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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Motonori Ishii (Waseda University, Graduate School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to reinterpret F. A. Hayek's theory of prices within the context of British classical economics (hereinafter referred to as "the Classical School"). Although Hayek hailed from the Austrian School, which was founded on a critique of the Classical School, he viewed modern economics—from the Marginal Revolution onward—as an economics in which subjectivism had been grafted onto the Classical School. In fact, Hayek reinterpreted the concept of the "natural price" in the Classical School—a price determined in light of social and historical circumstances and converging toward that level through competition. Hayek interpreted this as a system of negative feedback and recognized Smith as its pioneer. Hayek's interest lay in elucidating why markets move toward equilibrium even though people possess only fragmentary and unsystematized knowledge; he identified conventions—which stabilize people's expectations—as the key factor. Hayek defended the natural price as a price supported by convention, and in that sense, his theory of prices owes much to Smith's theory of the natural price. |
| Keywords: | Hayek, Classical Economics, Austrian School, Marginal Revolution, Natural Price |
| JEL: | B12 B13 B31 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wap:wpaper:2608 |
| By: | Turan Yay (Yeditepe University, Turkey) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the relationship among economics, strategic management, organizational studies, and economic sociology-four interconnected fields concerned with firms and organizations-from an interdisciplinary perspective. The argument is advanced that a descriptive approach, rather than a prescriptive one, more effectively illuminates their interactions. Recent natural and spontaneous interactions are highlighted as valuable for evaluating the effectiveness of interdisciplinary engagement. This perspective is grounded in three observations about major developments in these disciplines over the past fifty years. First, while all four fields focus on firms and organizations, they frequently operate in isolation despite overlapping interests. Second, the interactions among these disciplines should be analyzed with reference to the philosophical foundations of interdisciplinarity, particularly the ways in which disciplinary boundaries, methodological assumptions, and epistemological traditions shape knowledge production. Third, the study investigates the extent to which these interdisciplinary interactions contribute to the accumulation of knowledge. Ultimately, it is argued that adopting the complexity perspective is the most effective means of fostering interdisciplinary relationships, as it balances autonomy and collaboration, promotes pluralism, and supports authentic interdisciplinary work. |
| Keywords: | interdisciplinarity, scientific imperialism, complexity, firm theory, organizational theory, strategic management, economic sociology., L223, L1 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05495211 |
| By: | Guichardaz Remy; Pénin Julien |
| Abstract: | In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter famously predicts the likely replacement of capitalism by socialism and claims that a socialist economy could be perfectly workable. While most commentators have interpreted the book as a neutral or even favorable assessment of socialism’s feasibility, a few of them have noted the ironic tone that pervades parts of the book. Yet, the implications of this irony for Schumpeter’s assessment of socialism remain largely unexplored. This article argues that Schumpeter’s apparent defense of socialism is best understood as a sustained ironic demonstration designed to expose the limits of socialist planning rather than to endorse its superiority over capitalism. Drawing on concepts that lie at the heart of Schumpeter’s theoretical framework, notably the distinction between growth and development, the opposition between perfect competition and plausible capitalism, and the central role of the entrepreneur in the emergence of novelty, we show that Schumpeter could not consistently maintain that a socialist economy would be capable of reproducing the developmental performance of capitalism. Behind an explicit but mostly ironic claim asserting the viability of socialism, CSD provides in fact a demonstration that socialism cannot match capitalism’s ability to generate the stream of discontinuous innovations that constitute economic development. |
| Keywords: | Schumpeter, entrepreneur, capitalism, socialism, development, growth |
| JEL: | B15 B25 O3 P3 P5 P41 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2026-19 |
| By: | Koyama, Mark |
| Abstract: | Adam Smith's account of medieval towns in Book III of The Wealth of Nations remains one of the most influential analyses of how commerce transformed feudal Europe. This paper formalizes Smith's argument as a game between kings, lords, and towns. The king-town alliance emphasized by Adam Smith emerges when towns are wealthy enough to offer fiscal and military support but lords remain a serious threat. However, when kings become excessively predatory, towns may ally with lords (as in the Magna Carta crisis); when towns are too weak to offer substantial support, kings ally with lords instead (as in Eastern Europe). A dynamic extension shows that the king-town equilibrium is self-undermining: commercial growth erodes lordly military power through Smith's ``diamond buckles'' mechanism, eventually enabling royal absolutism. In contrast, the king-lords equilibrium is self-reinforcing, suppressing urban development and preserving feudal institutions. The framework highlights how small differences in initial urban development could generate dramatically different long-run trajectories and illuminates both the brilliance and the limitations of Smith's conjectural history. |
| Keywords: | Institutions; Economic history |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21458 |
| By: | François Facchini (UP1 UFR02 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - École d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | History, and historians, strive to separate the wheat from the chaff. This exercise is commendable, but one must avoid errors in classification, lest one reject the wheat and retain only the chaff. When attempting to distinguish progressive intellectuals, who move with the times, from those who oppose social progress by defending the strong against the weak, immorality against morality, and self-interest against the common good, it is best to avoid mistakes. This article aims to correct such errors. It recalls, as is fairly well known, Keynes's openly eugenicist positions and refutes the rumors of racialism surrounding James Buchanan, based on work recently published in the journal Public Choice. |
| Abstract: | L'Histoire, et les historiens, s'emploient à séparer le bon grain de l'ivraie. L'exercice est louable mais encore faut-il ne pas se tromper dans les classements sous peine de rejeter le bon grain et de ne garder que l'ivraie. Lorsque l'on prétend distinguer les intellectuels progressistes, qui vont dans le sens de l'histoire, des intellectuels qui s'opposent au progrès social en défendant les forts contre les faibles, l'immoralité contre la moralité, l'intérêt égoïste contre le bien commun, mieux vaut ne pas faire d'erreur. Ce sont de telles erreurs que cet article entend corriger. Il rappelle, ce qui est assez bien connu, les positions ouvertement eugénistes de Keynes et dément les rumeurs de racialisme de James Buchanan sur la base de travaux publiés récemment dans la revue Public Choice à ce sujet. |
| Keywords: | Racialism, Corporatism, Eugenism, Keynes, Corporatisme, Eugenisme, Buchanan, Racialisme |
| Date: | 2025–10–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-05598689 |
| By: | Juan Carlos De Pablo |
| Abstract: | Para muchos economistas, el principal mensaje que surge de la Riqueza de las naciones es la mano invisible. Pero en esta monografía me ocupo de la división del trabajo porque al comienzo de un escrito un autor suele plantear la cuestión más importante. No solo la puso al comienzo de la Riqueza de las Naciones, sino que por sus implicancias pienso que Adam Smith se hubiera inmortalizado igual, aunque no hubiera luego hablado de la mano invisible, de la falta de benevolencia del carnicero, etc. La primera sección de esta monografía plantea la sustancia del hallazgo descripto por Adam Smith en las primeras páginas de la Riqueza de las naciones, por el cual merece ser recordado 250 años después. La segunda sección se ocupa de otros aspectos referidos a esta obra. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cem:doctra:921 |
| By: | Steininger, L. E. |
| Abstract: | This article starts from the premise that IPE has, by and large, a blind spot for the contingency of public, monetary provisioning in support of full employment. Public employer-of-last-resort facilities are often treated as politically or economically unfeasible, or even dispensable. Yet, much like central banks’ lending of last resort facilities, they are among the most basic features of a well-functioning economy. The persistent failure to recognise and operationalise such labour-market public backstops thus constitutes one of the most consequential, if intangible, infrastructure failures of our time. To address the foundations of this blind spot, the article draws on critical infrastructure studies, which conceptualise infrastructural forms as lively, political, and contested. I argue that attention to infrastructural form foregrounds the individuated ontology structuring contemporary IPE. The article then draws a parallel between the historical hard-wiring of public backstops into financial markets and the contemporary hard-wiring of inequities into monetary infrastructure, sustained by epistemic assumptions about accounting, money, and price stability. The argument is developed through the case of public option employment. |
| Keywords: | infrastructural form; blind spots; epistemology; lending of last resort; public option employment; theory of money |
| JEL: | A12 E42 P51 B41 |
| Date: | 2026–06–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138943 |
| By: | Alex Amiotte Suchet (IDHES - Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l'Économie et de la Société - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UP8 - Université Paris 8 - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - UEVE - Université d'Évry-Val-d'Essonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - ENS Paris Saclay - Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay) |
| Abstract: | Contemporary economic policies have become increasingly reliant on lending and guarantee instruments managed by public banks. Does this trend signal a return of the state, or rather the financialisation of public action? This article explores the long- term institutional transformations of public SME financing in France, analysing the evolving roles of finance, businesses and the state. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the political economy of financialisation, it examines both the creation and the gradual financialisation of the institutional arrangement governing public SME financing. Based on extensive sources – 108 archive boxes, additional historical materials, and ten semi-structured interviews – the study traces the emergence of a financialised institutional arrangement that has underpinned French economic policy since the late 1990s. Initially centred on public guarantees developed in the interwar period, the introduction of public loans in the 1980s produced a fragile arrangement that ultimately facilitated financialisation through the integration of financial devices and actors. This periodisation based on valuation powers helps to explain the recent conjunction of renewed public intervention and the consolidation of financialisation dynamics. |
| Abstract: | Les politiques économiques contemporaines s'appuient de plus en plus sur des instruments de crédit et de garantie gérés par les banques publiques. Cette tendance marque-t-elle un retour de l'État ou plutôt la financiarisation des politiques publiques ? Cet article explore le changement institutionnel de long terme du financement public des PME en France, en analysant l'évolution des rôles respectifs de la finance, des entreprises et de l'État. Avec l'institutionnalisme historique et l'économie politique de la financiarisation, il étudie à la fois la création et la financiarisation progressive de l'arrangement institutionnel régissant le financement public des PME. S'appuyant sur des sources historiques – 108 boîtes d'archives, des documents historiques supplémentaires et dix entretiens semi-structurés –, l'enquête retrace l'émergence d'un dispositif institutionnel financiarisé qui sous-tend la politique économique française depuis la fin des années 1990. Initialement centré sur les garanties publiques mises en place pendant l'entre-deux-guerres, l'introduction des prêts publics dans les années 1980 a donné naissance à un arrangement fragile qui a finalement facilité la financiarisation par l'intégration de dispositifs et d'acteurs financiers. Cette périodisation fondée sur les pouvoirs de valorisation permet d'expliquer la conjonction récente entre une intervention publique renouvelée et la consolidation des dynamiques de financiarisation. |
| Keywords: | financialisation, institutional change, institutional arrangement, public financing, public banks |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05330715 |
| By: | Jona Whipple |
| Abstract: | The history of the creation of U.S. central banks includes political battles, financial crises, 77 years without a central bank—and one founding father’s enduring vision. |
| Keywords: | central banking; economic history; financial history; financial panics; financial crises |
| Date: | 2026–07–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:l00100:103481 |
| By: | Besley, Timothy; Velasco, Andres |
| Abstract: | This paper puts forward five principles for a new economic consensus, which could serve as a modern alternative to the Washington Consensus of 35 years ago. They are built on new ideas that have gained currency in economics over the past three decades. We also provide examples of the policies that could follow from these principles. The goal is not to advocate a particular constellation of policies pitched as global ‘best practice’, because a one-size-fits-all approach does not make much sense: As local circumstances vary, so should policies. Ultimately, it is up to each polity to decide for itself. Our hope is that the principles contained in this paper can help organise the thinking required to make those decisions. |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2026–06–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138446 |
| By: | Jonathan D. Rose; David C. Wheelock |
| Abstract: | The tradition of Federal Reserve independence is encoded in statute in important ways but is also rooted in norms and practices. To articulate this tradition, we discuss how those norms and practices emerged historically from compromises over the concentration of power, actions taken by political leaders and Fed officials to define the boundaries of the Fed’s independence, and in reaction to evolving monetary theories and practices. We argue that understanding these historic roots provides essential context for evaluating challenges to the Fed's independence today and in the future. |
| Keywords: | Federal Reserve; central bank independence; monetary policy |
| JEL: | N12 E58 |
| Date: | 2026–07–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedlwp:103485 |
| By: | Allan Pedersen |
| Abstract: | The endogenous-money debate is settled operationally: central banks set the price of reserves and accommodate the quantity, as the post-Keynesian literature argued and the Bank of England's 2014 account states publicly. Yet the codified rule-book (Basel risk-weights, the legal definition of money, stress-test taxonomies, the mandate) was written on opposite, veil-view assumptions and not rewritten. What does that lag do to supervision? Codified categories, the paper argues, shape the surveillance regime: a category-system makes some risks countable and others unrepresentable, so codified doctrine works as an epistemic immune system, specialised against the prior crisis and blind to risks of a different kind. Doctrine does not decide which settlement is codified (material interests and path dependence do that); the contribution is downstream, in the sociology of ignorance. It separates doctrinal blindness, where a risk has no category, from motivated blindness, where a recognised risk goes unwatched because a coalition benefits, distinguished in the record by a missing versus a suppressed category. The dependent variable, the distribution of supervisory attention, has four observable proxies. The mechanism is shown in three historical episodes and a set of contemporary gaps; a discriminating archival case (Competition and Credit Control 1971 and the Secondary Banking Crisis) is specified for a companion paper. |
| Keywords: | endogenous money; monetary doctrine; financial supervision; sociology of ignorance; classification; macroprudential policy; central banking; path dependence |
| JEL: | B22 B31 E42 E58 G28 N20 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pmt:wpaper:1 |
| By: | Naoki Yoshihara; Roberto Veneziani |
| Abstract: | We analyse a general, dynamic neoclassical production economy. We show that any sequence of competitive equilibrium prices converges to a vector of production prices. Thus, far from being a special case, classical prices of production are the attractor of neoclassical equilibrium prices. Indeed, and this is a second insight, prices of production turn out to be the (unique) supporting price vector of the turnpike capital accumulation path. Finally, our results have some implications for theories of exploitation and class, and distributive justice more generally |
| Date: | 2026–06–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:toh:tergaa:499 |
| By: | Robeyns, Ingrid; Vaughan, Michael; Burchardt, Tania |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we lay out the foundations for an extreme wealth line, in both conceptual as well as motivational terms. An extreme wealth line is a social indicator that tries to capture the intuition that a person can have too much wealth, and is thus the opposite of a poverty line. An extreme wealth line is a novel proposal, that could play a crucial role in debates on high and rising levels of wealth inequality, in academia, policy-making and civil society. To conceptually develop the extreme wealth line, we first lay out the reasons to hold that one can have too much wealth. We argue that the most fruitful way to answer this question is to focus on the harms that excessive wealth causes to people, societies, economies, democracies and the planet. In this paper, we start by reviewing existing academic research on related but distinct efforts to identify 'the rich' and 'riches lines'. Next, we develop a notion of harm that is suitable for this purpose, and provide a brief survey of the different domains of harms. This allows us to develop a definition of the extreme wealth line, and also clarify what functions we believe an extreme wealth line can play and how it should be distinguished from related yet different claims. We conclude the paper by laying out an agenda for further research, that is needed to develop the extreme wealth line empirically. |
| JEL: | J1 E6 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138898 |
| By: | Ewan McGaughey |
| Abstract: | Are democracy and socialism compatible? Does democratic socialism work? And what is its relation to the law? This paper shows that democratic socialism, by whatever name, is the dominant political model in wealthy democracies, popular among voters, and the chief driver of human progress. It explains how democratic socialism was built through the understanding of capitalism’s failures, especially the shape-shifting legal forms of private property in the means of production, freedom of contract, and competitive corporations. It identifies the 3 core features of 21st century democratic socialism: more public and common ownership, economic democracy on a floor of social rights, and fair taxes. These policies have been spreading, are the prevailing practice in most wealthy countries, and are highly popular among voters. It is a myth that the rules of capitalism lead to more innovation, productivity, less waste, or are good for democracy. The evidence suggests the reverse is true. Democratic socialism is humanity's greatest hope. |
| Keywords: | Democracy, socialism, law, labour, public ownership, economic democracy, fair taxes, innovation, productivity |
| JEL: | K31 K10 K11 K20 K22 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbr:cbrwps:wp550 |
| By: | Philippe Colo (Oeschger Centre for Climate Research, Univ of Bern & ETH Zurich); Guillaume Pommey (DEF, University of Rome "Tor Vergata") |
| Abstract: | This paper studies communication failure regarding risks in the commons. It argues that strategic issues might explain why years of scientific reporting regarding future risks have failed to trigger sufficient climate awareness. We consider a game of contribution to a public bad, where there is uncertainty regarding the damage generated by externalities. Prior to the game, agents receive non-certifiable information regarding the damage from an informed utilitarian expert. We show that in large-scale public good problems information transmission usually fails. We compare this result with the cases of Rawlsian and anti-Rawlsian experts and discuss the implication for climate expert panels. We also investigate the influence of the value of information in our result, which provides us with some insight on the part played by deontology on scientific communication. |
| Keywords: | Public good games, cheap talk, climate change, values in science |
| JEL: | H41 D83 D62 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–07–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:624 |
| By: | Jeffrey Gardiner |
| Abstract: | This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.18288 |
| By: | Nina Rapoport (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France) |
| Abstract: | This review examines how virtual embodiment interventions can inform economic research on inequality across social groups. These interventions, widely used in psychology and related disciplines, consist of using virtual reality to embody individuals in virtual bodies whose appearance can be experimentally manipulated. By varying key characteristics such as skin-tone, gender, or age, researchers caninduce the illusion of inhabiting the body of an outgroup member. I synthesize existing research on outgroup embodiment and provide both a practical guide to designing embodiment interventions and a critical assessment of the methodological trade-offs involved in their implementation. In addition, I discuss how combining embodimentinterventions with tools from experimental economics can serve two purposes: first, to advance research on social inequality by introducing new methods to study its socio-cognitive foundations; and second, to address open questions in the embodiment literature by testing whether “changing bodies” can change not only minds but also behavior. |
| Keywords: | Discrimination; Inequality; Prejudice; Identity; Virtual reality; Experimental economics |
| JEL: | C91 D91 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–02–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aim:wpaimx:2603 |
| By: | Hagenbach, Jeanne; Saucet, Charlotte |
| Abstract: | Many economic and policy decisions require weighting the welfare of individuals living at different points in time. To examine how people approach such intertemporal trade-offs, we design an experiment in which subjects with no personal monetary stake allocate money between Strangers who differ in their participation and payment dates. This design allows us to examine intertemporal universalism, the extent to which individuals receive equal consideration regardless of their temporal location. Our results show that subjects are more generous toward Strangers who participate and/or are paid today than toward those whose participation and/or payment is delayed by 6, 12, or 24 months. In contrast, when both Strangers participate and/or are paid at different dates that all fall in the future, allocation differences largely vanish. To shed light on the mechanisms behind these results, we complement the main experiment with measures of perceived closeness to Strangers and open-ended justifications for favoritism. These complementary data suggest that temporal distance maps onto social distance: subjects feel closer to Strangers who are anchored in the present and justify favoring them by invoking their immediate needs or greater commitment. |
| Keywords: | altruism |
| JEL: | C91 D64 D91 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21469 |