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on Heterodox Microeconomics |
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Issue of 2020‒10‒19
eighteen papers chosen by Carlo D’Ippoliti Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Schiller-Merkens, Simone |
| Abstract: | In these times of crises, capitalism and the far-reaching marketization of our societies has again become a subject of contestation and critique. Alternative organizing is one response to the critique of capitalism. As an embodied and constructive form of critique it takes place in prefigurative organizations and communities on the ground that experiment with alternative forms of organizing economic exchanges and lives. These prefigurative initiatives are seen as central actors in a social transformation toward an alternative economy. However, they oftentimes remain autonomous and disconnected, questioning their potential to contribute to a broader social change. This paper sets out to explore how and when alternative organizing as practiced in communities and organizations can scale upwards to lead to a more profound social transformation of our societies. Building on insights from scholarship on social movement outcomes, I discuss the collective actions, contextual conditions, and social mechanisms that are likely to allow an upward scale shift of alternative organizing. |
| Keywords: | alternative organizing,critique of capitalism,diffusion,movement outcome,postcapitalism,prefiguration,scale shift,social movement studies,social transformation,alternative Organisationsformen,Bewegungsforschung,Diffusion,Kapitalismuskritik,Postkapitalismus,Präfiguration,scale shift,soziale Transformation,Wirkungen sozialer Bewegungen |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:2011&r=all |
| By: | Koddenbrock, Kai; Kvangraven, Ingrid Harvold; Sylla, Ndongo Samba |
| Abstract: | One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has begun to behave ‘abnormally’ towards production. It has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from ‘legitimate’ economic pursuits. In this paper we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’. We argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The neglect of the needs of a self-centered economy has been the ‘normal’ and structural operation of finance in most of the former European colonies in the Global South during the last 150 years. We provide evidence to that effect with a longue durée study of the finance-production nexus in Senegal and Ghana. A main result of our empirical exploration is that an understanding of the historical developments of finance under colonialism is key for understanding how capitalist finance works globally. Such a de-centered perspective requires however a serious engagement with the concept and logics of imperialism. |
| Date: | 2020–09–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:pjt7x&r=all |
| By: | Assistant, JHET; Graf, Rüdiger |
| Abstract: | The article examines an early and idiosyncratic version of behavioral economics or “empir-ical socio-economics,” which the German economist and taxation expert Günter Schmölders developed in the postwar decades. Relying on both his published papers and his lecture notes and correspondence, it scrutinizes Schmölders’ intellectual upbringing in the tradition of the Historical School of Economics (Historische Schule der Nationalökonomie) and his relation to the emerging ordoliberalism, demonstrating that the roads that led to dissatisfaction with the emerging neoclassical mainstream and the unrealistic behavioral assumptions of macro-economic models were manifold. Accordingly, it shows that behavioral economics is compati-ble with various intellectual and political backgrounds and convictions. Yet, it still forms a dis-tinct entity: Comparing Schmölders with contemporary and later behavioral economists, I will show that they shared essential methodological assumptions as well as an understanding of human beings as decision-making organisms. |
| Date: | 2020–09–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:vyarx&r=all |
| By: | Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Grupo Estudios del Trabajo |
| Abstract: | En esta segunda edición presentamos los resultados de la "Encuesta sobre trabajo en tiempos de COVID-19" dirigida a trabajadores y trabajadoras de toda la ciudad de Mar del Plata y que fue realizada de manera on-line entre los días 14 y 26 de abril de 2020 a un total de 1660 personas. El cuestionario fue difundido a través de distintos medios por la CGT Regional Mar del Plata y la CTA de los Trabajadores. Asimismo distintas personas y organizaciones colaboraron de manera desinteresada para que la encuesta llegue a personas que pertenecen a todas las ramas de actividad de la ciudad y de diferentes categorías ocupacionales. A todas ellas, muchas gracias! Cabe aclarar que la técnica de muestreo empleada (no probabilística) no permite realizar inferencias. En algunas ocasiones, y sólo a modo de referencia indicamos valores absolutos de población que podrían estar en la situación que se describe (las características de muestra y los tests estadísticos se presentan al final de este documento en Notas técnicas). Los principales resultados dan cuenta que: - El 42,2% no trabaja desde que se inició la cuarentena y un 27,3% trabaja menos horas. - Un 31,7% no está percibiendo ingresos por trabajo y un 23% gana menos de lo habitual. - Asimismo, el 24,3% realiza teletrabajo/home office, y menos de la mitad (11,4%) convive con dependientes. En esos casos el 61,3%, sostuvo que la presencia de menores obstaculiza su trabajo. - La asistencia escolar recae en una sola persona el 36,6% de los casos que conviven con niños, niñas y adolescentes en edad escolar. Y de ese grupo, el 81,8% son mujeres. - Respecto a las expectativas, un 10,1% cree que posiblemente pierda el empleo y un 56,9% que posiblemente se reduzcan sus ingresos. A esto se le suma que un 7% ya perdió su empleo. - El 96,1% de la población trabajadora cree que el aislamiento obligatorio afectará su economía familiar (mucho 41,1%, bastante 36,1% y poco 18,9%). |
| Keywords: | Trabajadores; Situación Laboral; Aislamiento Social; COVID-19; |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nmp:nuland:3327&r=all |
| By: | McKee, Gregory; Jacobs, Keri L.; Kagan, Albert |
| Abstract: | Retail prices of products sold by agricultural input cooperatives are set according to a variety of factors, which may include the cost of offering products on trade credit. A sample of over 300 total pricing decisions for six inputs sold by input cooperatives to their members is used to analyze whether that trade credit volumes and the cooperative’s own financial needs tend to affect retail input price changes. We find that increased trade credit, at levels observed in this sample, tended to increase price inflation. The net combined effect on price inflation reflects upward pressure due to increasing risk associated with trade credit and downward pressure from an increase in through-put quantity. We find no effect on price inflation related to a firm’s internal need for funds as measured by liquidity or solvency measures. Finally, our results suggest that co-ops may not be pricing products using a “cost plus†approach, but rather based on their local market conditions and the need to drive sales. We discuss these results in the context of the role of the cooperative. |
| Date: | 2020–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genstf:202001010800001708&r=all |
| By: | Manson, Steven; An, Li; Clarke, Keith C.; Heppenstall, Alison; Koch, Jennifer; Krzyzanowski, Brittany; Morgan, Fraser; O'Sullivan, David; Runck, Bryan C.; Shook, Eric; Tesfatsion, Leigh |
| Abstract: | Agent based modeling (ABM) is a standard tool that is useful across many disciplines. Despite widespread and mounting interest in ABM, even broader adoption has been hindered by a set of methodological challenges that run from issues around basic tools to the need for a more complete conceptual foundation for the approach. After several decades of progress, ABMs remain difficult to develop and use for many students, scholars, and policy makers. This difficulty holds especially true for models designed to represent spatial patterns and processes across a broad range of human, natural, and human-environment systems. In this paper, we describe the methodological challenges facing further development and use of spatial ABM (SABM) and suggest some potential solutions from multiple disciplines. We first define SABM to narrow our object of inquiry, and then explore how spatiality is a source of both advantages and challenges. We examine how time interacts with space in models and delve into issues of model development in general and modeling frameworks and tools specifically. We draw on lessons and insights from fields with a history of ABM contributions, including economics, ecology, geography, ecology, anthropology, and spatial science with the goal of identifying promising ways forward for this powerful means of modeling. |
| Date: | 2020–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genstf:202001010800001690&r=all |
| By: | Koehler, Johann |
| JEL: | B14 B24 P2 P3 |
| Date: | 2020–12–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:104418&r=all |
| By: | Rahman, Jasmeen; Dimand, Robert; Assistant, JHET |
| Abstract: | We explore disciplinary boundary-making in geographical economics or “the new economic geography” with attention to the approaches taken by, and attempts at communication between, scholars with primary affiliations in economics, geography and regional science. The Dixit-Stiglitz general equilibrium approach to monopolistic competition and increasing returns was applied to agglomeration and location by Paul Krugman, who had previously pioneered the “new trade theory” building on the Dixit-Stiglitz model, and, independently and slightly earlier, by Masahisa Fujita and his student Heshem Abdel-Rahman starting from regional science, a tradition with its own departments, doctorates, conferences and journals distinct from economics and geography. Economic geography, as studied by geographers, had already taken a quantitative and theoretical turn in the 1960s, reviving an earlier tradition of German location theory overshadowed within geography after World War II by areal differentiation. Another strand of economic geography pursued by geographers was influenced by economic theory, but by non-neoclassical Marxian and Sraffian economics. Debates between these scholars raised questions whether these analyses were multidisciplinary, drawing on distinct disciplines, or crossed disciplinary boundaries (as when geographical economics in the style of economists is undertaken in geography departments) or transcends disciplinary boundaries, or involved the emergence of a new discipline. |
| Date: | 2020–09–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:xg5m9&r=all |
| By: | Pradipta Banerjee; Subhrabrata Choudhury |
| Abstract: | To design, evaluate and tune policies for all-inclusive human development, the primary requisite is to assess the true state of affairs of the society. Statistical indices like GDP, Gini Coefficients have been developed to accomplish the evaluation of the socio-economic systems. They have remained prevalent in the conventional economic theories but little do they have in the offing regarding true well-being and development of humans. Human Development Index (HDI) and thereafter Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) has been the path changing composite-index having the focus on human development. However, even though its fundamental philosophy has an all-inclusive human development focus, the composite-indices appear to be unable to grasp the actual assessment in several scenarios. This happens due to the dynamic non-linearity of social-systems where superposition principle cannot be applied between all of its inputs and outputs of the system as the system's own attributes get altered upon each input. We would discuss the apparent shortcomings and probable refinement of the existing index using an agent based computational system model approach. |
| Date: | 2020–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2010.03677&r=all |
| By: | L\'eo Touzo; Matteo Marsili; Don Zagier |
| Abstract: | The Glosten-Milgrom model describes a single asset market, where informed traders interact with a market maker, in the presence of noise traders. We derive an analogy between this financial model and a Szil\'ard information engine by {\em i)} showing that the optimal work extraction protocol in the latter coincides with the pricing strategy of the market maker in the former and {\em ii)} defining a market analogue of the physical temperature from the analysis of the distribution of market orders. Then we show that the expected gain of informed traders is bounded above by the product of this market temperature with the amount of information that informed traders have, in exact analogy with the corresponding formula for the maximal expected amount of work that can be extracted from a cycle of the information engine. In this way, recent ideas from information thermodynamics may shed light on financial markets, and lead to generalised inequalities, in the spirit of the extended second law of thermodynamics. |
| Date: | 2020–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2010.01905&r=all |
| By: | Abramov, Dimitri Marques |
| Abstract: | Despite the market economy to be contemporaneously considered as a complex adaptive system, there are no collective feedback mechanism that provide long range stability and complexity to the system. In this scenario, the logical prediction is a long-term economic collapse by positive loops. In this work, I outline the fundamental idea of a floating taxation system as a feedback system to prevent market collapse by asymmetrical company overgrowth and extreme reduction of system complexity. The paradigm would promote the long-term stability of the economic system. I’ve implemented a generic computational neural network with 5000 virtual companies whose initial states (i.e. capital) and connective weights (trading network) were normally distributed. A negative feedback loop was implemented with different weights. The market complexity was measured in terms of joint entropy in an algorithm to calc neural complexity in networks. Without feedback, some companies had explosive growth annihilating all collateral ones until all system collapses. With feedback loops, the complexity was stable while many companies disappeared (negative selection) and the capital variance substantially increased (from 10 units in initial conditions to 2000 times) as well complexity (increment on order to 104). This data supports a theory about feedback dynamic mechanisms for market self-regulation based on floating taxes, maintaining homeostasis with complexity, capital growth, and competitive balance. |
| Date: | 2020–09–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:xj2gb&r=all |
| By: | Montenegro Oporto, Adriana (IISEC, Universidad Católica Boliviana) |
| Abstract: | Diversos estudios se han dedicado a explorar las barreras de acceso a la tecnología productiva que enfrentan hombres y mujeres. Sin embargo, poco se ha dicho acerca de las dificultades que pueden presentarse en el proceso de incorporación de las tecnologías a la cotidianidad, una vez sorteadas tales barreras. Es por eso que, mediante una combinación de herramientas cualitativas y cuantitativas, el presente Documento de Trabajo investiga las particularidades de la apropiación tecnológica en tres proyectos desarrollados en la Amazonía boliviana, desde un enfoque de género. Se han utilizado grupos focales, entrevista, observación participante y encuestas para el levantamiento de información, privilegiando el tratamiento cualitativo. Los resultados indican que la participación de las usuarias a partir de fases tempranas de implementación de los proyectos potencia el sentido de pertenencia sobre las tecnologías, así como la conformación de grupos facilita el flujo de información y brinda incentivos para su uso sostenido. Por otra parte, se evidencia que alrededor de la tecnología existe una construcción identitaria diferenciada por género, visible en las percepciones individuales y comunitarias, que facilitan la apropiación de innovaciones productivas por parte de los varones, mientras que lo dificultan para las mujeres. Por último, se indica que se debe tomar en cuenta las preferencias culturales, los arreglos sociales de producción y reproducción y la neutralidad de los espacios simbólicos en los que se implementan. Esta investigación fue desarrollada en el Instituto de Investigaciones Socio-Económicas de la Universidad Católica Boliviana, IISEC. |
| Keywords: | Género; Tecnología; Apropiación tecnológica: Desarrollo productivo; Investigaciones Socio-Económicas de la Universidad Católica Boliviana; IISEC |
| Date: | 2020–10–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:iisecd:2020_004&r=all |
| By: | Etienne GERARD; Rocío GREDIAGA; Mónica LOPEZ |
| Abstract: | Au Mexique, les frontières entre secteur public et privé d’enseignement supérieur sont floues ; dans chacun des deux secteurs on distingue des institutions d’élite favorisant les étudiants qui disposent de capital économique, culturel et social, d’autre de moindre qualité. Les deux secteurs concourent ainsi à la reproduction des inégalités sociales comme territoriales. |
| Keywords: | Mexique |
| JEL: | Q |
| Date: | 2020–10–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:avg:wpaper:fr11565&r=all |
| By: | Luc Marco (CEPN - Centre d'Economie de l'Université Paris Nord - USPC - Université Sorbonne Paris Cité - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | A la fin des Trente glorieuses (1945-1973), l'économie française a dû affronter une mutation radicale de son tissu industriel. Pour mesurer cette mutation, une nouvelle discipline économique est née : la démographie des firmes. Celle-ci consiste en la comparaison statistique des créations nouvelles et des disparitions effectives d'entreprises industrielles. Ces dernières disparitions peuvent être estimées par le flux économique des liquidations des biens et des règlements judiciaires. L'analyse de la période des deux premières crises pétrolières a fait l'objet d'une thèse de troisième cycle soutenue en juin 1980 à l'Université de Nice. Cette nouvelle version, ici revue et corrigée, intègre aussi les données disponibles pour l'année terminale. Les sources statistiques sont celles de la Caisse nationale des marchés de l'Etat et de l'Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. L'approche théorique se situe dans le droit-fil des études françaises d'économie industrielle, qui, de Jacques Houssiaux à Alain Bienaymé, ont permis de mieux comprendre la mutation rapide de l'industrie dont il est question dans cet ouvrage. L'approche archéologique se fonde sur le stock français d'ouvrages et d'articles en économie ou en gestion des entreprises dont l'auteur est l'un des principaux historiens en France et dans le monde francophone. |
| Abstract: | At the end of the Glorious Thirty (1945-1973), the French economy had to face a radical change in its industrial fabric. To measure this change, a new economic discipline was born: the demographics of firms. This consists of a statistical comparison of new creations and the actual disappearances of industrial enterprises. These latest disappearances can be estimated by the economic flow of property liquidations and court settlements. The analysis of the period of the first two oil crises was the subject of a postgraduate thesis supported in June 1980 at the University of Nice. This new version, reviewed and corrected, also incorporates the data available for the final year. The statistical sources are those of the National State Markets Fund and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. The theoretical approach is in line with the French studies of industrial economics, which, from Jacques Houssiaux to Alain Bienaymé, have made it possible to better understand the rapid transformation of the industry referred to in this book. The archaeological approach is based on the French stock of books and articles in economics or business management, the author of which is one of the leading historians in France and in the French-speaking world. |
| Keywords: | Firmes,Démographie,France,1973-1980 |
| Date: | 2020–09–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02942193&r=all |
| By: | Pauline Castaing (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | In semi-arid lands, the resilience of farmers facing climate change is uncertain. The main objective of this paper is to explore whether mutual assistance within a group of cotton farmers implies reduced adoption of risk-mitigating strategies. I investigate the case of Burkina Faso where cotton farmers collectively purchase inputs from the cotton wholesale companies and pay for their purchase under the constraint of joint liability. Specifically, I try to understand whether this joint liability is correlated with the adoption of strategies which reduce exposure to climatic risks. I proxy peer pressure by the size of the network and find it to be associated with reduced investment in both incremental and transformational self-protection against weather shocks. |
| Keywords: | Burkina Faso,Joint liability,group lending |
| Date: | 2020–09–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02942129&r=all |
| By: | Marco Simoni |
| Abstract: | The economic decline of Italy since the mid 1990s is a critical case in contemporary political economy because its model of capitalism was deeply reformed at the time when its decline commenced. This paper argues that economic stagnation cannot be attributed to special interest politics, nor to the lack of market-friendly reforms in a globalized economic context, as previous literature argues. Instead, Italian economic decline is a consequence of institutional change which on the one hand has destroyed previous institutional complementarities, and on the other hand has led to an incoherent, or “hybrid,” setting. In the institutional spheres of corporate governance and labor, economic reforms established new institutions alternatively apt to support both strategic coordination and market coordination, resulting in institutional incoherence. In addition, building on the case of Italy and based on patent data relative to 19 OECD countries, this paper unpacks the link between institutional coherence and economic performance. It articulates a novel hypothesis according to which higher specialization in innovation patterns, derived from institutional coherence, also leads to higher overall innovation volumes. Hence, reforms that undermine a prevalent mode of coordination across the economy also undermine innovation capacity, leading to economic decline. |
| Keywords: | Varieties of Capitalism, Economic Growth, Italy |
| Date: | 2019–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eiq:eileqs:143&r=all |
| By: | Comim, Flavio; Borsi, Mihály Tamás; Valerio Mendoza, Octasiano |
| Abstract: | This paper offers the first analytical framework to tackle the concept of aporophobia (rejection of the poor), as introduced by Cortina's ground-breaking work. It can be considered a first step towards a fully-fledged theory of aporophobia. More specifically, i) it provides a conceptual analysis of the aporophobia phenomena, suggesting that there are three dimensions of aporophobia, namely, macro, meso and micro aporophobia, ii) it introduces conceptual and measurement models to increase the theoretical density of the concept that add corresponding sub-dimensions and iii) it examines preliminary evidence of the existence of aporophobia at an aggregate level. In doing so, it introduces a new measure of aporophobia, such as the Global Aporophobia Index. The main message of this paper is clear: the non-poor are part of the (poverty) problem and therefore need to be part of its solution. |
| Keywords: | aporophobia, poverty, inequality, global aporophobia index |
| JEL: | A13 D31 D63 D64 I14 I24 I31 I32 |
| Date: | 2020–09–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:103124&r=all |
| By: | Salvat, Christophe; Assistant, JHET |
| Abstract: | This article questions the articulation between John Stuart Mill’s initial project of creating a new science dedicated to the means of improving individual character, a science named ethology, and the treatise of political economy that he published instead. My claim is that his defence of free competition as well as some of the arguments he opposes to it, and which have often puzzled his readers, actually reveal the moral agenda of his political economy and of some of his political principles, specifically his ambivalent position towards paternalism. |
| Date: | 2020–09–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:tcj2f&r=all |