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on Heterodox Microeconomics |
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Issue of 2020‒01‒06
23 papers chosen by Carlo D’Ippoliti Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Crespo, Eduardo (Institute of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); Dvoskin, Ariel (CONICET - IDAES National University of San Martín); Ianni, Guido (Roma Tre University) |
| Abstract: | The paper discusses the following result of the so-called ‘Ricardian’ models of international trade: the impossibility of exclusion from trade. We show that this result holds due to the very restrictive assumptions behind these models: (i) commodities are produced by unassisted labour alone under (ii) complete factor immobility. The moment these assumptions are relaxed, the likelihood of exclusion can no longer be neglected. The reason is the following: even if there were no limits to the fall in the rate of domestic real wages, production costs would reach a positive lower bound due to the presence of imported capital goods. Exclusion is therefore the result of this lower bound being higher than the prevailing international price, for both capital and consumption-goods sectors |
| Keywords: | absolute advantage; comparative advantage; exclusion from trade; pattern of specialization; Ricardian models of trade |
| JEL: | B51 F11 |
| Date: | 2019–12–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:sraffa:0039&r=all |
| By: | Heise, Arne |
| Abstract: | As a social science, economics studies social interactions. What distinguishes it from other social science disciplines is, firstly, its focus on interactions involving the management of scarce resources and, secondly, its conception of itself as generating traceable, verifiable findings that are free of normative judgements but instead yield 'objective knowledge'. Some regard this methodological foundation of positivist fallibilism as the feature that makes economics the 'queen of the social sciences'. Others are critical of these core assumptions, which they believe have no place in a social science. Interestingly, both critiques and defences of economics often make reference to ideology: defenders claim that economics is as free of ideological bias as it is possible to be, while critics deny economics' status as a science and instead regard it as an 'ideology that serves to uphold power relations'. This article explores the relationship between ideology and economics with special reference to German academia, and asks whether a pluralist approach to economics could help to make the discipline less vulnerable to the charge of being ideological. |
| Keywords: | ideology,pluralism,monism,value freedom,methodology,ontology |
| JEL: | A12 A13 B40 B50 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cessdp:75&r=all |
| By: | Simon Cramer; Torsten Trimborn |
| Abstract: | The existence of stylized facts in financial data has been documented in many studies. In the past decade the modeling of financial markets by agent-based computational economic market models has become a frequently used modeling approach. The main purpose of these models is to replicate stylized facts and to identify sufficient conditions for their creations. In this paper we introduce the most prominent examples of stylized facts and especially present stylized facts of financial data. Furthermore, we given an introduction to agent-based modeling. Here, we not only provide an overview of this topic but introduce the idea of universal building blocks for agent-based economic market models. |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1912.02684&r=all |
| By: | Cloos, Janis (clausthal university of technology); Greiff, Matthias (clausthal university of technology); Rusch, Hannes (General Economics 1 (Micro)) |
| Abstract: | We examine geographical concentration, scientific quality, and editorial favoritism in the field of experimental economics. We use a novel data set containing all original research papers (N=583) that exclusively used laboratory experiments for data generation and were published in the American Economic Review, Experimental Economics or the Journal of the European Economic Association between 1998 and 2018. The development of geographical concentration is examined using data on authors' affiliations at the time of the respective publication. Results show that research output produced by US-affiliated economists increased slower than overall research output, leading to a decrease in geographical concentration. Several proxies for scientific quality indicate that experiments conducted in Europe are of higher quality than experiments conducted in North America: European experiments rely on a larger total number of participants as well as participants per treatment, and receive more citations compared to experiments conducted in North America. Examining laboratory experiments published in the AER more closely, we find that papers authored by economists with US-affiliations receive significantly fewer citations in the first 5 and 10 years after publication compared to papers by authors from the rest of the world. |
| Keywords: | laboratory experiments, favoritism, geographical concentration, Methodological standards, network effects |
| JEL: | A11 A14 C90 I23 |
| Date: | 2019–12–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:umagsb:2019029&r=all |
| By: | Xingtong Han; Lei Xu |
| Abstract: | We study how input-output networks affect the speed of technology adoption. In particular, we model the decision to adopt the programming language Python 3 by software packages. Python 3 provides advanced features but is not backward compatible with Python 2, which implies it comes with adoption costs. Moreover, packages are dependent on other packages, meaning one package’s adoption decision is affected by the adoption decisions of other packages because many packages are linked to each other. We build a dynamic model of technology adoption that incorporates an input-output network and estimate it using a complete dataset of Python packages. We are among the first to link the literature of dynamic discrete choice models to network analysis. We also contribute to the literature on technology adoption by showing the adverse effects that input-output networks can have on how technology is adopted in a dynamic setting. We show that a package’s adoption decision is significantly affected by the adoption decisions of its dependency packages. We conduct counterfactual analyses of cost subsidies that target a community level and show that network structure is crucial to determining an optimal policy of cost subsidy. |
| Keywords: | Economic models; Firm dynamics; Productivity |
| JEL: | C61 L23 L86 O14 O33 |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bca:bocawp:19-51&r=all |
| By: | Jane Humphries |
| Abstract: | The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men’s life stories to compare girl and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment and this constrained the ways in which they could earn a living and live their lives. Fathers as breadwinners merited respect and often affection, but it was mothers with whom girls identified. |
| Date: | 2019–12–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_175&r=all |
| By: | Nathanael Colin-Jaeger (TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique - ENS Lyon - École normale supérieure - Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJM - Université Jean Monnet [Saint-Étienne] - IEP Lyon - Sciences Po Lyon - Institut d'études politiques de Lyon - Université de Lyon - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | Ce travail vise à développer la critique bourdieusienne de l'anthropologie économique tout en clarifiant l'ontologie sociale qu'on peut tirer des conceptions bourdieusiennes. |
| Keywords: | Institutions,Sociology,Bourdieu,Society,Rational Choice |
| Date: | 2018–03–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01836023&r=all |
| By: | Faggio, Giulia; Silva, Olmo; Strange, William C. |
| Abstract: | This paper considers the heterogeneous microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It studies the co-location of industries to look for evidence of labor pooling, input sharing, and knowledge spillovers. The novel contribution of the paper is that it estimates single-industry models using a common empirical framework that exploits the cross-sectional variation in how one industry co-locates with the other industries in the economy. This unified approach yields evidence on the relative importance of the Marshallian microfoundations at the single-industry level, allowing for like-for-like cross-industry comparisons on the determinants of agglomeration. Using UK data, we estimate such microfoundations models for 97 manufacturing sectors, including the classic agglomeration cases of automobiles, computers, cutlery, and textiles. These four cases – as with all of the individual industry models we estimate – clearly show the importance of the Marshallian forces. However, they also highlight how the importance of these forces varies across industries – implying that extrapolation from cases should be viewed with caution. The paper concludes with an investigation of the pattern of heterogeneity. The degree of an industry’s clustering (localization), dynamism, incumbent firm size, and worker education are shown to contribute to the pattern of heterogeneous microfoundations. |
| Keywords: | agglomeration; microfoundations; heterogeneity; industrial clusters |
| JEL: | R10 R12 L52 L60 |
| Date: | 2019–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:102721&r=all |
| By: | Kim, Minseong |
| Abstract: | In [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 180604], [Phys. Rev. E 90, 052149] and [Phys. Rev. E 99, 032134], it is argued that probabilistic inference from functional form of entropy violating the Shore-Johnson axioms is effectively incoherent. We argue this is not true. While the Shore-Johnson derivation of entropy holds even when accounting for existence of circumstances violating the axioms, the derivation relies on an implicit assumption that functional form of entropy be uniform across all circumstances. What one gets out of the Shore-Johnson derivation depends on acceptance of the assumption. We discuss other reasons why the Shore-Johnson derivation is insufficient. |
| Date: | 2019–11–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:ycx5r&r=all |
| By: | Goldman, Daniel S |
| Abstract: | Evolution and abiogenesis are usually considered two different topics in biology. However, recent work on the relationship between thermodynamics and life, as well as complexity and evolution, suggest that these topics may all be intimately related. Using new research conducted by Jeremy England, Taeer Bar-Yam, and others, I attempt to show that thermodynamics seems to exert a universal selective pressure, called entropic pressure. This pressure seems to exist on the atomic and molecular level, biological level, and even societal level, and results in a number of interesting consequences, for biology here on Earth, as well as potentially on other worlds. |
| Date: | 2019–02–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:4uczr&r=all |
| By: | David Masclet (Univ Rennes, CNRS, CREM - UMR 6211, F-35000 Rennes, France); David L. Dickinson (Appalachian State University, Department of Economics, USA) |
| Abstract: | We present a framework that incorporates both moral motivations and fairness considerations into utility. The main idea is that individuals face a preference trade-off between their material individual interest and their desire to follow moral norms. In our model, we assume that moral motivation is conditional and may be influenced by others’ actions. Specifically, in our framework moral obligation is a combination of two main components: an autonomous component and a social influence component that captures the influence of others. Our framework is able to explain many stylized results in the literature and to improve theories of economic behavior. |
| Keywords: | Fairness; Ethical Decision Making; Moral Motivation; Behavioral Economics |
| JEL: | B3 D6 D9 |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tut:cremwp:2019-10&r=all |
| By: | Kolpashnikova, Kamila; Chiba, Ryota; Shirakawa, Kiyomi |
| Abstract: | The assumption about socioeconomic status (SES) and participation in housework are based on the empirical results in Western countries. As such, SES is assumed to work in a similar way in other regions as it does in the countries of the global north. This assumption can often lead to misguided interpretations of the effects of SES on housework participation in other cultural contexts. One such exception is Japan. We analyze time-use diaries from the American Time Use Survey for the period from 2003 to 2016, 1986-2010 Canadian General Social Survey, and the 2006 Japan Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (社会生活基本調査). Using the negative binomial regression, we test whether SES is associated with less time spent on housework as the outsourcing hypothesis predicts. The findings show that this hypothesis stands only for Canadian and American women, whereas married Japanese women are unlikely to reduce their participation in housework with the increase of their SES. |
| Date: | 2019–07–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9tfce&r=all |
| By: | Fix, Blair (York University) |
| Abstract: | What explains the power-law distribution of top incomes? This paper tests the hypothesis that it is firm hierarchy that creates the power-law income distribution tail. Using the available case-study evidence on firm hierarchy, I create the first large-scale simulation of the hierarchical structure of the US private sector. Although not tuned to do so, this model reproduces the power-law scaling of top US incomes. I show that this is purely an effect of firm hierarchy. This raises the possibility that the ubiquity of power-law income distribution tails is due to the ubiquity of hierarchical organization in human societies. |
| Date: | 2018–07–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:u95dk&r=all |
| By: | Schneider, Nathan (University of Colorado Boulder) |
| Abstract: | The disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the banner of ‘platform cooperativism’, an emerging network of cooperative developers, entrepreneurs, labor organizers and scholars is developing an economic ecosystem that seeks to align the ownership and governance of enterprises with the people whose lives are most affected by them. This represents a radical critique of the existing online economy, but it is also a field of experimentation for alternative forms of ownership design. This essay presents and analyzes some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that could serve the platform economy of the future differently than the investor-owned structures that currently prevail. |
| Date: | 2018–03–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:2xyst&r=all |
| By: | Bruno Cheli; Achille Lemmi; Nicoletta Pannuzi; Andrea Regoli |
| Abstract: | Most of the methods designed for the analysis of poverty share two main limitations: i) they are unidimensional, i.e. they refer to only one proxy of poverty, namely equivalent income or consumption expenditure; ii) they need to dichotomise the population into the poor and the non poor by means of the so called poverty line. This reductionism simplifies the analysis, but also wipes out all the complexity of this phenomenon which, on the contrary, should also be object of study. The Totally Fuzzy and Relative (TFR) approach proposed by Cheli and Lemmi (1995) allows us to overcome these limitations and to analyse poverty in a multidimensional perspective avoiding the use of arbitrary threshold values. In this paper we aim to remark how the binary distinction between the "poor" and "non poor" states is too sharp, since deprivation is likely to occur by degrees. Starting from this consideration, we retrace and update the fuzzy sets approach for measuring multidimensional poverty, which leads to the Integrated Fuzzy and Relative method (Betti et al., 2006a, 2006b, 2008). |
| Keywords: | poverty measurement, multidimensional poverty, fuzzy set, living conditions analysis |
| JEL: | I32 |
| Date: | 2019–12–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pie:dsedps:2019/252&r=all |
| By: | Dutta, Sunasir |
| Abstract: | Why some communities have greater rates of social entrepreneurship in similar domains is a question of importance to scholars and practitioners alike. Much of the literature in social entrepreneurship begins with a social problem that has been identified, and then analyzes the antecedents of the entrepreneurial process that lead to organizational solutions emerging for those problems. However, why some problems gain traction as being worthy of time and effort in solving, has garnered little attention. I argue that particular problems are more or less salient triggers of action by prospective social entrepreneurs based on the distribution of such problems in the local social environment, rather than aggregate levels of need. Yet, even problems widely experienced as shared, salient, and generally worthy of action might lack the emergence of solutions in fragmented communities, such as those with high levels of residential segregation by race and income. We study this in the context of founding of advocacy and support organizations in the domain of healthcare, and find support for our predictions. We also conducted additional tests to better characterize the findings and test robustness to alternative sources of influence, such as the local pool of potential social entrepreneurs, the role of local ecology, and geographic spillovers from neighboring areas. |
| Date: | 2019–11–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:stvd7&r=all |
| By: | Vita, Gibran; Ivanova, Diana; Dumitru, Adina; Mira, Ricardo García; Carrus, Giuseppe; Stadler, Konstantin; Krause, Karen; Wood, Richard; Hertwich, Edgar (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) |
| Abstract: | Scientists and policymakers recognize the need to address consumption and lifestyles in order to reconcile environmental and development agendas. Sustainability-oriented grassroots initiatives emerge bottom-up to create opportunities for sustainable lifestyles; yet no prior assessment has ascertained the efficacy of their members to reduce carbon footprints (CF) and enhance well-being. We compare the CF of non-members and members of grassroots initiatives in the domains of food, clothing, housing and transport. We further compare the groups by testing the influence of socio-economic variables that are typically associated with both footprint and well-being. Here we show that grassroots initiative members have 16% lower total carbon footprint, and 43% and 86% lower carbon footprints for food and clothing respectively, compared to their “non-member” regional sociodemographic counterparts. We find a higher adoption of some energy-saving behaviors for initiative members such as greater active travel distance and lower indoor temperatures in the winter, yet no significant differences in the CF of housing and transport. Interestingly, increases in income are not associated with increases in the total CF of members, while the influence of income is confirmed for the CF of the total sample. Instead, factors such as age, household size, and gender better explain the variation in the domain-specific CFs of initiative members. Finally, members show higher life satisfaction compared to non-members and are 11–13% more likely to evaluate their life positively. Our results suggest that initiative members uncover lifestyle features that not only enable lower emissions, but also reconcile emissions with income and well-being. |
| Date: | 2019–10–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:3at5z&r=all |
| By: | Vahabi, Mehrdad; Mohajer, Nasser |
| Abstract: | This paper discusses different meanings and ambiguities of “neoliberalism” as a concept. Three dimensions of this concept as an economic doctrine, principles of economic policies (Washington Consensus) and a particular type of accumulation regime (post-Fordism) are explored. It also explores the evolution of this concept among its left and right advocates since the financial Crisis in 2008 notably the “authoritarian liberalism” and the “crisis of liberalism”. Finally, it reviews this concept is used in explaining certain aspects of the political economy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. |
| Keywords: | Neoliberalism, Authoritarian liberalism, Classical Liberalism, Social Liberalism, Washington Consensus, Keynes, Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Accumulation regime |
| JEL: | B2 E5 E58 G2 H7 N4 |
| Date: | 2019–12–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:97892&r=all |
| By: | Hung T. Diep; Gabriel Desgranges |
| Abstract: | We study in this paper the time evolution of stock markets using a statistical physics approach. Each agent is represented by a spin having a number of discrete states $q$ or continuous states, describing the tendency of the agent for buying or selling. The market ambiance is represented by a parameter $T$ which plays the role of the temperature in physics. We show that there is a critical value of $T$, say $T_c$, where strong fluctuations between individual states lead to a disordered situation in which there is no majority: the numbers of sellers and buyers are equal, namely the market clearing. We have considered three models: $q=3$ ( sell, buy, wait), $q=5$ (5 states between absolutely buy and absolutely sell), and $q=\infty$. The specific measure, by the government or by economic organisms, is parameterized by $H$ applied on the market at the time $t_1$ and removed at the time $t_2$. We have used Monte Carlo simulations to study the time evolution of the price as functions of those parameters. Many striking results are obtained. In particular we show that the price strongly fluctuates near $T_c$ and there exists a critical value $H_c$ above which the boosting effect remains after $H$ is removed. This happens only if $H$ is applied in the critical region. Otherwise, the effect of $H$ lasts only during the time of the application of $H$. The second party of the paper deals with the price variation using a time-dependent mean-field theory. By supposing that the sellers and the buyers belong to two distinct communities with their characteristics different in both intra-group and inter-group interactions, we find the price oscillation with time. |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1912.11665&r=all |
| By: | Tang, Daniel (University of Leeds) |
| Abstract: | Agent-based models are a powerful tool for studying the behaviour of complex systems that can be described in terms of multiple, interacting ``agents''. However, because of their inherently discrete and often highly non-linear nature, it is very difficult to reason about the relationship between the state of the model, on the one hand, and our observations of the real world on the other. In this paper we consider agents that have a discrete set of states that, at any instant, act with a probability that may depend on the environment or the state of other agents. Given this, we show how the mathematical apparatus of quantum field theory can be used to reason probabilistically about the state and dynamics the model, and describe an algorithm to update our belief in the state of the model in the light of new, real-world observations. Using a simple predator-prey model on a 2-dimensional spatial grid as an example, we demonstrate the assimilation of incomplete, noisy observations and show that this leads to an increase in the mutual information between the actual state of the observed system and the posterior distribution given the observations, when compared to a null model. |
| Date: | 2019–10–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:wu9q4&r=all |
| By: | Andreas A. Papandreou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) |
| Abstract: | There has been a burgeoning interest and literature on the risks associated with stranded assets. This paper aims to present an overview of this literature with a focus on the risks to the financial system associated with stranded assets and why these risks need to be a concern to central banks. It considers various definitions of stranded assets and its expanding scope while focusing more narrowly on climate-related risks and how these affect the financial system. Two main channels of climate-related risks are discussed in depth: risks of physical impacts from climate change and risks associated with the transition to a low-carbon economy. Reasons why the financial system may inadequately account for these risks are presented along with corrective policies on the part of investors and central banks. The paper also considers the special challenges and threats to financial stability associated with the historically unique sustainability transition needed to achieve the targets set by the Paris Agreement. |
| Keywords: | stranded assets; climate change;financial stability |
| JEL: | G2 Q54 |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bog:wpaper:272&r=all |
| By: | Amunyela, Lukas; Moyo, Thinah |
| Keywords: | Livestock Production/Industries, Agribusiness |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaae19:295710&r=all |
| By: | Henry Amoroso (Seton Hall University); Nathaniel Dvorozniak (Seton Hall University) |
| Abstract: | Through Catholic social thought, examining justice as a means of an individual?s dignity, freedom, and the act of charity, it is to be considered that the infrastructure of law and economics is to be subject to reformation in purpose to pursue a more just societal order. The practice of these professions, specifically in jurisprudence terms, being the consideration of not what is but an examination of what should be, is considerably interrelated with the pedagogical functions of the catholic church and its history in teachings and functions as a global institution(s). The major principles subscribed to the notions of law and social theory serving as guidance to lawyers, judges, and policy makers is not an amoral practice which renders results regardless of social implications but in fact is a profession which examines the welfare of the state, the fundamental ideas of evil, right, and wrong. These notions transcend into the principled ideas and structures of both government and economic models, more broadly supporting an institution of free market activity which reaffirms man?s personal dignity to engage in a system which inspires responsibility, a wage in coordination with the meaning of justice, private ownership, and more which structures peace, concord and justice. This perspective of catholic thought requires a departure from conventional thinking and a greater adherence to catholic social teaching which regards safeguarding human rights as well as the dignity of an individual as the centerpiece and purpose of law and economics. Law and economics, through the prism of Catholicism, is an erection of societal order designed to advance the welfare of the common good. ?Economics and Law Through the Perspective of Catholic Teachings? intends to reposition the individual?s normative perspectives on the ideas of legality and economic arrangements and instead questions models of these practices in a manner which examines the freedom of man and women. By doing so and by introducing perspectives of law and economics in the catholic thought is to question the contemporary secular sectors of these professions. Residing on the proposition that society can benefit from the extension of social catholic teachings, this paper proposes that career professionals in the fields of law and economics be prescribed to a construction of influenced religious teaching that more effectively utilizes his or her position as a means to extend a greater sense of justice for all bound in the fabric of both America and the world. |
| Keywords: | Catholic Social Teaching Economic |
| JEL: | A10 |
| Date: | 2019–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:9712187&r=all |