Scholars In Economics Research Articles

7Economic Criticism

Abstract This chapter on economic criticism begins with a review of recent scholarly contributions from historians that have shaped conversations on the relationship between economics and culture. A discussion of recent standout monographs in economic criticism follows; the chapter concludes by reviewing two recent anthologies of economic critical scholarship.

The economic anthropology of water

Anthropological research on water and economy has a long and rich history, especially among archaeologists and political economy scholars. In this review article, we discuss contemporary anthropological scholarship on water and economy to identify still‐active areas of long‐standing theoretical interest as well as novel theoretical approaches. We present five important threads of scholarship on the economic anthropology of water: (1) commodification, exchange, and diverse economies; (2) the political ecology of water; (3) resilience and sustainability; (4) institutions; and (5) water and health. We explain how these theoretical approaches fit into broader trends in anthropological scholarship on water, explore how they advance the economic anthropology of water specifically, and identify ways that economic anthropologists can make new contributions to these literatures.

Does law and economics help decide cases?

Our answer is “less often than you might think.” We qualify and defend this answer in several steps. First, we offer some suggestive evidence that major scholarly contributions in law and economics have had relatively more influence with academics than with judges. For example, ranking articles on the basis of judicial citations rather than academic citations produces interesting results: Judges cite Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” by far the most cited paper in the legal academy, much less frequently than doctrinal papers that have received relatively little attention from scholars. Second, we argue that some common features of law and economics scholarship are unappealing to judges. The broadest form of explanatory law and economics—like the hypothesis that the common law has tended to produce efficient rules—is often of little use to judges, who require reasons for making or justifying current decisions. Prescriptive law and economics, meanwhile—like various arguments that the legal system should produce efficient rules—often proceeds from ideological premises that judges don’t share, or fails to account for the institutional constraints under which judges operate. In short, much law and economics scholarship is insufficiently doctrinal to appeal to the average judge. These features of law and economics scholarship don’t prevent judges from using economics all the time. After all, economics is a basic social science, and judges encounter economic questions with some regularity. But, even here, we find little evidence that today’s judges are making greater use of concepts like “efficiency” and “incentives” than those of the past. Throughout this essay, we comment on Guido Calabresi’s “The Future of Law and Economics” (2016) and Richard Posner’s “Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary” (2016).

Accidental rivals? EU fiscal rules, NATO, and transatlantic burden-sharing

Both theorists and practitioners continue to show interest in transatlantic burden-sharing. Resource allocation choices – both to and within defense budgets – are grand strategic choices, and membership in alliances and security communities affects how states make those choices. International security and political economy scholarship offers plausible explanations for transatlantic imbalances in military expenditures. However, NATO allies and EU member-states have pledged to one another not just to spend more on defense, but to allocate more defense resources to equipment modernization. Current scholarship does not fully explain the sources of such within-budget choices, which would help anticipate the likelihood of such pledges succeeding. Building on work by security scholars, defense and political economists, and scholars of interorganizational relations, I argue that stringent fiscal rules dampen the kind of defense spending NATO and EU strategists seek. Governments respond to increasingly stringent fiscal rules by reducing overall defense expenditures, while at the same time shifting existing defense resources to personnel, and away from equipment and operational expenditures. I find evidence in support of this argument by using education levels in the states in question as instruments for fiscal rules. This phenomenon represents a significant risk for important transatlantic strategic initiatives, namely NATO’s Wales pledge on defense investment.

Risky health choices and the Balloon Economic Risk Protocol

We describe a risk protocol that combines the rigor of economic studies of risk with the ecological validity of tasks from psychology. Despite a wealth of experimental contributions on risk preferences, stemming from a variety of elicitation tasks, the external validity of standard measures of risk is questionable. In this study we focus on a risk task – the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) – which is highly successful in predicting health-related risk behaviors such as alcohol use, drug use, smoking, unprotected sex, driving without a seatbelt, and stealing. The BART is not commonly used by economic scholars because of concerns that participants may not adequately comprehend uncertainty associated with the task and because of the resulting difficulty in relating participants’ choices to standard risk models. To answer these concerns and build on associations with real world risk, we designed a modified BART, which we will refer to as the Balloon Economic Risk Protocol (BERP). In this protocol, participants observe the distribution of pop points prior to the task to create a more consistent knowledge base. We then use a belief elicitation technique to produce a user-generated prior distribution of balloon pops. Using these measures, we compare participants’ behavior to the expected-value optimum to provide a link to standard models of risk. In accordance with past economic literature, we found that participants’ BERP-generated risk preferences revealed mild risk aversion on average, and correlated with a self-report questionnaire on drinking, drug use, and smoking behavior.

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4

Impacts of Chinese Investment on Economic Growth in Sub-Sahara Africa (2007-2017)

Foreign direct investment has taken a central position in promoting economic growth in the developing world and has been anticipated by different economic scholars to be playing a key role in accelerating growth in Sub-Sahara Africa countries. Over the past two decades, Chinese foreign direct investment in Sub-Sahara Africa has increased and Chinese present in the continent has brought optimism for future progress in economic and transformation. It is against this background that CFDI has appeared increasingly attractive to Sub-Sahara Africa countries facing declining domestic investment and higher costs of foreign borrowing. The governments of Sub-Sahara Africa, therefore, has been putting up incentives to ensure that foreign corporations are attracted to the country in an effort to increase the investments to the country and increase the level of economic growth. The objective of this study was to determine the impacts Chinese foreign direct investment on economic growth in Sub-Sahara Africa and observing at the contribution of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment flows in improving the export supply of the countries' post-liberalization period. The study is grounded on FDI flow data from China to individual countries in SSA over the period of 2007 to 2017 on 14 SSA countries. The time frame for this analysis is 11 years period for each country, based on the availability of data. Including all countries in SSA would have been beneficial for the study but the rest of the SSA countries were not considered for the analysis because we want to balance data, uniformity, and availability of data during the required period of time. The study employed secondary data from different sources mainly accessed from the Chinese national bureau of statistics, MOFCOM, World Bank’s, World Development Indicators (WDI) database and World Bank African Development Indicator database as well as other sources like United Nations Commodity Trade (UN Comtrade) database, United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) database and from World Economic Outlook database (WEO). After controlling for other determinants of growth, the findings so far indicate that Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (CFDI) flow to Sub-Sahara Africa has a general positive and significant, which has a huge influence on economic growth. The results are in line with both the studies of Zhang (2001), Carkovic and Levine, (2002) and Borensztein et al. (1998) it seems plausible to argue that it is a certainty that Chinese FDI alone has a positive impact on growth. Chinese Investments have increased collective resource inflows into the host countries; this has/will improved capacity utilization, increased outputs and generated employment opportunities. The significance of private CFDI is that such investments are slightly risk-free to the SSA countries and bring with it the advantages of advanced technology, management practices, and assured markets. Based on the results achieved, we present the main conclusions and respective policy recommendations which, if addressed, will stimulate domestic investment in short and long runs, since the investors’ decisions are influenced to large extend by those similar factors. Our objective two is to elaborate and determine the contribution of CFDI flows into SSA countries in increasing the export supply of the countries post-trade liberalization era. Here we tried to see the effect of CFDI inflows on the increase in the export supply of SSA countries from the perspectives of the countries' characteristics in the post-trade liberalization period.

Theorists of Economic Nationalism in 1930s–1940s Romania

AbstractThis article examines the main theorists of economic nationalism (Romanianization) and their ideas promoting protectionism and anti-Semitism in 1930s–1940s Romania. Trying to offer a rational scientific justification for excluding foreigners, especially Jews, and increasing the role of ethnic Romanians in the economy, major scholars of economics offered solutions toward successful Romanianization. Because some of these economists were also influential politicians and public intellectuals, their investigations and blueprints for the project gained wide publicity and provided steps for achieving it rapidly and thoroughly. These economists disseminated their theoretical and empirical constructions of Romanianization in university courses, public lectures, and publications. Some were important scholars; among them, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, Gheorghe N. Leon, Ion Răducanu, and D. R. Ioaniţescu, They examined Romanianization of the economy from the 1930s to the 1940s and influenced the agenda of local elites and the general public, due to their prestigious positions as politicians, public intellectuals, and professors at local universities.

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Self-esteem, self-symbolizing, and academic recognition: behavioral evidence from curricula vitae

To provide new evidence on the empirically challenging aspect of measuring self-esteem, we collect written CV content from over 500 influential economics scholars and use such self-presentation modes as absolute and relative font sizes and typographic emphasis of author name on the CV’s front page to derive proxies for self-symbolizing behavior. Our analysis of these factors provides empirical support for the symbolic self-completion proposition that goal accomplishment reduces the need to self-symbolize. In particular, we find that receiving an education from a top 20 ranked university reduces the need to self-symbolize even when the scholars work for a non-top 20 university after earning the doctorate. On the other hand, major academic awards or honors do not seem to affect self-symbolizing behavior, which is also negatively correlated with activities having an external (e.g., policy-focused) social impact. Scholars with a higher h-index are also less inclined to self-symbolize, while being ranked in the Coupe top 1000 has no impact. Hence, despite some evidence of non-linearity, academic maturity shows a tendency (albeit not a robust one) to reduce the need to self-symbolize.

The impact of mandatory arrest laws on domestic violence in times of economic stress

We test the effectiveness of mandatory arrest laws to suppress domestic violence under changing levels of community-wide economic stress. While existing economic scholarship focuses upon the influence of arrest laws and financial strain independently of one another, we provide a meaningful bridge across these two factors to assess whether arrest laws are effective when communities need them most. Using county-level monthly unemployment rates and national crime data for years 2000 to 2015, we examine changes in incidents of intimidation and assault between intimate partners across states with and without mandatory arrest laws. After controlling for baseline county characteristics, we document the subsequent increase in domestic violence from rising rates of unemployment. We find the efficacy of arrest laws to mitigate intimate partner violence is strongest when unemployment increases. However, these results do not hold for more severe forms of domestic violence. Our results suggest that while mandatory arrest laws are not a single solution to domestic violence, they lessen the adverse effects of rising unemployment rates.

Post-Crisis Capital Controls in Developing and Emerging Countries: Regaining Policy Space? A Historical Materialist Engagement

Recent political economy scholarship has interpreted the recent resurgence of capital controls across the Global South as attempts by some developing countries to preserve their policy space to pursue heterodox economic policies. This article critically engages with this literature and argues for the need to study capital controls in light of the social constitution and the class character of the capitalist state, money, and private capital flows. This argument is substantiated through a class analysis of the deployment of capital controls in Brazil from 1945 to 2014, which emphasizes the crucial role that capital controls have historically played in the reproduction of capitalist social relations and particular forms of class rule in Brazil.JEL Classification: F30, F32, F38, F54

Law and Economics in Latin America. Some Ethical Issues Reconsidered

In Latin America, law and economics scholarship is gradually finding its way into court decisions and legislative enactments, both with respect to an increasing tendency to assess the overall consequences of legal rules, in terms of a growing application of cost-benefit analyses, and in the form of more incentives-driven reasoning. Until today, however, the literature on the movement’s normative foundations has failed to find common ground on how to justify its theoretical suppositions. This article illuminates this debate and provides an overview over some of the approach’s most basic assumptions that relate to its positive and normative implications.

Information Matters in Tax Enforcement

Most legal and economics scholars recognize both that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions in order to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Given governments’ reliance on tax funds, it is risky to think that information or third-party reporting is not needed by tax agencies. However, a recent article by Professor Wei Cui asserts that “modern governments can practice ‘taxation without information.’” Professor Cui’s argument rests on two premises: (1) “giving governments effective access to taxpayer information through third parties does not explain the success of modern tax administration” because, he argues, some important taxes, such as the value added tax (VAT), do not involve information reporting; and (2) modern tax administration succeeds because business firms are “sites of social cooperation under the rule of law,” fostering compliance. As this Article explains, the literature demonstrates that both arguments are mistaken. That is, it shows that third-party information reporting is highly effective, information sharing is used to enforce VATs, and firms are not inherently compliant. In fact, where individuals report on firms, firms’ compliance increases, which supports the intuitive notion that third-party reporting increases tax compliance and that information accordingly matters in tax enforcement.

International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various Autonomist Marxists have recently sought to fill such gap by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, the article argues that it mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches for overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and for paying little attention to the limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, the article reviews Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, the article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour as well as to account better for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.

New directions in the international political economy of energy

Until relatively recently international political economy (IPE) scholarship on energy has tended to focus on oil, rather than energy understood in its full, current diversity through IPE’s tripartite liberal, realist or critical lenses. Over the past decade or so there have, however, been far-reaching transformations in the global economy, not least in response to the increased recognition, and visibility, of damaging manifestations of fossil fuel usage and human-induced climate change. In the light of such changes this article, and the special section as a whole, represents a distinctive departure from earlier IPE of energy traditions by collectively deepening our understanding of how the IPE of energy is changing: in scalar, material, distributional and political terms. An appeal is made for greater engagement by IPE scholars with energy, given its wide-ranging relevance to debates about climate change, development, technology and equity and justice.

Robust Measures of Skewness and Kurtosis for Macroeconomic and Financial Time Series

The sample skewness and kurtosis of macroeconomic and financial time series are routinely scrutinized in the early stages of model-building and are often the central topic of studies in economics and finance. Notwithstanding the availability of several robust estimators, most scholars in economics rely on method-of-moments estimation that is known to be very sensitive to outliers. We carry out an extensive Monte Carlo analysis to compare the bias and root mean squared error of twelve different estimators of skewness and kurtosis. We consider nine statistical distributions that approximate the range of data generating processes of many macroeconomic and financial time series. Both in independently and identically distributed samples and in data generating processes featuring serial correlation L-moments and trimmed L-moments estimators are particularly resistant to outliers and deliver the lowest root mean squared error. The application to 128 macroeconomic and financial time series sourced from a large, monthly frequency, database (i.e. the FRED-MD of McCracken and Ng, 2016) confirms the findings of the simulation study.

Firms, Markets and Crowds: Information and Economic Organizing in the Digital Economy

The rise and prominence of platform-based organizations in recent years has attracted tremendous research interest by management and economics scholars. We focus on crowdsourcing, a particular type of platform-based form of organizing. We first inquire into the information efficiency properties of crowdsourcing, exploring why and how the underlying mechanisms can enable it to be more efficient than alternative organizational forms in organizing economic activities. We then emphasize the role of the firm as market designer as well as orchestrator of market resources in bringing about such efficiencies. We argue that the concept of firm-designed market represents a distinct institutional arrangement, demonstrating a new gain to management that is structured not around authority in producing orders but instead around orchestrating the market mechanism.

Realism, Nominalism and How Probable the Disappearance of Accounting Profession is

One of the characteristic features of twenty-year period of reforming the national system of accounting is that the new results of scientifc research opposing the principles of international fnancial reporting standards are not included in accounting practice. A false idea about the universal character of the IFRS, total conformism of accounting professional community and the shift to practically-oriented approach in the curricula of higher education institutions resulted in discrediting of accounting knowledge. Modern methodological approaches of economics in relation to accounting and fnancial reporting are inclined to consider the latter as applied secondary tool of generating fnancial information. From historical and objective point of view the very task of accounting was to provide such information that would aid in making educated and effective managerial decisions and later to increase or at least preserve the capital. Pursuing this goal the methodology (in addition to particular methods) has been going through changes depending on the goals set by the users of fnancial information. After the IFRS had been introduced the process of methodology transformation gained a one-way character — “everything should conform to the IFRS” —and consequently accounting as a tool which takes into account constantly changing goals, for example the goals set by the state, stopped working. This resulted in the compromise of accounting. In order to clarify the reasons of the above the article analyses the stages of the development of ideas, approaches and directions in economic theory, identifes its links with the evolution of science and retrospectively matches the peculiarities of the latter with such methodological directions of philosophy of science as nominalism and realism. The motivated rationale of the crucial importance to classify the stages of scientifc knowledge development determines the strategic choice of the methods of the research: deduction, information analysis; abstracting; dialectic logic of making conclusions and proposals. The result of the research is the rationale of the processes of historical development of accounting science, identifcation of logical correlation between the ideology of economic theory classical scholars and methodology of accounting knowledge. The author proposes to treat the contemporary history of the issue by introducing such terms as political and demagogical nominalism in conceptual construct.

International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various autonomist Marxists have recently sought to ‘voice labour’ by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, this article argues that such an approach mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches by overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and by paying little attention to the historical limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ is reviewed in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, this article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour and thereby to better account for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.