nep-pke New Economics Papers
on Post Keynesian Economics
Issue of 2008‒12‒01
three papers chosen by
Karl Petrick
University of the West Indies

  1. Behind the 2008 Capital Market Collapse By C-René Dominique
  2. The Cultural Roots of Institutions By Mariko Klasing
  3. A Note on Ronald Meek's 'Studies in the Labour Theory of Value' By Hagendorf, Klaus

  1. By: C-René Dominique
    Abstract: Greed and the unethical behavior of financial institutions obviously played a part in the collapse of the world capital market in 2008. But, this paper argues that the main culprits are the neo-liberal ideology (requiring ever smaller gov-ernments and privatization) and the flawed theories of risk assessment. It also finds that given the fact that market economies are fractal structures, the objective assessment and / or the quantification of risks is not even possible. It concludes with some recommendations as to how to avoid future collapses.
    Keywords: Efficiency and self-correction in market economies; Linear-positive and non-linear modelings; creative destruction of coefficients; determinism and randomness, and risk assessment.
    JEL: E22
    Date: 2008–10–26
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eei:rpaper:eeri_rp_2008_17&r=pke
  2. By: Mariko Klasing
    Abstract: Do political institutions have cultural roots? Using a novel data set of cultural values we show that culture, defined as a society's collective beliefs and values, is an important determinant of institutions. We argue that the traditional proxies for culture used in the existing literature suffer from conceptual problems and find that they do not survive several robustness checks. Our results suggest, that individualist societies and societies with preference for a more equal distribution of power set up institutions that better protect individual property rights, place more constraints on governments and have more effective governments. We find that our measures of culture are robust to the inclusion of other control variables and across different samples and that they always dominate the effects of the traditional proxies.
    Keywords: Institutions, political institutions, culture, cultural values
    JEL: D02 O17 P00 P51
    Date: 2008–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usg:dp2008:2008-24&r=pke
  3. By: Hagendorf, Klaus
    Abstract: Ronald Meek has (deliberately) ignored a very important discovery of Jevons. When labour is measured in terms of marginal labour values prices are proportional to these values and commodities exchange accordingly. This has been rediscovered by Soviet economists and that has been published in the JEL in the 70ies. Furthermore it is shown that under neoclassical assumptions the vector of marginal labour values is equal to the Sraffian vector of quantities of dated labour.
    Keywords: labour theory of value; Marxism; value theory; Ronald Meek; Jevons; Soviet economics; marginalism
    JEL: B10 B51 D46 B14 D24 B24
    Date: 2006–09–18
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:11759&r=pke

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