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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Becker, Sascha O. |
| Abstract: | This chapter explores the intersection of religion and economics on the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776. While Smith is often viewed as a secular figure in economics, his work was deeply influenced by the moral philosophy of his time, which was shaped by Christian thought. I discuss how economists think about the religious themes in Smith’s work in the 21st century and review what we know today about the connection between religion and economic outcomes. |
| JEL: | B1 B2 N3 N9 P5 Z12 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21196 |
| By: | Drakopoulos, Stavros A.; Katselidis, Ioannis |
| Abstract: | This work discusses the role of psychology in the Post War II non-mainstream economics tradition, focusing on George Katona, Harvey Leibenstein and Tibor Scitovsky. Although those three authors were largely ignored by orthodox economists, they exercised a considerable influence on heterodox schools and helped to establish the foundations of behavioural economics and of the economics of happiness. Katona started a research programme at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, which was openly based on the economic psychology of the attitudes and motives underlying market behaviour. Initially, he focused on the psychological aspects of business behaviour in order to explore the motives and attitudes of businessmen. Subsequently, Katona’s studies were centred on the psychological aspects of consumption, suggesting the use of interview surveys to obtain both financial and attitudinal data of consumers. Leibenstein is considered to be one of the first economists to explore issues pertaining to what is called today behavioural economics. Anticipating modern or new behavioural economics, Leibenstein incorporated the psychological dimensions of economic behaviour into his microeconomic approach long before the emergence of behavioral economics as a distinct discipline. Scitovsky was among the first economists to detect a new-found interest in the determinants of well-being and in its underlying processes in psychological research, and to show how economics could be enriched by applying the new psychological insights. All three were clearly against the purging of psychology from twentieth century economic theory, arguing that incorporating concepts and findings from psychology into economics was methodologically legitimate and theoretically fruitful. The paper will also discuss their critical attitude towards the standard model of economic rationality and the mainstream methodological framework. Further, it will investigate key common points of these authors, including their emphasis on the role of interdependent preferences. |
| Keywords: | History of Heterodox Economics; Relation between Economics and Psychology; History of Old Behavioral Economics; History of Happiness Economics |
| JEL: | A12 B2 B3 B4 B50 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129729 |
| By: | Kevin Leportier (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, INSPÉ Normandie Caen - Institut national supérieur du professorat et de l'éducation - Normandie Caen - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines whether the algorithmic institutions developed within market design are compatible with the Hayekian conception of liberty as the absence of coercion. While market design is often presented as a continuation of Hayekian insights regarding dispersed knowledge and decentralized coordination, this paper argues that Hayekian liberty depends on more than decentralized choice. It also requires a stable institutional environment within which individuals can form coherent plans and learn from experience. Algorithmic institutions tend to weaken this stability, thereby undermining Hayekian liberty. |
| Keywords: | Hayek, Algorithmic institutions, Coercion, Liberty, Freedom, Market design, Mechanism design |
| Date: | 2026–05–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05676848 |
| By: | Frohly, Constance; Galbiati, Roberto; Henry, Emeric; Jacquemet, Nicolas |
| Abstract: | Moral reminders, also referred to as moral appeals or moral nudges, are widely used by governments, companies, and NGOs to promote pro-social behavior. These appeals function by either increasing the salience of moral concerns or the cost of diverting attention away from relevant information on payoffs or social norms. Drawing on over 400 studies across psychology, sociology, management and economics, we present a meta-analysis of their effects. Our findings reveal that, on average, moral reminders are effective, with an effect size (Hedge’s g) of 0.24 in a random-effects model, but with significant backfiring occurring in 12% of studies. We identify sources of heterogeneity based on disciplinary focus and design choices. Crucially, we introduce a taxonomy of moral reminders: we distinguish those that provide information on consequences, those that highlight descriptive or injunctive norms, and those that prime moral awareness. Our analysis shows that all of these instruments are effective, particularly those providing information on consequences, whereas information on injunctive norms is more likely to backfire |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21025 |
| By: | Richard N. Langlois (University of Connecticut) |
| Abstract: | Legal institutionalists correctly emphasize that corporations are constituted by law rather than merely by private contract, but many wrongly conclude that shareholders do not own corporations and that corporations themselves cannot be objects of ownership. This paper argues instead that the Hansmann-Kraakman conception of the corporation – centered on legal personality, asset partitioning, transferable shares, delegated management, and investor ownership – is both compatible with legal institutionalism and superior as an account of the corporation’s economic role. The paper reconceptualizes the corporation as a modular legal architecture designed to cope with complexity, arguing that incorporation functions as a system of encapsulation and information hiding. By legally partitioning assets and defining organizational boundaries, the corporation creates a protected module within which rich, complex, and difficult-to-price interactions can occur. Corporate law thus operates as a set of abstract design rules that reduce the knowledge burdens associated with large-scale cooperation. This modular organizational form evolved gradually from medieval ecclesiastical corporations and chartered trading companies into the modern public corporation through the emergence of increasingly abstract and general legal rules of incorporation. The paper concludes that stakeholder and managerial theories ultimately rest on epistemic assumptions incompatible with a world of uncertainty and decentralized learning. The shareholder-owned corporation, embedded in external capital markets and disciplined by transferable ownership claims, evolved precisely because it is an effective institutional response to complexity, experimentation, and economic change. |
| Keywords: | corporate governance, shareholder ownership, legal institutionalism, modularity, Knightian uncertainty |
| JEL: | D23 G30 K22 L21 M14 N20 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uct:uconnp:2026-03 |
| By: | John Mori |
| Abstract: | We consider the social aggregation of preferences over lotteries in the presence of other-regarding preferences. If society respects each individual's sovereignty, an axiom we propose akin to Sen's Liberalism, then society's utility is a linear combination of individuals' self-regarding utilities. That is, other-regarding preferences can only influence the weights society places on each individual. We next characterize the unique weighting method under which society's weight ratio between two individuals is the geometric mean of that of all individuals. The first distinguishing axiom concerns the consistency of sequential aggregation, while the second concerns consensus across changes in individuals' other-regarding preferences. We extend the first result to a setting with feasibility constraints and a setting with subjective uncertainty. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.25904 |
| By: | Monnet, Eric |
| Abstract: | The Bretton Woods system is often described as freeing national monetary policies from the gold-reserve constraints of the gold standard. Breaking the “gold fetters†was essential to the embedded liberalism and economic interventionism of the postwar era. Yet gold retained a crucial role: monetary authorities backed currency with gold reserves, both de facto and de jure, frequently maintaining gold cover ratios comparable to those of the gold standard. How, then, could gold backing coexist with autonomous domestic macroeconomic policy? This article shows that the combination of two phenomena provides an answer: credit growth and currency growth became increasingly decoupled after 1945, and central banks shifted their emphasis from money toward credit. This created substantial scope to stimulate domestic economic activity through credit expansion without being constrained by the link between gold and currency in circulation. Econometric analysis for 38 countries indicates that gold reserves remained strongly correlated with currency, but not with bank credit. Changes in credit markets and central bank instruments therefore allowed gold backing to persist largely as a symbolic tie, without constraining domestic policy. Gold, however, exerted pressure on US policy and shaped international monetary relations. These findings indicate that institutional persistence does not necessarily generate similar economic effects across historical periods. |
| Keywords: | Bretton Woods |
| JEL: | D8 E5 F5 F55 M14 N1 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21215 |
| By: | Cinnirella, Francesco; Della Lena, Sebastiano; Manzoni, Elena; Panebianco, Fabrizio |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how religious ethic influences contributions to public goods. We develop a theoretical model distinguishing individualistic motivations — where people seek to meet individual moral standards — from collectivistic motivations — where behavior is guided by others' expectations. We argue that the Protestant ethic emphasizes individual responsibility, while the Catholic ethic places greater weight on social expectations. The model predicts that the Protestant contribution share increases with income, whereas the Catholic contribution share is non-monotonic. Moreover, Catholics' overall contribution is relatively higher at lower-middle incomes and lower at higher-middle incomes, while there is no denominational difference in the decision whether to contribute at all. The model also implies that only Catholics' contributions are sensitive to the religious composition of their environment. We test these predictions using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, exploiting variation within individuals. Consistent with the theoretical model, we find (i) no denominational differences at the extensive margin; (ii) at the intensive margin, donations increase with income among Protestants and remain flat among Catholics. These results hold when using the denomination of the parents, suggesting intergenerational transmission of religious ethics. Our findings highlight the role of religious moral structures in shaping cooperative behavior and public-good provision. |
| Keywords: | Religion; Individualism; Collectivism |
| JEL: | D91 H41 Z12 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21081 |