comparison requirement. Finally, I examine the question of whether the simultaneous application of antidumping and countervailing duties on imports from non-market economies constitutes double remedy. In each of these examples I argue that standard economic theory provides the basis for clear and logic interpretation of the relevant WTO provisions.
   Keywords:	non-recurring subsidies, zeroing, double remedy, countervailing duties, antidumping

10. Improving Nash by Coarse Correlation
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Herve Moulin Indrajit Ray Sonali Sen Gupta
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bir:birmec:13-10&r=hpe
    We consider a class of symmetric two-person quadratic games where coarse correlated equilibria – CCE – (Moulin and Vial 1978) can strictly improve upon the Nash equilibrium payoffs, while correlated equilibrium – CE – (Aumann 1974, 1987) cannot, because these games are potential games. We compute the largest feasible total utility in any CCE in those games, and show that it is achieved by a CCE involving only two pure strategy profiles. Applications include the Cournot duopoly and the game of public good provision, where the improvement over and above the Nash equilibrium payoff can be substantial.
    Keywords:	Coarse correlated equilibrium, Quadratic games, Duopoly models, Public good
    JEL:	C72

11. Nouvelle économie institutionnelle ou socioéconomie des institutions ?
    

    Date:	2012
    By:	Jérôme Maucourant (TRIANGLE – Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique – CNRS : UMR5206 – Université Lumière – Lyon II – Institut d’Études Politiques [IEP] – Lyon – École Normale Supérieure – Lyon – Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Etienne)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00804622&r=hpe
    L’émergence et l’affirmation, dans les années 1970-80, d’une " nouvelle économie institutionnelle " , branche de l’économie dominante, peut sembler paradoxale. Voilà près de trente ans que prolifère ce mot d’ " institution " dans la littérature professionnelle des économistes. Le présent article se veut une contribution à l’éclaircissement de ce problème, qui conduit à une conclusion négative : le traitement de la question institutionnelle que nous propose l’économie orthodoxe est un échec. Cette façon de poser la question des institutions, en effet, n’est que la conséquence, pour l’essentiel, d’une offensive visant à annexer les autres savoirs, tout en tentant de combler les contradictions interne de l’économie dominante. Comme tout empire, l’empire économique tente de masquer et de dépasser ce qui le mine par une extension déraisonnable de ses prétentions. Mais, que ce soit en ses marches ou en son cœur, cet empire a développé tant de difficultés, voire d’apories, qu’il est souhaitable de renouer avec l’idéal de l’économie politique comme une science empirique, riche des autres développements disciplinaires. En ce sens la socio-économie des institutions, comme logique propre d’une économie politique du XXIème siècle, serait une façon de dépasser le néoinstitutionnalisme et ses équivoques. En bref, les questions posées par North pourraient être déplacées avantageusement grâce aux problématiques de Marx, Weber et Polanyi, repensées pour le monde d’après 2008, d’après la première grande crise de ce siècle neuf.
    Keywords:	institutions; économie

12. Discourse, power and governmentality: Social movement research with and beyond Foucault
    

    Date:	2012
    By:	Baumgarten, Britta Ullrich, Peter
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wzbcen:spiv2012401&r=hpe
    In this article some ideas will be outlined, on how protest research can be stimulated, enriched and reformulated by (post-)Foucaultian thinking. We argue that Foucault and his very concepts of discourse and power provide a perspective on social movements that avoids too simple rational actor concepts, is more long-term oriented and pays more attention to the diverse aspects of the context of social movement action than does mainstream social movement research. We focus on four types of processes that can be analysed from a Foucaultian perspective. 1. Discourses define the boundaries for what can be thought of and communicated at a given point of time in a given society. These boundaries also apply for social movement actors. 2. Within these boundaries of the generally unthinkable we can analyse the framing of social movements and how they contribute to discourses. 3. Further, there are internal communicative practices of movement knowledge generation. These can be viewed as a set of (productive as well as restrictive) discursive regularities. 4. Discourses shape the subjectivity of the people, and thus impact on the mobilizing potential of social movements. Referring to governmentality studies we show how changing rationalities may influence the likelihood of social critique and protest. — Foucault und die vielen theoretischen und empirischen Arbeiten, die auf seinen Gedanken aufbauen, erfreuen sich momentan innerhalb der Sozialwissenschaften großer Resonanz. Aus diesem Grund ist es sehr verwunderlich, dass dies bisher kaum Einfluss auf den Mainstream der Bewegungs- und Protestforschung hatte. Wir stellen hier einige Ideen vor, wie die bewegungs- und Protestforschung durch (post-)foucault’sche Konzepte und Gedanken bereichert und verändert werden könnte. Wir argumentieren, dass Foucault, insbesondere seine Konzepte von Diskurs und Macht, eine Perspektive auf soziale Bewegungen und Protest nahelegt, die vereinfachende Konzepte von rationalen Akteuren vermeidet, stärker an langfristigen Entwicklungen interessiert ist und bestimmte Kontextbedingungen von Aktivismus stärker berücksichtigt als der bisherige Mainstream der Bewegungsforschung. Wir betrachten in diesem Artikel vier Zusammenhänge von sozialen Bewegungen und Diskursen aus einer Foucault’schen Perspektive: 1. Diskurse bestimmen die Grenzen des in einer bestimmten Gesellschaft zu einer bestimmten Zeit Denk- und Sagbaren. Diese Grenzen gelten auch für Akteure sozialer Bewegungen. 2. Innerhalb dieser Grenzen des generell Denk- und Sagbaren können wir die Rahmungs- bzw. Deutungsprozesse sozialer Bewegungen analysieren und betrachten, wie diese wiederum Einfluss auf Diskurse ausüben. 3. Es lassen sich interne Kommunikationspraktiken innerhalb von Bewegungen analysieren, durch die Bewegungswissen entsteht. Diese können als Set von (ermöglichenden und begrenzenden) diskursiven Regeln betrachtet werden. 4. Diskurse prägen Subjekte und beeinflussen damit das Mobilisierungspotential von sozialen Bewegungen. Angelehnt an die Gouvernementalitätsforschung zeigen wir, welchen Einfluss Wandlungen der Regierungsweisen auf die Möglichkeit von Sozialkritik und Protest haben.
    Keywords:	social movements,protest,discourse,Foucault,governmentality,power,knowledge,framing,Soziale Bewegungen,Protest,Diskurs,Foucault,Gouvernementalität,Macht,Wissen,Deutungsmusteranalyse

13. On the Foundations of Well-Being Economics and Policy
    

    Date:	2013-04
    By:	Giuseppe Munda (Departament d’Economia i d’Història Econòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aub:uhewps:2013_01&r=hpe
    When one wishes to implement public policies, there is a previous need of comparing different actions and valuating and evaluating them to assess their social attractiveness. Recently the concept of well-being has been proposed as a multidimensional proxy for measuring societal prosperity and progress; a key research topic is then on how we can measure and evaluate this plurality of dimensions for policy decisions. This paper defends the thesis articulated in the following points: 1. Different metrics are linked to different objectives and values. To use only one measurement unit (on the grounds of the so-called commensurability principle) for incorporating a plurality of dimensions, objectives and values, implies reductionism necessarily. 2. Point 1) can be proven as a matter of formal logic by drawing on the work of Geach about moral philosophy. This theoretical demonstration is an original contribution of this article. Here the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is formalised and definitions are provided. Predicative adjectives are further distinguished into absolute and relative ones. The new concepts of set commensurability and rod commensurability are introduced too. 3. The existence of a plurality of social actors, with interest in the policy being assessed, causes that social decisions involve multiple types of values, of which economic efficiency is only one. Therefore it is misleading to make social decisions based only on that one value. 4. Weak comparability of values, which is grounded on incommensurability, is proved to be the main methodological foundation of policy evaluation in the framework of well-being economics. Incommensurability does not imply incomparability; on the contrary incommensurability is the only rational way to compare societal options under a plurality of policy objectives. 5. Weak comparability can be implemented by using multi-criteria evaluation, which is a formal framework for applied consequentialism under incommensurability. Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation, in particular, allows considering both technical and social incommensurabilities simultaneously.
    Keywords:	Value Theory, Incommensurability, Public Policy, Sustainability, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Multiple Criteria Evaluation, Complexity Theory
    JEL:	A13

14. Cliométrie et Capital humain
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Charlotte Le Chapelain (Université Lyon III, CLHDPP et BETA)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:01-13&r=hpe

15. A Concept of the Global to Conceive Global Governance. Four Metaphorical Proposals
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Daniel Innerarity
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rsc:rsceui:2013/06&r=hpe
    This paper suggests four metaphors to correct our habitual way of thinking about globalization. It begins with the idea that the world can be understood more effectively based on the properties of gases, rather than liquids; secondly, it analyzes the properties and effects of the excessive exposure in which we find ourselves when interdependency is in force; It maintains that our world lacks outlying areas, in the sense that nothing, in fact, remains outside, peripheral or completely isolated, and as a normative principle, we cannot consider anything absolutely exterior; and finally, It presents the idea that we live in a world belonging to everyone and to no one, where piracy holds great explanatory force.
    Keywords:	Globalization, global governance, interdependence, piracy

16. Do Control Questions Influence Behavior in Experiments?
    

    Date:	2013-03
    By:	Catherine Roux Christian Thöni
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lau:crdeep:13.03&r=hpe
    Outcomes and strategies shown in control questions prior to experimental play may provide subjects with anchors or induce experimenter demand effects. In a Cournot oligopoly experiment we explore whether control questions influence subjects’ choices in initial periods and over the course of a repeated game. We vary the framing of the control question to explore the cause of potential influences. We find no evidence for an influence of the control question on choices, neither in the first period nor later in the game.
    Keywords:	Control questions; Experimenter demand effects; Anchoring; Experimental design
    JEL:	B41

17. Understanding Determinants of Happiness under Uncertainty
    

    Date:	2013
    By:	Peter Huxley (Mental Health Research Team, Swansea University, UK) Tapas Mishra (Department of Economics, Swansea University, UK) Bazoumana Ouattara (Department of Economics, Swansea University, UK) Mamata Parhi (Department of Economics, Swansea University, UK)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:02-13&r=hpe

18. Les limites du capitalisme : penser la crise du néolibéralisme et les failles de la pensée économique avec Karl Polanyi
    

    Date:	2012-10
    By:	Jérôme Maucourant (TRIANGLE – Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique – CNRS : UMR5206 – Université Lumière – Lyon II – Institut d’Études Politiques [IEP] – Lyon – École Normale Supérieure – Lyon – Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Etienne)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00806223&r=hpe
    Extrait remanié de la postface d’Avez-vous lu Polanyi, Flammarion, 2011 : en 1991, l’URSS quittait la scène et la Chine acceptait de s’intégrer dans ce qu’on dénommera " globalisation ". Polanyi, qui fut un critique de la première société de marché, celle qui meurt entre 1918 et 1933, offre une perspective toujours féconde pour comprendre la signification de la deuxième, qui naît au début des années 1980. Ainsi, nous discuterons d’abord de la crise actuelle selon un point de vue inspiré par Polanyi ; nous évoquerons, ensuite, une approche institutionnelle concurrente ; nous conclurons à un nécessaire retour à l’historicité dans le monde d’après.
    Keywords:	Polanyi

19. Quantitative Machtkonzepte in der Ökonomik
    

    Date:	2013-02
    By:	Roland Kirstein (Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg) Matthias Peiss (Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)
    URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mag:wpaper:130004&r=hpe
    Macht ist ein zentraler Bestandteil sozialer Interaktion. Obgleich eine Vielzahl gebräuchlicher Anschauungen und Begriffsdefinitionen zum Thema Macht existiert, erfordert ein wissenschaftlicher Umgang mit dem Konzept der Macht deren quantitative Operationalisierung. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die ökonomische Bedeutung des Machtkonzeptes und konzentriert sich dabei auf Möglichkeiten der Quantifizierung von Macht unter Berücksichtigung ihrer vielfältigen Erscheinungsformen. Hierfür werden einerseits unterschiedliche Konzepte der Machtmessung in der Ökonomik vorgestellt und im jeweiligen Kontext motiviert, so etwa im Rahmen verschiedenartiger Transaktionsbeziehungen, in (nicht-)kooperativen Interaktionssituationen, oder im Bereich der kollektiven Entscheidungsfindung. Zum anderen erfolgt eine Einschätzung darüber, welche der vorgestellten Analyse- und Messkonzepte Macht im Sinne bekannter Machtdefinitionen erfassen und operationalisieren können.