nep-pke New Economics Papers
on Post Keynesian Economics
Issue of 2009‒08‒08
five papers chosen by
Karl Petrick
University of the West Indies

  1. Beauty Contested. How much of Keynes’ remains in Behavioural Economics Beauty Contests? By Alessandro Lanteri; Anna Carabelli
  2. KALDOR’S WAR By J.E King
  3. The Gains from Right to Rent By Dean Baker; Hye Jin Rho
  4. Economics, Area Studies and Human Development By Gustav Ranis
  5. Entrepreneurship, Evolution and Geography By Erik Stam

  1. By: Alessandro Lanteri; Anna Carabelli
    Abstract: In one of the most famous passages of economic literature, John Maynard Keynes (1936, p.156) likens the stock market to a beauty contest in which the winners are those who anticipate the average opinion. Recently there have been attempts at investigating the BC experimentally (Nagel 1995, Duffy & Nagel 1997, Ho et al. 1998, Bosch-Domenech et al. 2002, Güth et al. 2002). In Experimental Beauty Contests, participants choose a real number from a closed interval, e.g. I [0,100]. Whoever picks the number closest to p times the average (usuallywith p = 2/3) is the winner of a monetary reward. An experiment like this is dominance solvable: the process of iterated elimination of dominated strategies leads to the unique and stable equilibrium at which every player chooses zero, and every player wins. Keynes’ metaphor, on the other hand, referred to a situation in which not all participants can win, so that the goal of individual investors and speculators must be “to outwit the crowd” (p. 152). Despite the differences, the Keynesian theory of decision under uncertainty tallies with the behaviour observed in Experimental Beauty Contests.
    Keywords: Beauty Contest, Behavioural Economics, Keynes, Reasoning.
    JEL: B31 C9 D81
    Date: 2008–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:20-2008&r=pke
  2. By: J.E King
    Date: 2009–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:2007-25&r=pke
  3. By: Dean Baker; Hye Jin Rho
    Abstract: This paper calculates savings from renting compared with owning a house purchased at the peak housing bubble years of 2006 or 2007 in 16 major metropolitan areas. (The appendix includes calculations for 100 cities, including these 16.) The analysis calculates the savings both before- and after-tax, allowing readers to see the impact on ownership costs of the mortgage interest and property tax deductions. Many of the homeowners currently facing foreclosure would likely be able to afford the market rent on their home. If Congress were to temporarily alter the foreclosure laws to allow foreclosed homeowners to remain in their homes as renters, it is likely that many would chose to take advantage of this opportunity. This path would offer savings for former homeowners, as well as help stabilize families and communities that are blighted by foreclosures. In addition, Right to Rent offers the advantage that it could immediately benefit all homeowners facing foreclosure without any bureaucracy and would require no taxpayer dollars.
    Keywords: right to rent, foreclosures, housing
    JEL: G G2 G21 G28 R R2 R21
    Date: 2009–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:epo:papers:2009-26&r=pke
  4. By: Gustav Ranis (Yale University, Economic Growth Center)
    Abstract: This paper suggests that area studies and economics have a better chance to be married successfully if we shift our attention from the exclusive emphasis on economic growth towards improvements in human development, especially the much broadened version of that concept. Different areas are shown to differ substantially in terms of the choices they make among the various independent dimensions of well-being and the various indicators within each dimension. The particular characteristics of each area play an important role in determining the choices societies make and the extent to which they are constrained by their initial conditions.
    Keywords: Economics, Human Development, Area Studies
    JEL: O1 O2 O5
    Date: 2009–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egc:wpaper:975&r=pke
  5. By: Erik Stam
    Abstract: Entrepreneurship is a fundamental driver of economic evolution. It is also a distinctly spatially uneven process, and thus an important explanation of the uneven economic development of regions and nations. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurship is a key element of evolutionary economics (Schumpeter 1934; Witt 1998; Grebel et al. 2003; Metcalfe 2004; Grebel 2007) and has been recognized as an important element in explaining (regional) economic development (Acs and Armington 2004; Audretsch et al. 2006; Fritsch 2008). This means that the explanation of regional variations in entrepreneurship has also become an important issue. Even more so because there are pronounced differences within and between nations in rates of entrepreneurship and in their determinants (Bosma and Schutjens 2008), and these differences tend to be persistent over time, reflecting path dependence in industry structure (Brenner and Fornahl 2008), institutions (Casper 2007) and culture (Saxenian 1994) that vary widely across regions and countries, but are relatively inert over time. Introducing entrepreneurship into evolutionary economic geography means that the traditional focus on firms is complemented with a focus on individuals. This paper is an inquiry into the role of entrepreneurship in evolutionary economic geography. The focus is on how and why entrepreneurship is a distinctly spatially uneven process. We will start with a discussion on the role of entrepreneurship in the theory of economic evolution. Next, we will review the empirical literature on the geography of entrepreneurship. The paper concludes with a discussion of a future agenda for the study of entrepreneurship within evolutionary economic geography.
    Keywords: Length 23 pages
    Date: 2009–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esi:evopap:2009-07&r=pke

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